We like our Sanjeev Kapoors and our Vikas Khannas and their modesty

I don’t know if you’ve seen Burnt, the new Bradley Cooper movie about a top chef, which opened in America to lukewarm reviews.

But it has a great cast (in addition to Cooper, there’s Daniel Brühl – Niki Lauda in Rush – Uma Thurman, Sienna Miller, Matthew Rhys and many others). It had a Hollywood-style budget (over $20 million) and a massive marketing campaign focussing on Cooper’s star quality.

 

Ten years ago, Cooper (then sleek and lean and without the muscles he put on for American Sniper) starred as a chef in a TV show. Anthony Bourdain’s influential Kitchen Confidential was all the rage and some TV producer thought he could turn the ideas contained in the book (it is non-fiction so there is no real story) into a TV series. Cooper, not yet the big star that The Hangover was to make him, starred as a character called (if I remember correctly) Jack Bourdain who was chef at a top restaurant owned by Frank Langella.

 

   I quite liked the show but it was cancelled midway through the season (I had to buy the DVD to see the episodes that were never telecast) because the programmers reckoned that audiences had proved to be unwilling to see a chef as a romantic hero.

 

   That, a decade later, the producers of Burnt should have been able to raise finances for a movie in which a Bourdain-like chef (hard living, a drug-taking background in the past, etc.) is cast as the hero, tells you how much the perception of chefs has changed. And, I guess, it tells us how committed Cooper is to playing a chef.

 

   There have been food movies before, most notably in Europe. But Hollywood is only interested in cutesy food pictures like the animated Ratatouille. Even the more recent Chef (ironically, the original title for Burnt) refused to take the notion of a chef as a romantic hero seriously. The central character is unattractive and the point of the film is that he turns his back on proper cheffing to go on the road and make sandwiches using child labour (well, his own son). The happy ending has him finding redemption by starting a sandwich restaurant and winning back his ex-wife.

 

   It is a fun movie (and did well) but it isn’t really about the glory of cheffing. It is about a loser who scales down his dream to appeal to a mass audience and finds love (and also finds the mass audience that the producers were looking for).

 

   Burnt goes the opposite route and captures the change in the way that chefs are regarded. The holy grail for Adam Jones, the Cooper character, is a third Michelin star and this goal is treated with such seriousness by the script that we are supposed to wince with pain at each undercooked scallop and weep when the villain is revealed to be a cook who puts extra mirchi into a dish to sabotage a meal served to the Michelin inspector!

 

   Once upon a time we would have thought this was just silly. Do we really care that when the hero meets the heroine, he asks her to toast the pepper before putting it in the pasta? (I had to admit that I giggled at the preciousness of that exchange.) And he follows it up by adding, “And chop some sage into that”!

 

   It is not exactly the sort of thing that Indiana Jones (who Cooper is always rumoured to be playing next because the original Indy, Harrison Ford, is now a bit too old and grumpy) would say to the heroine as a pick-up line. And when the hero and heroine first kiss, it is at Billingsgate Fish Market in London, not the most pleasantly perfumed location in the world.

 

   But, that’s how people are beginning to view chefs and food these days. The two most important books about chefs, which changed their image forever, were White Heat (which cast Marco Pierre White, the British chef, as the sexy, wild man of the kitchen) and Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (which depicted a culinary wasteland full of cocaine and knife fights and tough-guy chefs).

 

   Till then, chefs had been regarded as part of the help (in America and England) and as artists (in France). The notion of the chef as a gaali-spewing mawaali, who nevertheless cooked amazing food, was largely a creation of the post-Marco/Bourdain phase.

 

"If chefs all over the world are longing to be regarded as wild men and bad boys, is it inevitable that a new generation of Indian chefs will also decide that it is time to shed our traditional reticence and play at being the rock stars of the kitchen?"

   In the West, you see this kind of gaali-maroing chef on TV every day. As the British critic, AA Gill, wrote of Gordon Ramsay recently, he is a very talented chef with a foul temper but such is the world we live in that he finds it easier to make a living on the basis of the latter than the former.

 

   The fortunes of Ramsay’s restaurants have fluctuated (only the flagship on Royal Hospital Road, where Clare Smyth and not Ramsay himself cooks, is consistently good) and most of his protégés have split from him. But he has never been a bigger star than he is now. This is largely because of the shows he does in the US (where he is always referred to as “Cheframsay” – say it quickly, like it is one word), in which he routinely loses his temper and swears at contestants and other hapless chefs but very rarely does any cooking himself.

 

   So yes, Gill is right. It is a very strange state of affairs in which chefs make more money pretending to be swaggering mawaalis than by actually inventing new dishes or doing much cooking. (Can anyone think of a single original dish of any consequence that Ramsay has invented in 10 years?) And Marco now even claims that he has abandoned the kitchen, preferring to run mediocre restaurants and make TV shows.

 

   Fortunately, we in India have missed the worst excesses of this demon-chef craze. The American Masterchef, where Gordon swears and rants, does much less well here than the Australian Masterchef, where two relatively undistinguished chefs and a famous food critic deal with contestants with gentleness and compassion. Plus they host some of the world’s greatest chefs (Heston Blumenthal, David Chang, etc) and encourage them to share their secrets with the TV audience. (Not sure about the Asian Masterchef though. I know and admire both Susur Lee, one of the pioneers of modern Chinese cooking and Bruno Menard, who had three Michelin stars in Japan. But the show is curiously flat and forced.)

 

   I don’t think Indians appreciate chefs who behave badly or are rude to contestants. Our own Masterchef has the great Sanjeev Kapoor who has the air of the friendly neighbour you can count on; the expert without any ego. And Vikas Khanna is the son that every Punjabi mother wishes she had. Their very niceness ensures that they will not throw tantrums, let alone subsist on a diet of curses and cocaine as the British and American chefs often tend to.

 

   And our chefs recognise how important it is to be seen as normal and decent. Take the case of Manish Mehrotra. From all accounts he is “a terror in the kitchen” (his own phrase) because in a high-pressure environment you cannot ensure consistency unless your chefs are forced to deliver. But the moment service is over or he leaves the kitchen, he is back to being his normal, modest self.  Or take the great Ananda Solomon. His chefs are terrified of him because of his passion for perfection. But he is the shyest, most reticent chef I know.

 

   I remember judging Foodistan – the show that created the legend of Manish when he won it by easily outclassing all the competition – and noticing how hard Manish was trying to keep his temper in check when others in his team were screwing up. Manish sensed, correctly I think, that Indians don’t like chefs who regard themselves as wild men or prima donnas.

 

   Overall though I’m happy that there’s so much cuisine on TV, I sometimes think that food is the new sex and that many of the shows are just variations on gastroporn. My worry about many of the US shows is that the food itself doesn’t really matter. It is just an excuse for yet another game show. But, in India, our focus is right. Apart from Masterchef, people like Kunal Vijaykar and Rocky and Mayur pay attention to food quality and tell us things we don’t know.

 

   Of course, the big question remains. If chefs all over the world are longing to be regarded as wild men and bad boys, is it inevitable that a new generation of Indian chefs will also decide that it is time to shed our traditional reticence and play at being the rock stars of the kitchen?

 

   My guess is that it won’t happen. We like our Sanjeev Kapoors and our Vikas Khannas and their modesty. And when we think of superstar chefs, our image is still Amitabh Bachchan in Cheeni Kum. A little grumpy but still the star we love.

 

   Which, on balance, is a bit of a relief!