Ritu Dalmia: The MasterChef on food, TV Shows and Books

Epicurean Traveller 

She lives to eat and believes that people highly underestimate the power of good food. And you have to accept Ritu Dalmia’s verdict, for she has become an authority on all things gastronomical. Medha Shri talks to the kitchen diva about what it takes to be a chef, and the first meal she cooked when she was only nine.   Ritu Dalmia’s name has a synesthetic effect. It evokes delicious food imagery activating one’s salivary glands. She is an insatiable innovator when it comes to food, and a wine connoisseur. Owner of popular restaurants and a popular television chef, Dalmia’s work includes travelling, eating and appearing on television. She lives an enviable life, you may think. But Dalmia gives you a reality check: “Mine is a fifteen hour- a-day job without any holidays. While people party away on special occasions, we are busy making it enjoyable for them. I am not complaining about it, I love every bit of it. But at the same time, it is not a bed of roses.” Since 1993, the year she launched her first restaurant, her New Year’s eve celebration has meant more work, for she is busy serving revellers gourmet delights. But she does take a break to satiate the traveller, the cook and the foodie in her, once everyone else’s celebrations have subsided.   Interestingly, what inspired her to get into the business of food was travel. On one of her several trips to London, she visited Rose Gray’s River Cafe. “It used to be my favourite. That’s where I decided I would have my own restaurant,” shares the owner of popular Delhi restaurants Diva, Cafe Diva, Latitude 28 and a restaurant at the Italian Cultural Centre, which are synonymous with epicurean excellence. But she didn’t taste success with her first venture Mezzaluna, which served Mediterranean cuisine with a focus on Italian. The menu had Dalmia’s personal touch such as ‘I learnt this in Italy’ or ‘this I loved the first time I tasted it’. Unfortunately, it had to be shut down. She then flew down to London, opened Vama with a partner, turned it into a success and came back to India to launch Diva. Diva has indeed become a diva with Italian-food lovers – what with its marvellous collection of fine wines and Dalmia’s own gregarious personality as she goes from table to table, interacting with regulars, most of whom she knows by name.   You’d expect someone as busy, acclaimed and much interviewed as her to be haughty. But Dalmia’s unpretentious, self-effacing, witty personality surprises you. When it comes to conversations, she is as smooth as her wine collection. Dalmia turned an author with her first cookbook Italian Khana and a TV-show host when a series based on her book was aired on NDTV Good Times. She recently launched another book, Travelling Diva (Hachette India), a collection of recipes from around the world. Dalmia says that the book “just happened”. “Whenever I travel, I carry a notebook with me in which I jot down notes on how that delicious cuisine was prepared or how was the sauce made,” she says. “This book is the final version of those personal notes.” NDTV has proposed to make a series based on this book as well.   Winner of several awards like the Wine Spectator award and Cavallier title for outstanding contribution in the field of food, it is hard to believe that this awardwinning chef who has travelled around the world with a camera in the tow is not a trained chef. “You have to be naturally talented. It’s a little like art and you have to go with your gut. You either have it in you to be a chef or not,” is what she believes in. Like an artist she doesn’t abide by any rules in her kitchen: “Where is the fun if you cook by the rules? It should be guided by a sense of which taste goes with what.”   Her cooking instincts kicked in when she was just nine years old. She cooked her first meal – rice and baked beans – for her brother. “He loved it, but he was only twelve years old so what else could you expect,” she says, half seriously. By the time she was twelve, she had started dishing out three course meals for her mother. “My mom complains now; she says I don’t cook for her now the way I used to when I was young,” says Dalmia.   Her mother’s indignation is surely tinged with some pride, as Dalmia’s list of clients now includes Sonia Gandhi the Italian president and prime minister, the Belgian queen, the Swedish king, the royal family of Norway, and the German president, among others. Ask her about the experience of serving such dignitaries and she confides, “No better, no worse. I am nervous before every meal.” A fun person herself, Dalmia is a budding DJ in her personal time. Playlists at her restaurant are carefully selected by the culinarist herself. She also loves reading, and says that if she weren’t a chef she would have run a book shop or a music store.   Dalmia is essentially a traveller at heart, if food maketh her soul. Her love for Italy and Italian food makes one wonder if she was an Italian in the previous birth. “Possibly,” agrees the bon vivant. “I went there for the first time in my life at the age of ten, without my mom and dad. It’s amazing how comfortable I was in a foreign land without parents. I was so much at home. I stayed there for a month and was very happy. That’s when the love affair started and, since then, it has only grown.” The Italian government recently knighted her with the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity.   To her, food means instant pleasure or nirvana. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Dalmia adds, “To anyone’s heart. People highly underestimate the power of good food. It can do wonders.”       “Cooking is a little like art and you have to go with your gut. You either have it in you to be a chef or not.”   Cuisine Ritu doesn't  like: I hate Korean. It has never gone down well with me. I don’t like Burmese or Moroccan food either.