Why chefs are returning to open-fire cooking
Tandoors, grills and wood-fire cooking make a comeback to the restaurant kitchen as fine dining chefs try to draw out deeper flavours, and give guests a ringside view of their process
The charcoal embers burn bright, slowly roasting the crescent-shaped green pumpkin slices brushed with tare (a Japanese glaze made from soy sauce). Once charred to perfection, chef Saurabh Udinia plates them up with pumpkin sauce, scatters toasted pumpkin seeds on top, and slides the plate towards me. The pumpkin has a slight bite to it, which contrasts well with the creamy sauce. At HOM, which opened in Mumbai last month, 80% of the dishes are cooked on fire using the charcoal grill, the plancha (flat-top griddle) or the tandoor.
“I have been to really cool, intimate grill restaurants like Kiln in Soho (London) and Burnt Ends in Singapore, but there’s nothing like that in Mumbai where you can watch the chefs in action and see every ingredient being cooked (in front of you)," says Pratik Gaba, HOM’s founder and owner. To realise his vision, the first-time restaurateur roped in Udinia as the culinary director.
The Delhi-born chef has cooked in the kitchens of Indian Accent (Delhi), Masala Library (Mumbai) and Revolver (Michelin-recommended Indian restaurant in Singapore). “I had never done open-fire cooking before Revolver; it’s where I realised that it was one of the better ways of cooking," he says. The open kitchen is the centrepiece here, and you can take one of the seven seats around it for the “HOM Theatre", an 11-course tasting menu where every dish is finished over fire as you watch. The food is largely Indian with global influences.
Open-flame cooking isn’t new in India’s food culture—we have always had our tandoors, sigdis and wood-fired chulhas. But what was once a home or street-side practice is now put by restaurants and chefs at the centre of the dining experience.
Live grills, open hearths and wood-fire pits are being used to create smoky, layered flavours, allowing guests to watch the cooking action. At NAAR in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, chef Prateek Sadhu serves smoked bottle gourd on pine skewers. At restaurateur Tanveer Kwatra’s Grammie, which opened in Delhi last month, chef Konnark Sharma plays with open-fire cooking to dish out Wafu Italian that marries Japanese and Italian flavours.
Chef Amninder Sandhu was one of the pioneers of this trend when she opened Arth in Mumbai in 2018. “What drew me to open-fire cooking was a conversation with Sarvesh Kaur, the granddaughter of Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, who shared some of her family heirloom recipes with me. She would talk me through a recipe, and at the end would always say, ‘if the same recipe was cooked on open fire, it would taste absolutely different.’ It was at that point in my career that I first found my rhythm in cooking," says Sandhu.
While Arth shut in 2020, Sandhu carried forward her philosophy in her subsequent restaurant projects, including Bawri (Mumbai and Goa), Palaash and Talaabwali (at Tipai Wildlife Luxuries, a resort near Maharashtra’s Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary), or the recently opened Kikli in Delhi. “Indian cuisine intrinsically is very attuned to open-fire cooking. At Palaash, the ladies who cook in the kitchen are from the nearby villages, and they are very comfortable with this way of cooking," says Sandhu.
At the 35-seater Fireside in Bengaluru, which opened in 2024, siblings Priyanka Alve Nayak and Rajat Alve also experiment with wood-fired cooking. Growing up on their parents’ farm in the coastal town of Honnavar in Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district, they were no strangers to cooking over wood. They’d watched their parents and grandparents cook everything from rice and curries to seafood over it. “People have a very narrowed down vision of wood-fired cooking; they only think about tandoor or barbecue and don’t go beyond the regular spices that we use in Indian kitchens. We use wood-fire cooking as the main element but with modern flavours," says Nayak. So, ivy gourd gets brushed with peanut butter miso, eggplant is torched with thyme to release its smoky flavours, slow-cooked lamb is rubbed with Sichuan pepper dust, and pork ribs are smoked with cherry wood.
The kitchen is kitted out with a Gaucho grill (Argentinian-style charcoal or wood-fired grill), a Toscano oven (commonly used for making pizzas), and a wood smoker—each chosen for the unique way it shapes ingredients. “The open kitchen was non-negotiable; we wanted guests to see how the food was being cooked," says Nayak.
Cooking over open fire in a restaurant setting is not without its challenges. Chefs need to account for the unpredictability of fire, adjusting timing and technique to deliver a consistent dish every service. The kitchen also requires careful ventilation and consistent heat control.
“It took us a year to execute the idea," says Simran Kaur, founder of Primitive, which opened in Jaipur in February. The 70-seater restaurant has a live kitchen that uses coal and wood to cook every dish, like the crowd favourite beetroot and walnut khatai, where a whole grilled beetroot is served on a bed of hung curd and walnut dip, or the unusual amrood ki kadhi with charred guava. “It was a challenge to control the fire and the smell of food... we have used air curtains to control the heat and maintain the temperature in both the kitchen and restaurant," she adds.
This incipient trend of restaurants being built around open fire also leans into the larger, back-to-roots movement in Indian dining. As more chefs seek to spotlight regional cuisines, it’s natural that traditional cooking techniques are revived, albeit with modernised equipment and contemporary flavours. Like the charcoal-seared scallop, topped with tart lime kuzhambu segments, and served on a Kerala-style coconut mud crab at HOM—it’s a dish I’m still thinking about.
Prachi Joshi is a Mumbai-based travel and food writer.
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