#blahvsfood: Next Gen Showcase : Rahul “Picu” Gomes Pereira

November 13, 2020

#blahvsfood: Next Gen Showcase : Rahul “Picu” Gomes Pereira

(Also some thoughts on what it takes for talented chefs to fulfil their potential)

I ate at Jamun in Delhi in early 2019 and felt it was very good but not great. But two of the most knowledgeable experts on Indian food told me that I needed to give it another shot because Chef Rahul (Picu) Gomes was a shining star, one of the brightest and most talented young chefs in India. He and I connected earlier this year and I realised that this was a chef who was growing and evolving rapidly, that the food I had eaten didn’t represent his growth and profession, his philosophy, his current ability and his future potential. He told me about the Jamun that they were setting up in Assagao and how it was his passion project so I wanted to make sure that I tried his cooking whenever I was in Goa next.

I went there this week and was completely blown away by his cooking as well as that of his partner in crime Hanoze Shroff.

I would broadly divide the meal into two parts. The food you normally get in Jamun which is Indian food from across the country cooked in a distinctive style and then the Goan food he cooked especially on that night.

The classic Jamun food impressed me because the perspective Picu brings to Indian food is not to recreate or reinvent it. The idea is to make make great Indian food and do it with technique and rigour so that it is consistently flawless. It takes great maturity for a chef to reach this point, to not feel the gnawing insecurity that pushes a chef to demonstrate creativity before achieving mastery.

In the west, it takes years of training, of refining craft and skill before a chef starts demonstrating their creativity and vision. In India however, the sudden growth in restaurants and the proliferation of shows like Chef’s Table and Masterchef have led to a generation of chefs who want to showcase their “genius” and who all want run a restaurant by their mid 20s. I respect their self belief but the truth is that most of these chefs are destined for a hard landing. It is a law of nature that you cannot run before you can walk and the rigours of mastering cooking and running a kitchen over years pay a chef back over a lifetime. It takes mental strength, physical stamina, attention to detail, a relentless work ethic, a mastery of processes and the ability to do the same thing again and again with complete consistency to become a chef. Yes there will be some who are touched by genius but the common thread in all successful chefs is not genius, it is sheer bloody minded relentless hard work.

Beetroot and Amaranth Galouti

Picu is young. He is just 29. And he is clearly gifted and accomplished. So to have him create a meal that was so focused on showcasing his technical skill with no superfluous bullshit is a sign of a young chef who is supremely confident in his ability, who doesn’t feel the pressure to overcompensate to prove anything to anyone. His cooking was nuanced with a great balance of flavours and textures, without any unnecessary elements on the plate. He expressed his creativity in subtle ways, a hint of betel flavour in the beef Chapli thanks to the leaf it was wrapped in. Or the Amaranth that went into the galouti kebab and gave it a complexity that stopped it from being a beetroot mush. This was a level of sophistication and a demonstration of restraint that is exceedingly rare at any age when it comes to Indian food, leave alone a 29 year old.

The Prawn with Vauchi Bhaji

Like I said though, there are some chefs that find more than success, that have the touch of genius. When I ate Picu’s Goan food, I came away convinced that this young man is on his way to achieving that. He stuffed squid with squid tentacles, Goan recheado and coriander root to create this texturally marvellous flavour bomb. There was a prawn and Vauchi Bhaji cooked in garlic and ghee, where the Malabar spinach (vauchi) had such a remarkable depth of flavour, a hint of bitterness and then this rich iron soaked salty sweet umami like mouthfeel, that it really was the star even more than the prawn.

The piece the resistance was the pork, a suckling pig cooked three ways. The belly rub was cooked as a classic solantulem with Kokum (a dish that’s hard to find with real Portuguese Goan restaurants becoming rarer than ever). He also did a simple, fragrant classic pigling roast with cinnamon and cloves with chilli. The best dish of all though was the roast leg. He served it with some sauce that I didn’t even touch because that leg needed nothing else. A wonderfully thick, perfectly crisp layer of crackling and then this juicy, glistening meat below it, tender but firm, this was really the dish that convinced me that Picu will be one of India’s greatest chefs in the not too distant future.

I just hope that when it happens, he does it cooking Goan food, reviving a centuries old cuisine that has lost its integrity through tourism but that is part of a heritage that is unique and worth preserving. From my perspective, as the brightest chef to have emerged from Goa in a long time, Picu has to take the heritage of his community’s cuisine and show the world that there is so much more to it than vindaloo and cafreal and fish curry. If anyone can do it, he can.

Ps: It’s important to mention that according to Picu, Hanoze is an equally important part of the Jamun experience and deserves a large share of the credit. I have never met Hanoze but having spent time with Picu now, I would trust his judgment and keep an eye out on Hanoze as well.

We ate: