The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: How this one restaurant transformed Delhi's love for authentic Italian food

Hindustan Times

4 hours ago

It's not unusual for a restaurant to be successful for 25 years. Many of the restaurants in Delhi's Connaught Place, Kolkata's Park Street and Mumbai's Churchgate Street have lasted for longer. Some opened in the 1950s and 1960s and have chugged on ever since, long after their glory years have passed them by. The original Italian flavour is still intact even after 25 years. (Reference pic: Shutterstock)
And influential hotel restaurants can usually stick around forever: Mumbai's The Golden Dragon has been going since 1974. Bukhara opened in 1978 in Delhi but is still sold out every night decades later. Dum Pukht opened a decade after Bukhara but is still flourishing 37 years later.
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Nevertheless, everywhere in the world, it is unusual for a restaurant that changed all the rules to still be going after a decade or so. The Ferran Adria version of El Bulli closed while it was still transforming the way we eat. London's Le Gavroche taught the British how to eat real French food and gave us such great chefs as Marco Pierre White, Pierre Koffman and Gordon Ramsay. Sadly, it closed last year.
Noma is one of the world's most important restaurants but, its chef-owner Rene Redzepi says that he will have to shut it down soon.
There are rare exceptions. The Fat Duck was as influential as Adria's El Bulli in transforming the way we looked at food and its creator Heston Blumenthal may well be the world's greatest chef. But even The Fat Duck, for all of Blumenthal's fame and influence, has always had rocky finances and only survives because of Blumenthal's passion.
When I see the Indian restaurants that now dominate the culinary conversation in our cities, I often wonder how many of them can ride out the trends and fashions that are a characteristic of today's restaurant industry. Most are 21st century phenomena and though I am sure the better ones have legs, many will bite the dust soon enough.
That's one of the many reasons I admire Diva in Delhi so much. Like The Fat Duck, Diva's success is down to the passion, talent and dedication of one person. And, like Heston Blumenthal, its creator Ritu Dalmia is a self-taught chef: No catering degree, no lengthy list of long apprenticeships (or 'stages' as they call them) at famous restaurants and no years spent working in other people's kitchens.
Blumenthal famously fell in love with French food after his parents rented a small holiday home in the South of France. In Dalmia's case, it was Italian food that became her obsession. Blumenthal read every book he could find about French food and studied the recipes of the great chefs (he couldn't read about the modern cooking techniques with which he made his name because they did not exist till he invented them) to learn how to cook. Dalmia went to as many restaurants as she could and inveigled her way into the kitchens to talk to the chefs. She even had visiting cards printed which described her as 'Ritu Dalmia-Food Journalist' when, of course she had never written anything in her life. She read every Italian recipe she could find.
By the time she had become a self-taught chef, her confidence and her knowledge about Italian food was such that well-known restaurants let her come and work in their kitchens for a few days. (She knows many top Italian restaurants well but I suspect her most important formative influence was London's River Cafe, run by two women Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers.)
Diva did not emerge out of nothing. Ritu first opened Mezza Luna in Delhi's Hauz Khas, a forerunner of Diva.
But because there was no red sauce pasta (or pink sauce pasta, for that matter) on the menu, because the pizzas did not have the texture of papad and the spaghetti carbonara was not made with cream, customers were disappointed.
Mezza Luna closed and I imagine it was only because Delhi was not yet ready for real Italian food.
Bitterly disappointed, Dalmia left for London where she opened a successful Indian restaurant. But her heart was not in it so she left the restaurant with her partners and came back to Delhi to try again with Diva in the then underdeveloped Greater Kailash 2 market. (The market is now a restaurant hub mostly because of the influence of Diva.)
This time Delhi was ready.
As a fan of Mezza Luna, I was pleased to see that its failure had not taken Dalmia's courage away. Not only was the food authentically Italian but she also managed to cook most of it without expensive imported ingredients. When she did use imports, she started a trend or two.
For instance, even chefs at Italian restaurants at top hotels had never seen a truffle before. At Diva, because Dalmia knew truffle dealers in Alba, there would be fresh, high quality white truffles in season every year. I never found out how she did it but one theory, popular at the time, was that she got her pals in Alba to send her the truffles by courier. She never seemed to have any problems with customs, so I imagine that the authorities just thought that she received very smelly packages and left it at that. (In later years, after Diva had established that Indians liked truffles, everyone started serving them. But they used local suppliers who were reliant on the poor-quality truffles that merchants could not sell in Italy and so, exported to markets like India.)
The success of Diva transformed perceptions about the kind of Italian food that would work in India. Menus at other restaurants began changing. Real pizzas finally became available. Pasta was not always drenched in a thick sauce.
Ritu used the restaurant's success to launch herself in many new directions. She set up a money-spinning catering business. A TV show on NDTV Good Times was so successful that a cookbook based on
the show became a bestseller. The Italian embassy, thrilled to find an Indian who could cook real Italian food, asked her to open a cafe in the Italian Cultural Centre and to take over catering for embassy functions. Ritu opened other restaurants in Delhi, Mumbai and Milan.
In recent years, she has specialised in handling the food at the weddings of the children of billionaires in India and abroad. Typically, she will not just cook her own food but will call on an array of the world's best chefs from Massimo Bottura to Mauro Colagreco.
The days when Diva seemed like a daring experiment because Indians did not like real Italian food now seem far away. But I don't think Ritu ever neglects the still thriving original Diva. It may have been 25 years. But that is where it all really took off.