“The only two things I’ve ever been good at is cooking and talking,” said renowned chef and one of the hosts on MasterChef India, Vikas Khanna.
Of course, his Michelin star is indicative of his prowess in the kitchen but what’s charming about this 43-year-old from Amritsar is not glib talk but the simplicity of his words and thoughts.
We sat sampling sweet-sour chaat made of fried batter-dipped eggplant and melt-in-the-mouth galouti kebabs made from red kidney beans at Junoon, the restaurant he represents, at the Shangri-La Hotel, Dubai. Khanna took us through the “now-hilarious, now-heartbreaking” nostalgic journey of a shy small-town boy who became the only Indian chef to host an American president.
“Even today on the MasterChef [India] set I get nervous when I’m given long lines to speak because my Hindi isn’t any good – in fact my English is bad too,” he said in perfectly decent English. “Well, I polished my English after I did Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares because it embarrassed me to see what I spoke being flashed as subtitles,” he laughed.
The growing years
“I went to the US in 2000. Even today I don’t know how I ended up there. I had no aim, I just wanted to go and hide. I was tired. I had my ‘business’ in the back of my house. It wasn’t even a dhaba — a dhaba is really nice. I simply catered for kitty parties. We had no money to open a dhaba, we’d suffered due to the [1984] riots.
“My brother had given me Jonathan Livingston Seagull when I was about 30. That’s my favourite book. The seagull wants to fly and everyone says it is a disease to fly, so I decided I wanted that disease. My brother said if you have to go then New York is the only place. It was a decade later that I opened Junoon.
“It was 1986-87, I must have been around 15 and there was this school near us. I would sell chhole bhature [spiced chick peas and fried flat bread] outside it, but business wasn’t good. The principal would often talk to me — I’ve always been a chatterbox — and I’d tell her it’s my dream to open the world’s best restaurant. ‘Where?’ she asked. ‘Behind my house’, I would tell her. She gave me an order to knit 540 school sweaters. I asked her why. She said ‘you wish to open a restaurant, I want to contribute’. I actually learnt to knit. Obviously, they were the worst quality — with loose necks or stitches. My grandmother always said never forget this day and I can proudly say I’ve never thieved, I’ve never cheated, only worked my hardest.
“So I was this duffer, just a cook. It was my chacha [paternal uncle] who lived in Ireland, who saw any potential in me. He took me to Delhi, to Maurya Sheraton in his Maruti 800 [car] — which was a luxury at that time. For the first time in my life I saw real food. It was a massive shock to me and I started howling in the hotel. I had never seen a full chicken. Obviously we got the worst quality produce, the cheapest possible. My first restaurant had one signboard, 24 chairs, 23 plates and one tandoor. We made around Rs9,000 [Dh528] with it. Then my uncle told me if you can single-handedly — in the peak of summer heat, without electricity, without a machine — knit 540 sweaters, you can do anything. If India loses family power it’ll have nothing. This is what makes us so strong as a nation”.
The shy boy
“I had initially been refused a seat at Manipal University. All I could talk about was food so they rejected me. I didn’t know how to speak proper English or have good grades. I told them ‘I know you’ve all been laughing at me because I made sweaters but let me tell you I will open my restaurant and then you’ll wish you hadn’t rejected me’. I left the office and sat outside and cried like a baby thinking I was a total failure when the college principal came. Somehow what I had said touched him. Recently when I went to the college — they now have an award and scholarships in my name — in that place where I sat crying, they’ve put a sign. The principals have changed but the story that I was a misfit and only lived in the kitchen, keeps getting repeated.
“For me life is lottery. Nothing matters — your ability, hard work, devotion or skills. I ran a shack called Spice Route near Wall Street — very close to Ground Zero — selling $5 [18.35] platters of south Indian food. But after 9/11 I felt there was no future. There was this young pregnant woman, Jennifer, who came to eat and would tell me ‘every time you bring me the food, I feel my child is smiling because I always see you smiling’. She was working with Fox on the Ramsay show. Ramsay questioned me if I want to do TV. I replied ‘no’ because I felt nobody would understand a boy from Amritsar. And he turned and said ‘You know what, you’ll be an international riot on TV because you are untrained. You are not trained to pretend’. I somehow managed to do Kitchen Nightmares and the aftermath was tremendous. Suddenly, I was getting magazine covers. Where is the hard work in this? It’s sheer luck.”
