VANIKA CHOUDHARY
A LEADING LIGHT IN INDIA’S FARM-TO-TABLE MOVEMENT, VANIKA CHOUDHARY IS TAKING THE COUNTRY’S CUISINE IN A BOLD NEW DIRECTION, WITH A FOCUS ON PRESERVATION AND FORAGED INGREDIENTS.
Vanika Choudhary is surrounded by a mindbending array of salts, pickles and ferments. There are yuzu-fermented cherries, achars (pickles) made from swede-like tamyung from Ladakh and herby Himalayan salt. “It’s my way of spotlighting and preserving recipes and foraged ingredients that are precious to our country but never make it to the mainstream dining scene,” she says.
The founder of Mumbai’s fine-dining restaurant Noon is in London for a two-day residency at restaurant 180 Corner. It’s part of an international tour, during which she’s been gilding her reputation for creating innovative dishes that offer a taste of India’s regions. Last night, her 10-course tasting menu revealed her flair for marrying flavour and texture, with dishes including charcoal-grilled lamb in a fermented pumpkin marinade, foraged mushroom with fava bean miso and sourdough roti served alongside pungent wild garlic and plump, yellow chilli-daubed lobster.
Eight years ago, Choudhary quit her job as COO of a media company to pursue her vision of fostering a farm-to-table movement in India’s largest city. She didn’t complete any formal training, focusing instead on absorbing culinary knowledge from her family, before opening her first venture, Sequel, in Mumbai in 2016. She set aside time each day to expand her knowledge of ingredients and take courses in culinary nutrition — resulting in Sequel’s focus on seasonal, organic produce and dishes that reflect her upbringing in the Kashmir city of Jammu.
Here, close to the foothills of the Himalayas, her father, a silk producer and botanist, would nurture crops and sun-dry morels on the roof. Meanwhile, her mother and grandmother would use a pestle and mortar to pound seasonal achars: mango in summer, fiddlehead ferns during the monsoon, galgal (aka hill lemons) and kohlrabi in winter. And when Choudhary was pregnant and living in Mumbai, craving the flavours of her childhood — gucchi pulao (pilau with morels) and kanji (a fermented carrot drink) — the concept for her next venture, Noon, gathered pace. “Everything I’d observed in our kitchen growing up shaped me as a cook,” she says. “But as much as I loved eating my grandmother’s food, I realised that for Noon, I wanted to create a new language for Indian food, based upon our incredible indigenous produce.”
So began a creative journey that saw Choudhary return to Jammu to finesse her family’s recipes and
