Ricky’s Cookies, Chennai

Chennai is Indian food’s great undiscovered secret. From Avartana to Aeseo to Kappa Chakka Kandhari to Bread and Chocolate, restaurants there are doing things at a level that very few cities are. Add to that the local food options, from biryani to idlis to hardcore Chettinad mess food, you can go a week in this city and just touch the tip of the iceberg. 

Now we can add truly insane cookies to the list because Ricky’s cookies are easily the best I’ve had outside of Japan and the USA.

The founder Karthi Jagannathan (known to his friends as Ricky) is a trained chef, who has studied and worked in the classic French tradition and not a baking or pastry chef. Having studied the professional program in French Cuisine at *Ferrandi culinary institute* , Paris, he did a 5 month stage with legendary Chef Alain Passard at L'Arpège (I love that he didn’t pretend it was a full time job like so many Indian chefs do).

He then spent a year  with Chef Guillame Iskander at restaurant Garance where their small team earned a Michelin star and months in a neo bistro called Au Passage. When he came back to India, he was part of the 4 member pre-opening  team at Avartana, ITC Grand chola before heading Prego at Taj Coromandel.

One would have thought that this sort of meteoric rise would automatically lead to a career creating and running restaurants but instead he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and has ended up making the most extraordinary cookies. They are creative, consistent, and flavour packed. He either uses really good ingredients like Mason and Co chocolates or makes his own ingredients. And just the imagination in the cookies! To take fresh green peas and make a matcha inspired cookie that is just so subtle but Indian. Or Indianise the classic oatmeal raisin cookie by soaking the cookies in rum infused with chilies to give them a real punch. This is just extraordinary brilliance and just reading the list of cookies below will give you an idea of this man’s magic.

Here’s what we tasted:

*Green Pod* - Fresh green peas and hazelnut.

 *Wholesome dark* - millets (9 different millets roasted and grounded in-house) with dark chocolate. Gluten free.

 *NSC oatmeal* - Not So Classic oatmeal cookie with raisins (soaked in green chilli infused rum) .

 *Damascus rose* - Rose infused dough with in-house white chocolate and French white chocolate.

 *Yuzu* - Yuzu chocolate with puffed rice. 

 *Golden Eye* - 63% Peruvian dark chocolate sprinkled with Fleur de sel. 

 *Lemon Pockets* - Fresh lemon, cream cheese and caramelized white chocolate.

 *Fig* - Slightly charred fig with 55% dark chocolate.