The story of Masque...and why it is one of the world’s great restaurants

Marco Pierre White 

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Prateek Sadhu was five years old when his family fled Kashmir and moved to Delhi. There in the baking sun, far away from the high mountains and apple orchards and fig trees, he began creating a new identity for himself even as his mother continued to cook the food of her beloved Kashmir. In that moment, the seeds of the Masque were born. Masque isn’t just the single most important restaurant in India today, it is one of the great restaurants in the world.

A restaurant that reimagines the very idea of what a restaurant serving Indian food can be. 

It is impossible to fully appreciate Masque without understanding how it came to be and how it fits into the world. 

It is a story that needs to be written. For a long while I waited for someone to do so but no one did. So I decided to try and tell it myself. 

This is the story of Masque.....

Prateek didn’t want to be a chef. He wanted to be a pilot, to soar high in the sky. Hotel management was a pit stop, a getaway from the constant questions about what he would do with his life... at least until he could begin his pilot training. Staying true to his lifelong disinterest in academics, he skipped classes, bunked entire days, raised hell, chatted endlessly and invested in the life learnings that only a misspent youth can provide. He did attend one class though, and religiously. That class was cooking. 

The day he first entered the kitchen at IHM Gurdaspur he realised he had been learning to cook his entire life. As a child, he helped his mother cook dum aloo, poking the potato a hundred times after par boiling it, before shallow frying it in mustard oil so the oil soaked into the holes, filling it with flavour. He did the same with Kashmiri chillies seeping through through his mother’s Rogan josh giving the meat colour and body and flavour and a Kashmiri identity. He worked with dried fish and vegetables, with preserved food, and he saw his mother awaken them from their hibernation and gently bring them back to life, infusing them with warmth and flavour.

The more time he spent in the kitchen the more he realised that this was him at his truest. He read The French Laundry Cookbook and realised there was a whole new world to discover. For the first time, as he stepped into adulthood, he decided he wanted to learn. He wanted to learn everything there was to learn about cooking. His mind was made up. He wanted to be a chef. Not just any chef, but a great chef. He was admitted to the Culinary Institute of America but they didn’t have the money. So his father mortgaged their family house and took a loan from Jammu and Kashmir bank so Prateek could follow his dreams. And so at age 22, Prateek left for America.

In an early sign of how hard the journey would be, a volcano erupted just before his flight was to take off leading to thousands of flights being cancelled across Europe. Prateek was stranded at Delhi airport for 48 hours, begging to be put on the next available flight so he could report on his joining date. It was a sign that nothing would come easy. That if you want to chase the impossible dream you have to fight for it. So Prateek fought. The loan weighed heavily on him so he took three jobs while attending a full schedule of classes. he cooked dishes at the cafeteria in the mornings and assisted the librarian in the day. Most importantly he assisted the resident in registering students complaints handling issues from fridge repair to underage drinking, a job that got a free room to sleep in and subsidised meals at the cafeteria. Three jobs. Three hours of sleep. And a lot of learning.

Gradually the rewards became sweeter. He was selected for the institute’s three person culinary team, first as a substitute and then as one the the main three from more than a hundred students in the institute. He was mentored by the Dean of the institute. He traveled across America for competitions. He honed his skills. He won a silver. Then he won a gold. And another gold. By now Prateek started to believe. He wrote to Grant Achatz at Alinea fifteen times before being accepted for a week at his own cost. He went to Chicago and slept on a park bench before the friend of a friend offered him a mattress on the floor. Just because the rewards get sweeter doesn’t mean the fight ends....

And then finally graduation. Money. The (in)glory of a fish station at as a comis chef in Washington DC. No more competitions. Just long hours smelling of fish at the bottom of the food chain. Prateek was happy. But he still wanted more. He knew there was more than working in a great steakhouse helping Michael Mina bring his vision of American classics to life. He sought something both more personal and a means to express that in a way that the world could understand. So in 2010 he decided to forsake his salary and go to Noma in Copenhagen as a stagiere. If CIA nourished his craft, Noma opened Prateek’s mind. He visited the island where Noma grows grapes for their wine and got paid in beer and wild boar sandwiches, learning through conversation and observation with the likes of Trevor Moran. 2010 was when Noma was first selected as the World’s Best Restaurant. There was a feeling of excitement in the air, an energy, a feeling of change and possibility, a sense of the limitless nature of imagination and possibility. Prateek was amazed by how Noma changed perceptions of Copenhagen and Denmark and that is where he first began wishing someone would do the same for Indian food. 

