He’ll take Manhattan: Vir Sanghvi writes on chef Vikas Khanna

It is a funny thing to say about India’s most famous chef, but until this week, he had still to cross the final frontier: win critical acclaim for his cooking.

Now, with The New York Times giving Bungalow, the restaurant Vikas Khanna runs in New York, three stars, making it the first Indian restaurant in this century to gain that accolade, he has climbed that final mountain.

Rating chefs is a complicated and multi-layered business. Most of the chefs we have heard of get very little respect from their peers. They are TV chefs, famous largely for being good on television. Relatively few have eaten their food. Nigella Lawson, for instance, is a “goddess” on screen, but not a chef. She doesn’t run restaurants, and lacks some of the technical skills that chefs prize. To be fair to her, she is upfront about her role.
When chefs who have made their reputation on TV try to run restaurants, the results can be disappointing. Jamie Oliver was a young chef at London’s River Café when a TV producer spotted him and turned him into a star. His eventual foray into restaurants has been less than successful. His restaurants have closed, gone bust or flopped.
Vikas Khanna’s case is slightly different. When Star brought him back to India to host the second season of MasterChef India, he was already chef at the Michelin-starred Junoon in New York. So his chef credentials were not in doubt. Over the years, as TV gave him filmstar-like popularity and a devoted fanbase, he cooked less and less at restaurants.
Of course, he had once helmed a Michelin-starred restaurant, people said, but what was his food like now? Had anyone actually tried his cooking? It had been 14 years of only celebrityhood.
I have known Vikas, now 52, since he came to India to host MasterChef in 2011, and have never paid attention to suggestions that he has stopped cooking and started performing. When he is not in front of the cameras, he is still exploring the world of food. The cookbooks keep coming. So does his research. He has travelled across India and explored local cuisine. He has brought back unusual ingredients: at one point, he was obsessed with bamboo rice, which is not a true rice but grows on withering bamboo.
He has also, contrary to what people may think, run an excellent restaurant, Kinara in Dubai, and created recipes that take Indian cuisine forward.
But none of this has attracted as much attention as his stardom. When he has been written about in serious publications, it is less for his cooking and more for his humanitarian work. During the pandemic, he put his life and career on hold and focussed only on sending food (and food grains) to people who needed it, all over India.
And then, there has been his personal tragedy. As all his fans know, Vikas is the ultimate family guy. He started cooking as a very young man in Amritsar with the blessing of his parents and grandparents. Even now, he relates dishes to his childhood and family kitchen, and at every public event that is important to him, he brings family along.
For most of his life, his closest friend and soulmate was his sister, Radhika Khanna, who had always looked after him (“She was the bright one, I was the dud,” he has said) and even moved to New York to be with him.
In 2008, Radhika was diagnosed with lupus, a potentially fatal condition. Brother and sister agreed they didn’t want to talk about it in public, and for over a decade, they didn’t.
In recent years, as her health worsened, their roles were reversed; now he was the one who looked after her. As her condition deteriorated, Vikas found there was less and less he could do for her. He tried every kind of medical treatment but, two years ago, just before she was due for a kidney transplant, Radhika died, leaving her brother bereft, lonely and shattered.
It was after he lost Radhika that Vikas took on the challenge of opening Bungalow, a 125-cover restaurant in New York. With a hole in his life to fill, he threw himself into the project. Though nobody will admit it now, many of his peers were sceptical that he could pull it off. It is not easy to open a large restaurant in the most competitive market in the world, in a city that has never rated Indian food very highly.
Vikas was conscious of the challenge and says he was grateful that Unapologetic Foods, the group run by Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya, which owns Dhamaka, Semma and other Indian restaurants in that city, had led the way in building a new respect for Indian food. They, in turn, are hugely complimentary about his skills and talents.
The chef Rene Redzepi of Noma, who loves Indian food, told me that when he met Vikas with Mazumdar and Pandya in New York, he was astonished by how friendly they were. “There was no sense of competition,” Redzepi said admiringly. He has since been back to Bungalow and rates it very highly.
Redzepi also noted the high proportion of Indian guests who loved the food. As The New York Times noted in its review, Bungalow “is a restaurant by South Asians, for South Asians, and if others want to join in, they are welcome too.”
I don’t think anyone expected Bungalow to do as well as it has done. As Priya Krishna, who reviewed the restaurant for NYT, wrote, “checking forward last Friday, I could have landed a dinner reservation for four at coveted places like Lilia, Carbone or Torrisi in the next few weeks. But there wasn’t a single opening at Bungalow.”
Integral to Bungalow’s appeal (and I have still to eat there) is that Vikas makes Indian food that Indians enjoy, with creative tweaks. His galoutis are fried lotus root filled with mashed rajma. The shrimp balchao comes in puff pastry (like that Indian standard, the cream cone). Vikas cooks jackfruit, pineapple and guava in ways that no one has before.
All in all, it has been a good week for Vikas Khanna: A rave review and a rating of three stars from The New York Times, and a restaurant that is full for weeks ahead. Here finally is proof that he is much more than a TV chef or a performer; he is a skilled and imaginative chef who can triumph in an incredibly competitive market.
And the success gives him something to put into the hole in his heart that opened up when he lost Radhika.