Talent Spotlight : Anurag Arora

Whenever I’ve written about an emerging chef whose work I like, it has always been a professional chef. From Hussain Shahzad to Rahul (Picu) Gomez, these are people who have done the hard miles of studying and spending years working in restaurants, honing their craft in a working kitchen, cooking day after day, year after year, to get themselves to a place where all the learning and skill and experience and genius all come together to create something special. 

So I hesitated to write about Anurag Arora. I had a spectacular meal on his terrace last year, with freshly made pasta and freshly made bread, inventive and fresh and tasty. And I know that he has been doing some spectacular pop ups and delivery menus. 

But the thing is he isn’t a chef. He has never worked in a kitchen full time. He has never been “trained”. He doesn’t have a food or a hotel management degree. 

He studied engineering and design. 

He has a full time design job in Uber. 

He has no plans of quitting and starting a restaurant. 

So how can you talk about a guy like this as a bright young talent in India’s cooking scene? It felt a little disrespectful to professional young chefs and also a bit premature. 

But this week I went back and ate another meal and I realised I had to tell the the world about this guy and it would be a loss for our Indian food community if we didn’t help more people discover and experience his food, if we didn’t enable his growth and evolution as a chef and hopefully help him see it as a full time calling. 

New Orleans Cafe du Monde style beignets 

When I talk to friends in Bangalore about our food scene, I often bemoan the lack of courage and creativity in our chefs. We are a city that prizes comfort and familiarity and most of our popular restaurants end up with some sort of pub food or biryani joints or Dosa joints. Despite the trailblazing efforts of a Toast and Tonic or Smoke Co, we’ve not seen too many younger chefs really pushing themselves to do something new. There will be the odd Permit Room that riffs on comfort food but the only great new Bangalore restaurant in the last few years is Bengalooru Oota Company that revives and serves classic Karnataka food. 

What is the “aha” moment I look for when I meet a chef? There are young chefs who have great creative ideas. There are chefs that have great knowledge. And there are chefs that have great skill. But there are less than ten young chefs in the country that are able to combine all three to present a meal that displays coherence of thought, technique and expression. When I ate again with Anurag this week, that’s what I felt again. Every dish was coherent, there were no superfluous elements, the presentation was faultless and clean, and the flavours felt both really familiar in terms of their constituent elements but completely new in terms of how they had been combined. 

Of course, Anurag has a long way to go to actually become a real chef and a successful one. You need relentless hard work and discipline, you need process and discipline, physical stamina and mental resilience. You need to learn to lead a team and deal with daily curveballs. You need to master sourcing and economics. It’s much easier to give full rein to creative expression when cooking for smaller groups. 

I get that. I get all of that. 

But that still doesn’t change the fact that I’ve now eaten his food twice and have also had his food delivered twice. And every single time, I felt since the early days of Toast and Tonic and Smoke Co, I’ve not had anything that comes close to this in Bangalore. 

So all the best to this young man and his culinary journey. At the very least I hope he starts traveling this year and does pop ups so more people in this country can taste his food.

We ate:

• 
  Two kinds of sourdough beignets. A perfectly baked classic New Orleans style Cafe Du Monde version with sugar, served with Blue Tokai Coffee. And a version filled with matcha and powdered with raspberry sugar 

• 
  A milk bread tartine with seeni-sambol that has been cooked for three hours until it becomes like an onion jam with spring onions. Served with a Sri Lankan curry sauce that was rendered with butter to give it that French sauce kind of richness and refinement but which retained the intense coconut and curry flavour.  

• 
  Burrata with a shiitake mushroom purée, fried kale, soy and ginger chilli oil. This really should not have worked with its mix Italian, Japanese and Chinese flavours. But it was absolutely stunning, one of the best burrata dishes I have had. Served with sourdough toast with napa valley wildflower honey and sesame oil, another combination that shouldn’t have worked but did. 

• 
  Banana bread Pain perdu with the bread soaked overnight, served with walnuts, chilli labneh and miso butterscotch sauce (as opposed to the sweeter miso caramel sauce)