He went back to New York. He worked at the Pierre. But still the feeling lingered. He was cooking the food of another culture, and he felt incomplete. He moved back to India and spent a month in Kashmir before the reality of India’s restaurant scene struck home. He was a trained Western chef. From the greatest culinary institute in America. No one was interested in his philosophical and artistic journey. What they saw was the ideal chef to elevate their quality, their technique and most of all their Western restaurants. He joined the Leela in Udaipur as executive sous chef and kept rising until he reached the pinnacle, opening Le Cirque in Bangalore. But it was during this moment that Prateek started seeing the possibilities of what he could create. His work may have been western food but in Udaipur, for the first time, he discovered, studied and started cooking regional Indian cuisines like Rajasthani and Gujarati.

The more he learnt about Indian food he started looking at it from a completely different perspective from everyone else. He wanted to take Indian food to the world but he didn’t want to look at our cuisine through the prism of dishes and recipes like everyone else did. He was fascinated by ingredients, the building blocks of Indian food. He wanted to go deeper. He wanted to look at the soil itself and what grows on it, what grazes on it, what swims in its rivers and lakes and seas. He wanted to trace the evolution of Indian cooking, the impact of migration and history and weather and trade how all these factors impacted the evolution of our food. Don’t look at how to use masala but actually question why that masala came into existence. At a time when modern Indian food was about a newer representation of Indian dishes, Prateek wanted to look into history, terroir and evolution and re-examine the very idea of what is Indian food and what that will mean going forward.

He started Masque with the fearless Aditi Dugar (who deserves her own story) with an idea, a vision and a philosophy but with no real idea of what that meant in terms of dishes. So the first year he took Indian ingredients and applied western ways of looking at it and western cooking techniques. Aditi and Prateek were brave and ambitious and almost foolish in their idealism. They only did ten course tasting menus that changed every fortnight. Their food defied categorisation. They were located in a place that no one could find. They struggled. They hoped. They dreamed. They persevered. And gradually they won respect and they won recognition. The food at Masque in its first year and half built a great reputation. It was creative, innovative.. bursting with new ideas and new expression. You knew that when you went to Masque you would have a great meal. But there is a difference between serving great food and being a great restaurant. And Masque may have been one of the best restaurants in the country, but that wasn’t enough for greatness. For immortality. To reach that peak that only Bukhara and Indian Accent had ever scaled in the country. It was original food but it was still Indian food through a western lens rather than something completely new,. It was pathbreaking but it wasn’t revolutionary, it was evolutionary but it wasn’t a paradigm shift. Most importantly it filled Prateek with satisfaction and pride, but it didn’t fill him with joy.

What did give him joy was the Kashmiri food he cooked at home. The food his mother cooked. The food that reflected his soil and mirrored his soul. So one day he sat with Aditi and he decided to search for that feeling of joy and that feeling of soul and he decided to seek inspiration from his Kashmiri roots. Masque made the best sourdough bread in the country, made from the best Indian flours with a yeast that was five hundred days old, a highlight of the menu. Almost overnight, it disappeared replaced by the Katlam bread found in every street corner in Srinagar and every village in Kashmir. He started smoking winter potatoes and serving them with Kashmiri morels. After spending his whole life looking outside for inspiration, he started looking within. At what it means to be Kashmiri, what it means to be Indian and how to express that through food.

We have seen many many chefs try and interpret Indian food in a modern way ever since the first generation of Vineet Bhatia and Floyd Cardoz and the superstars Gaggan Anand and Manish Mehrotra. Sadly not a single chef went beyond Manish in terms of doing something truly original at a fundamental, philosophical level. They took classic dishes and changed their form. They took traditional recipes and reinterpreted them, substituting a few elements, replacing pork with duck in Khasi cooking or using bhoot jolokia for chicken wings or bheja pate in a samosa. They were and are brilliant, and I have been very fortunate to eat their food but they all pay tribute to Manish Mehrotra through their work in some way or the other.

