From working on cruise liners in Miami to being awarded as the celebrity chef for Pune, Shailendra Kekade has an impressive resume.
The chef, who is currently the host of Style Chef on Food Food Channel, where he attempts to simplify the art of food presentation, believes that travel and easy access to international cuisines have exposed people to more exotic cooking methods. “The initial thought process of anybody wanting to use exotic ingredients is a little bit shocking because people usually do not know how to use these ingredients the way they should be. This is what I try to simplify on the show.”
He goes on to say that cuisine in general is often influenced by the kind of produce found in a region, though ingredients are now becoming easier to procure the world over. “For example, Italians have pasta and pizzas with cheese because that is the local produce. Similarly, in Andhra, there are a lot of chillies that are available and hence Andhra cuisine is spicy. So this is how the trend of consuming food has evolved. Even within India, there are many food trends. In metros, people go heavy on breakfast, light on lunch and then again heavy on dinner. Conditionally, Indians have been taught to not consume food post sunset and that is slowly coming back into play again. There is a lot of consciousness towards healthy eating.”
Along with healthy eating, Shailendra believes that the Indian foodie now wants good food even with a casual dining experience. “People are tired of dressing up to go to a restaurant.
All they want to do is have great food without additional burden,” he says, adding that this places the onus on restaurants to offer great food and ambiance at affordable rates. “Now, there is a lot of importance given by the restaurants to the décor but again they make sure that they don’t spend unnecessarily as that introduces costs which are invariably passed on to the customer.”
Despite the accolades, he admits that cooking is all about experimentation and that he tends to have bad days too.
However, he does offer up some tips to make sure that anyone who tries their hand at preparation and presentation can pull it off well. “Try and keep it simple. People think that complicating the number of ingredients will make a dish great, or sometimes they over garnish a dish. You can start off being a bad plate designer and then evolve. It’s a matter of keeping an eye on what is used and how it can be used. If you cook something and it is good, you get appreciated immediately. But if you think it is bad, you feel disheartened too. But we need to keep on doing what we need to do. Experimenting has to go on.”
Shailendra Kekade was in Bengaluru to judge the HyperCITY Budding Chef Challenge.
