Chef Sanjeev Kapoor’s guide to Indore, India: Where to visit, what to eat, why he loves the city
India’s most famous chef, Sanjeev Kapoor, on the unassuming ways of this stand-out city .
As an outsider it’s impossible to truly understand the revered position and reach held by Sanjeev Kapoor across India.
His celebrity is that of George Clooney meets Anthony Bourdain with a side of cricketer Sachin Tendulkar — a proper rockstar and culinary force unlike any other; a man with more than 20 million followers across social media and more than 200 cookbooks to his name, and a broadcaster who spent 19 years hosting Asia’s longest-running TV cooking show, Khana Khazana.
Not done, Kapoor also launched FoodFood — India’s first 24-hour Hindi-language cooking channel — sported the apron as a MasterChef India judge (with guest spots here) and claimed India’s Padma Shri award, the country’s fourth-highest civilian award for outstanding contributions to the field of culinary arts. “It’s been a great journey, I must say,” Kapoor tells ROAM. “A great journey indeed.” Cooking — certainly professionally — was never on the radar. It wasn’t seen as a “rightful” profession. But then young Sanjeev had also grown up watching his father in the kitchen: “My mum was vegetarian so my dad would cook all the non-vegetarian foods, a male in the kitchen was not a taboo in our house. Also, when I was growing up, we didn’t have plenty of food. It was just enough, but my parents were very particular and they said that no matter what we can afford the quality of food had to be really good. So, a lot of money went into getting good quality food, ingredients and I think that set the foundation for me.”
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“I wanted to do something which nobody in our family, our neighbourhood was into. And I wanted to be different — I thought (cooking) was different. It could have been anything — it could have been hairdressing, just something different.”
Despite a schedule that sees Kapoor often on the road, he maintains a sense of appreciation for travel. “What excites me is the discovery of new things because I’m a very curious person. And that curiosity is not limited to only food — it’s a technology, it’s people, it’s places, it’s culture, it’s music, it’s language. When you’re that kind of a person, life is actually very exciting because there’s so much to do and there’s so little time — when I’m on the I go I’m trying to make most of it. Always.” Cue his recollection of a food-laden trip to central India’s Indore.
“Indore is not that well known outside India — it’s not on the circuit for global tourists — but it’s great. It’s also been awarded the cleanest city of India for the last few years and that’s a good thing,” he said.
“If I were to pick food cities of India, I’d rate it as one of the top in the country today — even for Indians to discover. I was there for a TV awards show. The event was in the evening, and my wife and I had a few hours in the day. I called a friend of mine who lives not very far from there, though he works in Delhi. He’s a doctor but also a big foodie. He happened to be in Indore and I asked him where I should eat. He asked where I was staying and said he’d be there in 15 minutes. He also said, ‘you are with me until 5 o’clock. And don’t eat anything until I get there’.”
“So we go around and the first place we go is a Thali place — plates with small bowls of many different things form that place. And we start to taste everything and it’s all vegetarian. There is a kind of fried bread — think of a dinner roll — which is baked and then it’s soaked in clarified butter. And then you eat it in one. This dish is called dal bafla — oh my my god, it was heaven on earth. It was so good.
“My wife loved it and her spoon went to the same dish again — my doctor friend said, ‘no, no — I told you no second spoon’ because we had so much to have and we tasted everything.
“Of course, whenever I go to any place, whether it’s a small or big, or top of the line, whatever, the whole restaurant wants me to taste everything, right? They just go overboard and get very excited.
“I think that day we had 10 or 15 different dishes on that plate, everything vegetarian. And we thought that, oh my god, we have eaten everything.
“But then, Indore is famous for a few things — like breakfast. They make savoury rice flakes. It’s called poha. So, of course, anyone who goes there, even from airport, they stop somewhere to have poha and you pair it with something sweet called jalebi. So of course we had to have poha and jalebi. And so we go to a poha place on a famous crossroads.
“Another thing is kachori. It’s (a) fried snack. If you are familiar with samosa then kachori is round in shape and filled with some lentils and a lot of spices.
“There were many other famous dishes that we had. So much food. And then when we thought everything was over, my friend said ‘no, no, NO — now you have to come to my house, I have cooked something. This was at around a quarter to five and we needed to get back for the TV awards.
“He was insistent and said he and that had made some pani puri — a kind of pastry with some spiced water in it.“This day was spent just eating and eating and eating — excellence on the plate, everything, my god, was so so good. It was a memorable day for me.”
sanjeevkapoor.com
