Indian Culinary Heritage
From the spice routes of Kashmir to the courts of Delhi, the cuisines of India arrive on our plates.
India is not one cuisine. It is twenty-eight, and each one carries a thousand years of its own history. The yoghurt-rich braises of Kashmir owe their colour to Mughal cooks. The smoke of the Punjabi tandoor predates the British Empire by a millennium. The coconut curries of Goa borrow from Portuguese sailors, and the chettinad spicing of Tamil Nadu owes nothing to anyone.
We don't pretend to cook them all. What we do - what we have always done - is choose the dishes we love, source the right ingredients, and cook them the right way. Slowly. Patiently. With the seasoning checked by the same chef every service.
The recipes in our kitchens were learned by our chefs from their mothers, and from their mothers' mothers. Some of them have never been written down. They live in the hands of our brigade, in the way they reach for the cardamom without looking, in the way they know - without anyone telling them - when the lamb is ready.
“A great curry is the slowest thing in the kitchen. That is the whole secret.”