The star of recognition
“For a person who has waited for 21 years for a recognition as big as the Michelin star, it’s hard to describe his feelings. I could feel my heart in my throat and this person is talking about other things in my life and let slip in that I had received the star. I put the phone down and all the staff is standing around me with bottles of champagne. I just walked off to the staff restroom, locked the door and started crying — loudly — remembering my mother. And my staff is knocking on the door to know what happened. I came out and said yes I’d got it. They were so mad with me for holding the news they bathed me in the champagne.
“People say The 100 Foot Journey has been inspired by my life. I say not at all. He goes to a French restaurant which got the Michelin star. If he was working at his father’s restaurant and had got it, it would have been worth it. They’ve just said ‘sorry you are just not worth my time, I’m going to a French restaurant’.
The president and I
“The day President Obama came to the restaurant I was extremely nervous. We received the call that he’d left Washington and would be there exactly at 8pm and leave by 9pm. So we had to keep everything ready. They reminded us we cannot have glassware for beverages, which they must have mentioned earlier and we had missed. The entire restaurant was filled with glass.
“I removed myself from all this chaos and went to — where else? — the restroom and called Biji, my [paternal] grandmother. I said ‘please bless me I’m very nervous’. She asked why. I told her Obama was coming and nothing was going right. People were questioning why an Indian chef is hosting him. Plus I had given a ‘wrong’ statement on national TV a few days earlier. When asked if it was a big honour for me to be hosting the president, I said ‘not at all’. I had said the biggest honour is when a child cooks a surprise for his mother, even if the food isn’t good, because she’s the one who cooks for him all the time. Also, a president will change in four to eight years but you have only one mother. I received such firing from my management. The TV channel re-ran that segment saying Vikas Khanna doesn’t consider it important to cook for the president.
“So here I was talking to my grandmother. I told her in Punjabi Obama is coming. She’s hard of hearing so she thought I said I lost my pyjamas. And she started yelling at my father in Punjabi ‘he’s so simple, you shouldn’t have sent him so far away. Now the poor child has lost his pyjamas, what is he to do?’ I tried to speak to my father, who was otherwise busy and wouldn’t listen to me, and there was my grandmother scolding him in the background. Indian women once they start talking will not stop. But after some time I felt better. It was so funny that my grandmother was least bothered about a president but more about a small thing such as my pyjamas. I told the president about what happened and he said ‘Oh I never thought they rhymed’.
Grooming Indian chefs
“MasterChef India is a cult. I was requested to come to Chandigarh for the auditions. People had to bring their dishes for judging and there were ladies who’d come without food, just to chat. Before we select the top 50, almost 50,000 dishes are tasted. When initial judges are there, they’ll tell people if they are selected they’ll receive a call. But if we [Sanjeev Kapoor, Ranveer Brar and I] are there they keep questioning us and one contestant can take up to 30-40 minutes. Multiply that with 50,000?
“Aspiration for Indians is cooking western cuisine. Ask a young girl [in India] what she’s cooking, and she’s only making cupcakes. Ask her to make a gulab jamun and she’ll refuse because they get the food at home [cooked by mothers and grandmothers]. So they will always try and make something Mumma hasn’t.
Single but not ready to mingle
“I’ve had three relationships, the longest being almost nine years. I’ve never told this to anyone but each time I was in a relationship, I felt my creativity was shrinking. I’ve sacrificed everything only for one project — Utsav. Have you seen a granth [tome]? It’s a book that size. It has 12 years of my life in it. Utsav talks about every festival of India, its rituals, its food, its ingredients. It will be unveiled this year and will be priced at Rs800,000. I feel it’s high time India does something like this, otherwise you only get negative news about India. Yet, India continues to flourish. So there must be something very calming in us that allows us to move on, forget and forgive.
“The book is dedicated to the hijdas [hermaphrodites]. It’s created chronologically — January to December. But I made one exception, the hijda festival comes first. Yes, hijdas are part of all our celebrations, but do we know each year on May 13 they converge to a village near Chennai to celebrate Koovagam? It’s a heartbreaking festival. I went thrice to the festival to capture it. Then there is the story of the crooked temple in Benares. It’s an 800-year-old temple known as Maa Ka Dil [a mother’s heart]. It’s a temple not many talk of.
“All Indian festivals are nature-based and I’ve managed to click some beautiful photos too. I’ve touched social subjects and believe if someone reads it years after I go they will know the culture of India. I have never revealed anything regarding this book before. I worked guardedly. This hasn’t been done before by any chef. I just want a small mention in history after Michaelangelo, Mahatma Gandhi, and Chef El Buli. I may write 50 books but I want to write something that is real. Yes, it’s nice to say add so much salt and so much chilli, but it’s not the only thing I want to be remembered for”.
