Chef who gave curry a top-table place in the world

In the world of Indian cuisine, Vineet Bhatia is a hot prospect. The London-based chef owns nine restaurants — three in the UK. Mr Bhatia’s restaurants are not late-night curry houses for drunken revellers.“I want to showcase Indian food in the right manner,” he says.

He has a flurry of openings in the Middle East planned for next year and, in March, returns to his home city of Mumbai to open a restaurant at a Moberoi hotel. Mr Bhatia trained in the hotel group’s highly regarded catering school, then graduated to running its Indian restaurant, before emigrating to the UK.

It was a move that paid off. In 2001 Zaika, the restaurant he co-owned on High Street Kensington, in West London, won a Michelin star — the first awarded to an Indian restaurateur. Mr Bhatia repeated the success five years later at Rasoi Vineet Bhatia, in Chelsea, and, last month, completed the hat-trick with a Michelin star awarded to Rasoi by Vineet, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Geneva.

It is the first Indian restaurant in mainland Europe to receive the accolade, and Mr Bhatia is only the second British chef, after Gordon Ramsay, to hold Michelin stars in more than one country.

Mr Bhatia grew up dreaming of becoming a pilot, but he was turned down for military service because he was too small. He ended up on a hotel management course almost by accident, going against the family tradition of becoming a doctor or lawyer.

From the moment he stepped into a kitchen, he fell in love with it, eventually gaining a place at the Oberoi School, where trainees are expected to learn French and Indian cuisine. “It was like military school — I loved the discipline. I did double shifts and all the dirty jobs to prove myself,” he says.But Mr Bhatia stubbornly insisted that Indian cuisine was all that he wanted to learn, and consequently climbed through the ranks at a quicker pace.

He was appointed to the Indian kitchen at the Oberoi Mumbai, where he stayed until he moved to London, in 1990. “It was either Dubai, Bangkok, Tokyo or London — I opted for the latter, assuming that, with all of its connections to the Raj, a good standard of Indian food would be guaranteed. How wrong I was,” he says, laughing.

Mr Bhatia arrived in London with £7 and took a job at a restaurant in Chelsea. Horrified by the “aggressively macho, illogically hot and spicy” Indian food served in Britain, he set about changing things in the kitchen. The critics took notice.

In her Evening Standard column in 1993, Fay Maschler wrote: “Bhatia has lifted the cooking into a new league, providing convincing proof that Indian food is capable of evolving.”

But it has not been easy for Mr Bhatia, and Rashima, his wife and business partner, who is a trained pharmacist. Even after winning the first Michelin star, things were tight financially.

He said that he was not making as much money as he hoped, “so Rashima and I decided to go it alone”. In 2004 he took out a large bank loan, with his house as collateral, and opened Rasoi Vineet Bhatia, his flagship restaurant in Chelsea.

There are only 13 tables spread over two small reception rooms on the ground floor and two private dining rooms at the top of the creaky stairs in the Chelsea townhouse. Mrs Bhatia designed the interiors — lush embossed wallpapers and rich fabrics, the smell of incense mingling with aromatic spices drifting in from the kitchen.

Eventually, Mr Bhatia wants a second Michelin star for the restaurant. “When I can spend more time in London,” he explains, revealing that he is on the road for up to five months a year. “But I don’t get jet lag — I never tire of being on a plane.”

He is negotiating consultancy projects with hotels in Abu Dhabi and is looking at deals in Bahrain, Morocco and Europe. “It’s the safest way to operate at the moment but, yes, I do want to open more of my own places in the future,” he says.

Mr Bhatia has recently published Rasoi: New Indian Kitchen (Absolute Press, £30), his first cookery book, of which he is immensely proud. “Rasoi is not about a quick curry. But once you get the mise en place right, then it all falls into place,” he says.

Source: Times