There are many people who have turned Garima Arora, who recently won the second Michelin for her restaurant Gaa in Bangkok, into the chef she is today. First, there is her grandmother. Arora took her toddler steps in cooking with a milk cake, made with semolina in the pressure cooker, that her grandmother taught her. The real pleasure was not the end but the means―cooking with her grandmother.
Her grandmother used to make white butter, which Arora used to eat with 'gobi ka paratha' or 'methi ka paratha'. Today, it is a signature at her restaurant. In fact, many of her early food memories are plated and served at Gaa. “We used to make a dish called kanjak with halwa, chane and poori during Navratri,” she says. “That was something I used to look forward to all year. That combination of savoury and sweet eaten together has shaped my palate and the way I cook.”
Gaa was launched in 2017 as a modern Indian fine-dining restaurant offering a 12-course tasting menu, turning Arora―the only Indian woman to have won two Michelins―into an overnight sensation. However, starting it was not an overnight process. It took years of hard work, dedication, and a little nudge from chefs like Rene Redzepi, the wizard behind Copenhagen’s Noma.
Redzepi is one of the chefs she worked with after completing her course in Paris’s Le Cordon Bleu. Arora says her time at Noma gave her structure and discipline. And Redzepi gave her the best piece of advice. “He told me to make sure I do business only with the right people,” says Arora. “Finding a life partner is easier than finding a good business partner. Those were wise words."
She also says that her time at Noma taught her not to take her cooking too seriously, and to have fun in the process. But no one could ‘out-fun’ Redzepi like two madcap tricksters-turned-tasters―Chefs Ranveer Brar and Vikas Khanna―her co-judges on season 7 of MasterChef India. Both of them, Arora was to find out, could give you as good a laugh as a lasagna. "They are my two favourite humans ever," says Arora. Whether it was playing ‘food charades’ or crowning Queen Garima with marigold flowers, the three had a blast on the sets of the show. As Brar said, “Growing up is overrated.”
But there is one thing that Brar and Khanna could not give her―magic. Because there could be only one magician in her life: her father. He inspired her love for food when he experimented with all sorts of dishes in her childhood. He was making risottos and hummus when no one in India had even heard of them. But what confounded her was a banana upside-down cake that was his specialty. For the longest time she could not figure out how the banana got inside the cake. Her father would tell her it was magic, and he would make a ‘poof’ sound, and Arora was mesmerised. “That shaped my relationship with food, when the mystery surrounding it was ignited,” she says.
When the magic drizzled away, the magician turned into mentor and best friend. The two have taken holidays together to Spain, Paris and Vietnam, wining, dining and wisecracking. There is nothing she cannot tell him. He also has another role at Gaa―as master taster. Everything must pass the acid test of his discerning palate, whether it is the famed jaggery butter and caviar on crispy buckwheat, or the fermented rice cake stuffed with spinach and topped with tomato chutney.
And no prizes for guessing who was the first person she called upon hearing of the second Michelin.