Talent Spotlight: Spirituality, Food and Marina Balakrishnan

The path to success as a chef has been well defined in the last few years. 

An epiphany while still young, either at the kitchen of your home or while grinding it out at hotel management finding joy only in the culinary classes. 

Maybe admission at culinary school in upstate New York or Paris if you’re talented enough or fortunate enough. 

Spending your twenties traveling the world, being exposed to food philosophy across the world, stagier stints at Michelin star restaurants, interning with the great Masters. 

Compared to the generation of Manish Mehrotra and Bawmra Jap, today’s generation of star chefs is blessed with greater exposure and a clearer path than any generation before them. Which is why almost every chef that has emerged in the last few years has stepped into the limelight and built a reputation while still in their twenties.  

There is one notable exception though. 

At the young age of 56, Marina Balakrishnan has emerged from nowhere to light up India’s culinary firmament, rewriting every rule along the way. 

She has no restaurant. 

She started selling food during the lockdown. 

She had never seen a commercial kitchen until well into her fifties. 

She makes only vegetarian food. 

She doesn’t tweak or modernise her dishes in any way. 

She focuses on a micro-cuisine. And when I say micro, I mean micro. Not just the food from a region or even a district, but the homes of a specific community in Thalassery in Malabar.

And yet, every single person I know, from India’s biggest industrialists to the most respected food writers swears by her food, while the clamour for her to take her offering to other cities or to a restaurant format grows louder every day. 

So who is Marina Balakrishnan, better known as That Thalassery Girl, and what is she all about? 

Marina was always an excellent home cook. In 2017, at the urging of her daughter, Aditi Rao (a New York Bar lawyer, currently working in Delhi), Marina went to study at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, a plant based culinary school. Her time at the school taught her the technique and vocabulary of global cuisine but more than that, it opened her mind to new ways of seeing. She spent her days wandering the streets of New York, living by herself in another country for the first time, soaking in the multitude of cultures and how they were expressed through food, language and culture. She interned with the likes of Mercer Kitchens and worked with Stefanie Sacks and Marti Wolfson at farm to table dinners.

She came back to India but her spirit still thirsted for answers and knowledge and clarity so she wrote to Garima Arora asking if she could come work at Gaa, a moment that transformed her life. Garima proved to be more than a boss. She was a mentor and guide and inspiration and Garima urged her to find and express her own voice through her cooking. She taught Marina that cooking could be an expression of skill and bloody hard but it could also be fun and kind and an expression of what you want to gift the world through your cooking. 

So Marina decided to come back to India and cook the food that she had grown up with. The Covid 19 Pandemic didn’t halt her ambitions. Instead it led to the birth of Oottupura, her delivery food brand which quickly became a phenomenon. 

I was finally able to meet Marina and eat her food last month. She invited me to her home to eat her food and it’s hard for me to explain what exactly makes it so special. 

This is traditional food. But it’s cooked with a skill and attention to detail and commitment to excellence that elevates the cuisine to its highest form. The commitment to excellence is reflected in small details. The coconut used in the sambar needs to be roasted evenly over a flame by hand to ensure consistency, the dhania seeds need to have a specific plumpness, the hing is bought chunky and powdered and roasted at home, as is every spice. Every single morsel is the product of centuries of history and tradition, but recreated not just instinctually but through a process of research and fealty and unwillingness to comprise in any form. This requires not just skill as a chef but a singularity of vision that really doesn’t exist anymore. 

That singular vision is also married to a clarity of purpose. Marina is a deeply spiritual person, and the food reflects that. If ever food reflected a person’s spiritual journey, it is this. It feels like what she is sharing isn’t just food but a certain energy, the harmonious coexistence of opposing forces, of tradition and modernity, of complexity of process but simplicity in how it’s presented. There is a certain positive energy to the food, a feeling of purity but not in a Vedic, ritualistic way but expressed through love and devotion like the Bhakti movement. I know this may seem absurd and flaky, but I can only write what I feel and write it with honesty and that is how the food affected me.

If you think about it, the world has seen something like this before in the food of the Korean nun Jeong Kwan. It’s just that we in India are often slow to recognise the wonder within us and the people around us, and wait for the world to acknowledge Gaggan Anand or Garima Arora or Manish Mehrotra or Prateek Sadhu before we recognise this brilliance. 

I have always loved that moment when you eat a chef’s food and realise that you are at the beginning of something special. It happened with Bawmra and Gresham and Manish and Vikramjit a decade ago. With Prateek and Hussain four or five years ago. And with the young chefs I’ve profiled and written about the last few years. A sense of excitement that I feel the need to share with the world. People laugh and accuse me of hyperbole. But it doesn’t matter because I recognise that moment, and it feels like an epiphany and I find that with time popular opinion always comes around to sharing that point of view.

So I am saying it now. Marina Balakrishnan is India’s next global culinary superstar. And her journey has only just begun! 

I ate:

- Red rice

- Sambar 

- Vellerika (Madras cucumber) pachadi

- Erisherry. A dish with two textures of coconut, one freshly blended and the other slow roasted to a deep golden brown. She cooked it similarly to a kootu with yam and Bengal gram 

- Avial with carrot, drumstick, snake gourd, ash gourd, raw banana, yam, madras cucumber and long beans

- Her famous inji pulli, a tamarind chutney that took her two years to perfect, and the balance of sweet, tartness and tart is perfect. 

- Also on the menu was pineapple pullisherry and Pappadam