Vikramjit Roy and his journey home…

I first met Vikramjit Roy over a dozen years ago when I was just beginning my culinary journey. I used to visit Delhi for endless days of sales visits, criss crossing 3 states, trying to convince brands to sign my clients. At the end of an exhausting day where 7 meetings were a minimum, I would stumble back to the Taj Mansingh for the highlight of my day, a cold bottle of Asahi and a meal at Wasabi. Over the course of my visits, my determination to stay away from just sushi/sashimi and instead eat every single dish on the menu intrigued the young chef there, a young chef who then decided to meet me start sharing with me his vision for the Asian food, showing me how Japanese food could surprise and delight in ways I never imagined. 

That was how I first met Vikramjit Roy, and over the years I have had the pleasure and good fortune of not just witnessing his growth into India’s greatest ever Asian chef (and of India’s greatest chefs, period!) but also to have been a very happy Guinea pig for his ideas and innovations, his madness and his creativity, eating with him and being stunned at what was on my plate, the result of Vikram asking himself “why not?”. 

Today, along with my friend Vir Kotak, Vikram has opened his magnum opus, the spectacular Tangra Project in Delhi. Tangra Project’s food is impossible to put in a box, to define or to categorise. It is an ode to three things.. the city of Calcutta, to his identity as a Bengali through the food cooked in his home by his mother, and to his own personal journey as a chef and a human being. Over two days (before the restaurant opened), I was able to try some of the food at Vir and Vikramjit’s secret, invitation only, dining table in Mehrauli. The food I ate went from shrimp paturi to pork in citrus broth with curry leaf oil, from avocado wonton tacos to shammi kababs inspired by Calcutta’s Chaplin theatre, from salmon usuzukiri with yusi soy to nalli nihari. In the hands of a lesser chef, this could end up becoming a messy hodge podge, a throwback to the multi-cuisine menus of the past. In Vikram’s hands they become a tapestry, where different colours and threads come together to create something cohesive, coherent, brilliant and inimitable. 

The food celebrates the inclusivity of Calcutta at its best. It celebrates all the influences it has had - from the Mughals, to the Persians, the Hakka Migrants, to the British and their sub-influences, as it seeks to evoke the spirit of Calcutta through food. Vikram always says that Calcutta is an emotion for him, rather than a city. It is a place that celebrates everything in life… religious festivals, book fairs, Theatre and Cinema, Literature, Politics.. and what binds all of this together is food, the centre piece for anything and everything in Calcutta, every memory, every emotion.

Sitting in the little secret supper room, eating this genre defying, rule busting, path breaking food, I couldn’t help but think of Vikram’s journey. You would think that a man who is almost a Renaissance like figure in his approach to cooking was raised in an environment where he was exposed to all the world had to offer intellectually and culturally, an environment that allowed him to experiment and try different things without any fear of failure. But this couldn’t be further from the reality of Vikram’s life and childhood. 

Vikram grew up in a small town called Baidyabati in the Hooghly district of West Bengal. Forget the world, until he started college he had never even seen the city of Calcutta, which was a train and then a bus ride away. It was a bucolic childhood, surrounded by nature and greenery, frolicking in ponds and streams, interspersed with studies, the beating heart of every middle class Bengali family. Growing up in a middle class environment, creativity took a back seat because of the struggles of daily livelihood, but Vikram used school to discover and express his creative self, involving himself deeply in drama and poetry. Eventually, he took his gift at academics and his love of reading to study literature at Calcutta University while also studying for a Bachelors in Computer Education from IGNOU in the evenings and weekends. And it felt like his path was set. Like every bright young boy from small town Bengal, a good degree with a steady job in the big city, the creativity buried inside except for ten days of escape during the “para” festivities at Durga Pujo.

