When I arrive at Vineet Bhatia’s small London restaurant for my lesson in how to cook the perfect vegetarian meal for Christmas Day, I am dubious to say the least. First of all, I am a little wary of Michelin-starred chefs (in 2004, Bhatia gained a star for his Chelsea restaurant, Rasoi, becoming the only Indian chef ever to receive the accolade; and he has seduced the food critics – the inimitable Fay Maschler, food critic for the London Evening Standard, waxed lyrical about the “magic carpet ride of spicing”). My only previous, prematurely aborted attempt at learning how to cook was initiated by none other than Gordon Ramsay, who has about 12 of the blasted little stars, which made him think he had the right to boss me about in my own kitchen, laugh at my lack of ingredients (no salt, no flour, definitely no such thing as a rolling pin), flick me with a tea-towel, laugh at my special shelf in the fridge purely for the cats’ use, and employ a metal cutter on my antique kitchen table, which had never seen so much as a CRUMB, to make ravioli (why not just buy some from M&S?), thus leaving scars that are there to this day.
To me, cooking is too much trouble, Christmas is sorely overrated, and Indian cooking… well, it is simply far too complicated. Plus, I have an Indian husband at home, so wouldn’t dare to pretend to know better than he how to cook rice, or crush a cardamom seed, or extract the flavour from a curry leaf (it is done by massaging it in the palm of your hand, apparently). Still, here I am in a boiling hot kitchen, surrounded by flames, which makes me worry for my Prada sweater, telling Vineet Bhatia my likes and dislikes. I don’t like mushrooms, or peppers, or big tomatoes, or anything too chilli-y, or anything that used to have a face and parents, obviously; I do like rice, and vegetable samosas, but he tells me we can’t make samosas today because they are too boring.
The first shock about being in his kitchen is how sweet and polite everyone is. Mr Bhatia has never been known to raise his voice, or to say the F word. “There is no need,” he says softly. “Most of the people here have worked with me for 15 years. I am like a conductor, and they,” he says, making an expansive gesture, “are the musicians”.
I am shown my Christmas menu. To start, we are going to make “almond-crusted potato patties, with grilled baby asparagus and green herb chutney”. This is followed by “oven-roasted broccoli on top of red onion and cumin khichdi” (a sort of kedgeree), and “grilled paneer with saffron-green pea upma (a sort of polenta), topped with crispy curry leaves, and drizzled with chilli oil”, at which I pull a face. He is also going to show me how to make one meat dish, a “gold-crusted lamb Mussalam with stir-fried baby spinach” (I have no idea what Mussalam means as I don’t pay attention during the meat bit of the lesson, especially when Bhatia tells me I have to stab the lamb – only the chops, not the animal, it turns out – so that it will become infused with flavour, and then cook it in a slow oven for seven hours).
Although Vineet Bhatia is far more low-key than Gordon Ramsay, he is quietly forceful, spooning dribbles of things into my mouth I wouldn’t normally try, such as the green herb chutney – simply whizz fresh coriander, mint, garlic, green chilli, ginger and yogurt together in a blender. Ooh, and salt. Delicious. What I like most about our Christmas menu is the mixture of subtle flavours: aromatic spices, such as saffron, fennel and green cardamom, getting all frisky with the more pungent, robust ones, such as cinnamon, pepper and cloves.