Prateek didn’t seek to reinterpret Indian food or Kashmiri food. He sought to create an entirely new language for Indian food. He doesn’t just substitute one or two elements to recreate a dish using elevated technique. He dives deeply into the history of the dish, the intent, the community that created it, who it fed, the context of the produce, the climate, how it has changed over the years and why. He seeks the very essence of a dish. Then he takes all the elements that go into making it and creates something completely new. Something inspired by the original dish, that captures its essence but that is completely different. The result is something that has never been seen before in Indian food. The flavours feel familiar and recognisable but new and surprising, you feel comfort but you feel wonder, the perfect synthesis of memory and imagination. It is an approach that no one has either had the courage or imagination to ever attempt before in India, and it is executed with a skill that transcends boundaries, that elevates Masque to the upper echelon of the world’s great restaurants, part of a handful of restaurants that have changed the world of food.

When we look at the last twenty years of food history, the most influential movement was the rise of the great Spanish restaurants. Whether it was Mugaritz or El Bulli or En Celar de Can Roca, all these restaurants rejected the sauce based philosophy of traditional French cooking and looked towards their own culinary history and culture, whether Basque, Castilian or Catalan. However they weren’t satisfied serving tapas and paella and jamon in the traditional manner. They wanted more. They wanted to create something completely new. Something that drew on tradition for inspiration, for authenticity and for roots. But that sought to express that heritage in a way that reflected their individuality, their voice, their art, their time as much as their place. And in the process they transformed food. Whether Den or Osteria Francesco or Noma or Dom or Central or Quintonil or Atomix, they inspired a whole generation of revolutionary artists to look within their own cultures, embrace their heritage but reject form and dogma and create a new postmodern expression of their nation’s food. These were not chefs as much as artists, rebels and philosophers and they dragged their nations’ cuisine into the present while creating a roadmap for the future. 

If you’ve eaten at any of these restaurants, you can see that Masque is the only Indian restaurant on this path, that Masque belongs in this group. It belongs there in terms of idea, intent and expression. 

It doesn’t surprise me that Indian food writers don’t give Masque enough credit. They are not equipped to do so unless they actually have had the opportunity to eat at the great restaurants and with the great masters of global food. Truth is there are less than five food writers in India with the necessary exposure to evaluate Masque in a global context, and with all due respect, if a writer’s frame of reference is just restaurants in India, asking them to evaluate Masque is like asking a high school physics teacher to grade a PHD at MIT. 

Like all revolutionaries Prateek refuses to sit still. Today he seeks to create new flavours that are undeniably Indian. He uses our ingredients and culinary traditions to create something that is new and that will shape Indian cooking for decades to come. If you visit him at Masque Lab you’ll see him researching what umami means in the Indian context, a context where umami exists but because of the boldness of the other flavours in Indian cooking it takes on a form that is subtler than the French or East Asian cooking traditions. Or he will take the black sesame sauce enjoying such a renaissance in restaurants and see if it can translate into a sauce and it’s flavour can be intensified and distilled into liquid form. 

Some of the things that Prateek does seem crazy. They don’t make sense. But genius rarely makes sense except in hindsight, and make no mistake... Prateek Sadhu is a genius in every sense of the word. And Masque is a platform for genius, a gift to be treasured. It often angers me when I see India’s food writers and award ceremonies claim that mediocre, derivative food can even compare with Masque, let alone surpass it. But then I realise it doesn’t matter. Someday, very soon, when the world recognises the greatness of Masque we will start giving it the credit it deserves. 

Masque will be recognised not just as India’s greatest restaurant but as one of the world’s great restaurants. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s not a hope. It’s a promise. It’s a guarantee.

Someday I hope to meet Prateek’s father and tell him ... “I know your son didn’t become a pilot. But he did learn to fly”.