All the chefs you do not know. Yet.

In a world obsessed with top 10 lists, we present an anti list. Meet the chefs flying under the radar, cooking authentic, memorable meals

A list maybe worth its expensive newsprint, and the rarer attention of its readers, for very few good reasons: as an assessment of merit by a (credible) critic. Or, as advice to readers, helping them make buying decisions — best colleges, best cars — backed by market research. Or, peer opinion, polled judiciously, with checks and balances, but importantly au courant.

In India, food awards/lists usually don’t have resonance with a larger public because they fail to spot change and change-makers early enough, and function as recommendations to the public instead of branding champions for whoever they are anointing. When was the last time you ate at a restaurant because its chef won an award?

In 2022, young chefs and taste makers are clamouring for change in the way restaurants work: many have braved job or personal loss, some have moved to smaller cities or home towns, many are rethinking how they’d like to live and, yes, cook more authentically.

The audience has changed, too. Diners are looking for more depth, uniqueness, quality and wellness in their platters. What are the trends and who are the tastemakers for circa 2022?

Chefs desirous of opening commercially successful restaurants often relied on the same ‘coffee shop’ formula: Indian-Chinese-Continental-bar to cater to a mass audience. But, now, some chefs are throwing away the cookie cutter. A big trend post pandemic is the rise of small, individualistic spaces, trying to transform the personal — the chef’s life experiences, upbringing, travel — into the universal.

At the Bangalore International Centre, Navu Project has chef Pallavi Mithika Menon serve “bistro food, as it should be”. Ingredients are cleanly grown and procured directly from producers, everything is made from the scratch (including charcuterie), and flavours are inspired by Menon’s multicultural upbringing (“I had four grandparents from four different parts of the country…”) and time in Italy, where she worked with Slow Food International.

Menon took over the kitchen of the Centre in 2020, at a time when she “had had enough”, as she says, of commercial restaurants, despite working in some of the best — Zodiac Grill in Mumbai, AD Singh’s Ek Baar, Abhijeet Saha’s Caperberry and Fava (where she was head chef) — since 2004, with a break to do masters in human ecology and sustainability from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Piedmonte. She then worked with Slow Food International for two years, trying to establish a network of young chefs and agri producers in India in 2014-15, being an early champion of farm to fork food. (It was only a year later that Masque, headed by Prateek Sadhu, would come up and become the most successful champion of this way of eating out).