Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: Crunch on this all-rounder

In Kochi two months ago, I had a completely novel version of the golgappa made by Suresh Pillai, Kerala’s most famous chef. Pillai put buttermilk in his golgappas. It should not have worked but strangely enough, it did.

Punjabis, who have as little to do with the golgappa as they do with Bharatanatyam, have also got in on the act. Now, some famous Punjabi restaurants are filling golgappas with butter chicken and bragging about it. (This is not a joke. Google it if you don’t believe me.)

What in God’s name is going on?

Well, I guess that what we are seeing is the adoption of the golgappa as an all-India flavour vehicle. Every community is using it to take its own flavours on a ride.

Nor is it that new of an idea, come to think of it. In 2013, at the Singapore Gourmet Summit, then the hottest food event in Asia (Does it still exist, I wonder?) I tried Sanjeev Kapoor’s menu at his pop-up and was intrigued by his chicken pani puri. Like everything else Sanjeev does, it worked extremely well.

I asked him how he got the idea. He told me that long before he became famous, when he was the chef at a restaurant in New Zealand, he was intrigued by the sour flavour of black grape juice and wondered if he could use it in golgappas instead of the traditional pani. He discovered he could and he then started a series of experiments with the golgappa puri, one of which was the chicken version I had in Singapore.

So, did Sanjeev Kapoor invent the modern golgappa? He laughed off the idea. When he first made his adventurous golgappas in New Zealand in the 1990s he genuinely believed he was doing something new. But the older and more experienced he has got, he explained, the more he has realised that there are very few original ideas in Indian cooking. Some chef has always been there before you.

The idea of a modern golgappa is so obvious, Sanjeev says, that he is sure that other chefs had made their own versions before him.

That’s the thing about great chefs. They are always cautiously reluctant to take the credit for innovations. For instance, the first time I saw golgappas presented on five shot glasses, each containing a different kind of pani, was on the opening menu of Delhi’s Indian Accent in 2009. Now, that style of presentation has become routine at modern Indian restaurants around the world.

I asked Manish Mehrotra, Indian Accent’s founding chef, if he invented the multi-pani golgappa with its shot glasses.

Like Sanjeev, Manish is unwilling to take credit for any innovations. “In 2009, I put this on my first menu with five different waters, but I think it had been done before in individual glasses (less fancy) with green water by chefs in London,” he responded.

Manish is right to refuse to take credit (though personally I believe he did invent it) because too many people who have a good idea claim it is original without bothering to check if it has occurred to other chefs too.

Take the vodka golgappa, which many establishments take credit for. I first had it at the late Parmeshwar Godrej’s home in Mumbai in the 1990s, when the idea of filling a golgappa puri with vodka seemed outrageous. I was intrigued enough to ask who was doing the catering. It was the Mumbai Taj and the Vodka Golgappa was Hemant Oberoi’s idea. Hemant is not a particularly modest man but he was never able to put his stamp on the concept because there was no social media in that era. Nowadays, the first vodka golgappa would be an Instagram sensation.

Even the many modern golgappas that Hemant put on the first menu of Varq at the Delhi Taj are not attributed to him because in those days, no records were kept.

And yet, it is chefs like Hemant, Sanjeev and Manish who broke the barriers between street food and restaurant food and told us it was all just Indian food. Gaggan Anand then took it to a new level with his Yoghurt Explosion which adapted the spherification techniques pioneered by El Bulli to capture the flavours of papri chaat in a little ball of exploding dahi. (The original El Bulli spherification technique did not work well with dairy; Gaggan modified it himself.) Now street food turns up with (a sometimes tiresome) regularity on every modern Indian menu.

But to come back to Sanjeev Kapoor’s point: Why is it so natural for chefs to want to adapt the golgappa?

Well, I can think of two reasons. One: Why be restricted by one or two kinds of pani? As Sanjeev and Manish demonstrated, you can use all kinds of flavours for your pani. It is this insight that Himanshu Saini has taken further at Dubai’s Trèsind Studio where pani puri is his signature dish and every menu begins with a new iteration of the classic. (The waters change but the puri remains the same.)

But there is also a second reason. Unlike the West, India does not have a great pastry tradition. A European chef can capture whatever flavours or ingredients he or she wants by putting them in a pie or a pastry dish of some kind. Beef Wellington is the most obvious example but French chefs delight in savoury pithiviers or pies made with choux pastry for instance.

Indian chefs have nothing like that. That’s why chefs like Vineet Bhatia started using our breads for the same purpose: Putting bacon on naan or filling kulchas with mushrooms. Manish invented the butter chicken kulcha and Singapore’s Revolver created the smaller kulchette with such glamorous toppings as caviar.

This approach has its limitations but most significantly it requires skill and talent on the part of the chef.

It’s much easier to fall back on the puri. You can buy readymade puris, and even if you don’t, they are not difficult to make. So, chefs are now effortlessly using golgappas as pastry cases for everything from prawn curry to rogan josh. It’s the same idea. But anyone can do it.

Does it always work?

No. Frankly it doesn’t. But give it a couple of years and perhaps our chefs will finally get it right. Until then, enjoy your Butter Chicken Golgappa!

From HT Brunch, April 19, 2025

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