The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: The truth about India’s restaurant awards, trends and where food is really thriving

Instead, I am going to write about things I learned this weekend.

1. The Hindustan Times did the first major honest restaurant awards in Indian history. We called them the Crystals. Some of the awards were voted for by the readers of HT City and some were an entirely subjective selection based on my reviews.

2. We got sponsors, of course, but it did not even occur to us to sell the awards. Little did we know what a racket the awards business would become or that we could treat the awards as a money-making business.

3. Others were more imaginative and more unscrupulous. Many other publications ( and I won’t take names here) have a rate card for how much it costs to buy awards. It’s all out in the open and there are different rates for a) an award, b) getting it presented on stage and c) getting a picture of the winner holding the award into the paper. Nobody feels the slightest embarrassment about this. Because nobody in the industry lets outsiders know that they have bought the awards they proudly display.

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4. Now, many if not most awards operate on a commercial basis. You can pay for them under the table; you can do it officially by calling yourself a sponsor and then getting the awards; or you have pay a fee (around ₹10000 at least) just to be considered for an award. The more ‘honest’ awards are the ones where you just have to contribute a certain level of advertising to be included.

5. I make no value judgements about this. In a country where so many of our systems and institutions have been corrupted, why should awards be an exception?

6. But what is true is that it has now reached blatant levels. At one so-called awards function in Mumbai, a restaurant that had not even opened was given a top award. Some foodies who had a connection to the ceremony complained and were promptly expelled from the WhatsApp group run by the organisers.

7. No awards system is perfect or designed to meet with universal approval. I disagree with Michelin on a regular basis. For years I felt that the 50 Best was unfair to India. So yes, disagreements are normal. But corruption should not be.

8. One reason why Culinary Culture’s Ultimate Restaurant Ratings attract the cream of the industry (around 100 industry people flew down to Bangalore for the ceremony) is because they don’t have to pay a penny for the awards and know they are merit-based. This allows me to use what happened over last weekend as a basis to draw some conclusions about the food scene in India.

9. The first is that Mumbai is the food capital of India, but that Bangalore is fast catching up. Delhi/NCR has missed the bus. And Goa makes up in enthusiasm for what it may lack in quality and consistency

10. The newer, younger and brighter chefs differ substantially from the previous generation because they lack the rivalries that marred the older generations’ relations with each other. They realise that the market is growing and there is room for everyone.

11. The era of the great hotel restaurant is drawing to a close. It is still possible to create wonderful hotel restaurants as ITC has proved with the success of the Avartanas and the Taj has broken new ground with Loya. The Oberois won big with Bangalore’s Wabi Sabi and the Capital’s Dehli. But these were exceptions. The big foreign chains run hundreds of restaurants. Very few of them are much good. As the sector expands, I suspect the new hotel restaurants will be even more mediocre.

12. Old is gold. The classic, influential hotel restaurants have maintained their standards. Wasabi, Karavali, Dum Pukht and Bukhara won big. In many cases this was because the managers stayed out of the way and let such great chefs as Naren Thimmaiah, Gulam Qureshi and JP Singh get on with the job. More and more, the hotel food and beverage manager is emerging as the enemy of good food.

13. The future of food in India lies with the standalone sector. Such brilliant restaurateurs as Riyaaz Amlani, Rohit Khattar, Zorawar Kalra, Sameer Seth, and Yash Bhanage are the ones taking Indian restaurants forward.

14. It’s the same with chefs. The best meal I ate in Bangalore was cooked by Manu Chandra. But Bangalore is bursting with great chefs. The stars are people like Kavan Kuttapa whose Naru Noodle Bar remains one of the three hardest reservations in India. The other Bangalore restaurant that’s hard to book is Farmlore helmed by Ebenezer Johnson.

15. It’s the same in Mumbai where Hussain Shahzad is still king but Masque, Mizu and so many others also have to turn people away because they are so full

16. Delhi remains a laggard but will, I hope, catch up.

17. The two best food cities in India where you can eat well at reasonable prices are Kochi (where two restaurants got four stars) and Amritsar.

18. The pastry chef is the phenomenon of this decade. Vinesh Johnny’s Lick, a multi-storey dessert and ice cream place in Bangalore has been open for a month and it still has long lines of people trying to get in. I went at 11:30 pm and the line stretched to the end of the block. The ice creams were terrific and every great chef who had come to Bangalore for the Ultimate Restaurant Ratings was there waiting for a scoop . The ice cream parlour as trendy night club? Who would have thought it!

19. The queen of the weekend was Pooja Dingra. I watched as she was stopped every five minutes by someone asking for a selfie. She was unfailingly polite, friendly and warm to every single person. That I guess is how a queen behaves.

20. And finally, the racketeer awards run by greedy publications and entrepreneurs out to make a living out of brown nosing second division hoteliers will continue. But I suspect they will count for less and less . Chefs have contempt for them and those restaurants who play that game will lose out in the awards that matter.