After compiling the profile of the galaxy that Gaggan is building, we focus on the meal that the Indian, number one in Asia for the past 3 years, serves daily at his restaurants above Lumphini Park, in the heart of Bangkok.
In 2010, Gaggan Anand colonised a beautiful wood building with just one goal: redeem Indian cuisine and the social image of Indian chefs around the world. «When they said», he’s been repeating for years, «that our tradition is too poor to aim for the top in fine dining, I got completely pissed off». It is to accomplish this mission that he did an internship at El Bulli in 2009: «Ferran Adrià changed my life and my approach to the profession», he says.
You can clearly notice this tecno-emotional heritage in the current menu, a breath-taking sequence of 25 bulli-style dishes: you find the entertaining side (loud music from Marshall amplifiers) which is never idle, unusual texture explorations, a large use of maltodextrins, spherifications and alginates and a well-designed sequence of growing intensity. It’s like staying in Sitges 6 years after it closed, but a continent apart.
Of course, the main characters in our films change. When you don’t spherify olives nor cavialise any ingredients, but change the look of traditional Indian recipes such as idly sambhar, vindaloo, samosa, sheek kebab… [details in the photo gallery]. «It’s a heritage unexplored in fine dining», he says with pride, «hundreds of reinterpreted recipes based on at least 36 different traditions, from the very damp Tamil Nadu in the south, to the peaks of Himalaya, thousands of kilometres to the north».

Gaggan Anand is also a great cook when it comes to traditional Indian cuisine. The proof is on this table. Left to right, clockwise: poppadum, rice, coconut chutney, fried lentil doughnuts, fish curry, curdled rice
An
Indian pride that ridicules British imperialism: «There’s no such thing as curry. The British imported it, when they arrived here to annoy us because they wanted opium, in the 16th century. They imported tea, started to build factories. They destroyed our heritage and started to sell English products but labelled 'made in India'». A polemical and sacrilegious attitude, enriched with lots of quotations and hints to Hinduist and Buddhist iconography and to the Thai universe, his current home.
Yet Japan is
Gaggan’s latest true obsession. As soon as he can, he gets on a plane to Tokyo, takes the Shinkansen to Hokkaido in the north or Fukuoka in the south and eats as many as 5 meals per day, amazed «by a product based culture that has no comparisons around the world, in a country where seasons are well defined», with all respect to the single season and limited biodiversity of Thailand.
It is in Fukuoka,
as we mentioned, that he’ll open his new restaurant
Gohgan, in 2021. «Meanwhile, I enjoy leadership and fame», he ends, «I’m ready to start from scratch, once again». The
Progressive Indian Cuisine, his greatest contribution to contemporary fine dining, will be a distant memory.
Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso
See also
The Gaggan galaxy by Gabriele Zanatta