But something gnawed within Vikram. He came to dread a life sitting at a desk or teaching a classroom of similarly disillusioned, listless young people. Vikram had always had a strong natural interest in cooking, going back to the childhood days when he would surprise his mother by cooking egg curry whenever she would step out in the evenings to run errands or to the stitching factory for work. Gradually he found his escape cooking meals for his friends in the evenings, and over time he realised that he wanted to live his passion for cooking every single day. He then took the extraordinary step of dropping out of college and enrolling into hotel management, a leap that was and continues to be unimaginable in middle class India, with the community labelling you as a failure to heap upon the individual guilt of having wasted your parents money and disappointed them. 

This was an inflection point in Vikram’s life. When I ask Vikram, where his insatiable hunger comes from, this is the moment he always comes to, a moment when it came down to pure survival. Having exhausted the money that his father had saved for his education on courses that he had walked away from, there were no more chances, no back up plan, no choice but to make it work… whatever it took. He worked twice as hard as his classmates, not to be better than them, but driven by the fear of being left behind, haunted by the ghosts of failure. 

He initially gravitated towards Asian cooking because very few qualified chefs wanted to work in Asian kitchens, collectively feeling that the workload and prep it came with was torturous, factors that held no fear for Vikram but that he saw as another opportunity to specialise in an area that few others did, to create the safety net, to stand out, to survive. But in the process he fell in love with the cuisine, the nuance and subtlety, the respect to ingredients, the mastery of techniques. 

Not that Asian cooking was all he knew. His years of working in Delhi, cooking at places like The Oberoi, Taj Mansingh, Maurya Sheraton meant that he was exposed to North Indian food, cooking it in his formative years and eating it on a daily basis. He was intrigued by the possibilities of exploring how Asian cuisine intersected with other cuisines, to look at the cross pollination of techniques, ingredients and ideas. But the bureaucratic and territorial nature of five star hotel Kitchens resulted in his being asked to stay in his lane, and never being able to show that he was about so much more than Asian food. All the while he learnt and persevered, despite the often brutal nature of the learning process in those unenlightened times. If you spend time with Vikram today he can show you the physical scars of that journey… rope burn marks on his arms from the Chinese master who was unforgiving if he made the slightest error, a scar on his foot and hands where a Japanese sushi legend deliberately dropped a knife as punishment for getting the angle of his knife wrong by two degrees while carving sashimi, not once but on two separate occasions. 

It was only at Pan Asian in Chennai, almost a decade ago that Vikram finally had the opportunity to bring the full force of his talents to life. This was followed by the much mourned Tian at ITC Maurya and POH in Mumbai, and finally a stint in Whiskey Samba. At these places I saw him start to push his boundaries, starting to play with visuals and temperature and texture but also take risks like serving only tasting menus. He built a formidable reputation not just for his mastery of a Asian cuisine but got his inventiveness and the playfulness of his creations. Inspired by the great masters like Heston Blumenthal or David Chang, he pushed himself to never play safe, to never cook safe, to challenge every norm and question every format. Sometimes the process of pushing boundaries meant that he went beyond them, and I would ask him, what do you have left to prove Vikram? There was nothing to prove in terms of technique or skill or creativity. The next step was to take all his learning and expertise and distill it into something simpler and purer, that came from the heart. 

Vikram’s greatest inspiration… his mother 

Over the last two or three years, you could sense that Vikram’s restless soul had started to settle. In his pop ups exploring regional food, I realised that he was ready to break out of his Asian box and stretch his wings, but that he no longer had to prove anything for anyone. That he was finally cooking for himself, for the joy he felt making egg curry for his mom, and he really didn’t give a damn whether the “experts” were impressed or not. Now at the Tangra Project, that journey has found its fullest expression. There is no attempt to cook a particular cuisine, to capitalise on a specific trend, to conform to any norm. It is the pure synthesis of inspiration and expression, cooked with love and joy, food from the heart and soul and not just with the head, and in the process Vikram has cemented his place as one of the greatest chefs in our country, in this or other age. 

It’s been a long, hard, unforgettable journey. 
But Vikramjit Roy is finally home.