Barkat by Vikas Khanna

Author:Vikas Khanna [Khanna, Vikas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789354921346
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2021-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

8

One Life, One Dream

On 23 August 2004, when I cooked at the James Beard House, something changed in me. After cooking the dinner and getting rave reviews, they give you an apron to sign. As I was signing the apron, I noticed it had the signatures of some of the biggest icons of the food industry. That inspired me to not just sign my name but also mention that I am Indian. This evoked something in me and I knew that I needed to have bigger dreams to represent my country and cuisine. If I tried harder, I would find space on the mainstream platforms and that is how the next journey started.

I went back to Salaam Bombay and told them that I was rethinking my career and I was leaving the job. I didn’t have any backup plan, I had nothing. I just had a small apartment in midtown Manhattan. Just to survive and sustain myself, I started doing cooking classes there and it was pretty good as three or four times a week, I’d have six or seven students paying 100 to 200 dollars to learn a menu or do a course. Sometimes, people who could afford more would call me to their house and I did a weekend session with their friends where I just cooked on a centre aisle and everyone stood around me. That’s where I got the idea that this was the only way I could move forward—one meal, one dish, one recipe at a time. After that one amazing thing happened—my experience at the James Beard House—someone suggested that since I had all these classes in my apartment, but it was small, and all this clientele, why didn’t I open a cooking school?

That was the birth of Sanskrit Culinary Arts. It was a small school on 23rd Street. It had a professional kitchen but that space was also used by different chefs, so you had to book it in advance when you had a cooking class. I was inspired by the generosity of the people and amazed at how many people would come there to celebrate what I was cooking and be a part of the sessions. Slowly I realized that all these little kitchens and dishes that I was creating to spread Indian food were reaching new heights and I was also making new contacts. Some people asked that since I had the cooking school and an established kitchen, could I do the catering for their upcoming events—I could make a little extra money.

Those kitchens were very important to me in my journey and I started doing small caterings. But later, I realized that it was hard to stock ingredients in the kitchen and it did not give us the opportunity to do bulk cooking. So, I opened a catering company called Tulsi Caterers. I rented a kitchen in downtown Manhattan and this really worked for me. It was after 9/11, so downtown New York was still recovering financially and emotionally, and we were getting a lot of support because people would come there for homestyle Indian cooking.

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