Michelin chef likes Chennai’s food scene

Like for most chefs, Alfred’s mother was his inspiration and the reason behind him pursuing this career. “From a young age, my siblings and I were quite hands-on in the kitchen helping her make delicious meals and the kitchen was a natural and happy place for us. I can still remember the aromas wafting around the kitchen. But even then, I wasn’t looking at it as a career option. It was my mother who filled up the form for a hotel management course, which was then a very new field. One of my seniors in school had just joined the college and it became an optional idea for us,” he starts the conversation.

After passing out of the college in 1993, he worked in some of India’s most iconic restaurants before shifting his base to the UK. “I had joined Tamarind as a sous chef in 2001 and progressed to the executive chef the year after. London offers a great canvas for a creative person. The British have had a long love affair with Indian food and the flavours of the sub-continent. A strong Indian diaspora ensures authentic ingredients are quite easily available. While Punjabi food has probably been the most popular overseas, I have always been a champion of showcasing other Indian micro-cuisines as well,” explains the chef.

In 2015, he left Tamarind to pursue his own restaurant projects. “It has been an incredible and organic journey the past couple of years with a lot of learning and unlearning along the way. I curate ‘INDUS’, the Indian menu offering for hospitality boxes at MCC Lord’s for the cricket season every year. I present my cuisine every summer in Geneva at the Hotel D’Angleterre. I work as a food consultant to Gleneagles, Suvlaki (London’s best Greek restaurant), Tandoor Chophouse, to name a few,” Alfred shares.

The chef loves to come to Chennai two or three times a year and gets to know about the many new places that have opened up. “It is a great feeling to see this explosion of concepts. I try and visit as many as I can but definitely cannot keep up. Our audience is well travelled and thanks to social media and TV food shows as well, they are well informed to seek more. I am particularly happy that there are so many new restaurants specialising in particular Indian micro-cuisines and not just global cuisines. I am also happy to see young chef entrepreneurs running interesting new spaces and it is overall very heartening to see this new evolution of Chennai’s culinary landscape.”

His culinary philosophy, ‘Heritage. Health. Happiness’ lies at the very core of his cooking. Though he loves to experiment with various cuisines, his go-to meal is biryani. “It doesn’t matter if it is vegetable, chicken or lamb; the flavour of biryani is something that stays with me for long.”