From the Gate of India, overlooking the Arabian Sea, the city of Mumbai stretches back 20 miles, a thickening spread of choked roads, slums, commercial districts and, as you head north along the shoreline, large suburbs of villas, apartment blocks, chic eateries, schools, brightly lit markets selling cheap clothes, the occasional mall and office blocks.
Sanjeev Kapoor, India's best-known chef, has his office in Andheri West, one of the sprawling suburbs. Kapoor's pioneering Khana Khazana, started 18 years ago, is the longest-running TV cooking show in Asia, and he has just launched India's first 24-hour Hindi-language cooking channel with 40 shows. This success has brought awards, government advisory contracts, jobs with foreign airlines and an appearance on CNN alongside Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Wolfgang Puck as one of the top five celebrity chefs in the world. Kapoor's website gets 25m hits a month, and his 36 books have sold an estimated 10m copies.
I stop at the stalls in the street where he works. They serve office workers, and it is 3 o'clock and there are many having a late lunch. At the corner of the main road is a stall selling samosas and pakoras. There is a woman with piled tins full of Tibetan dumplings, served with chilli or soy sauce, and next to her, at last, something authentically Mumbai: pav bhaji, a mix of spiced vegetables and yeasty soft bread. Further down, in front of a McDonald's and a drain from which a crew of women is hauling foul black muck with their bare hands, I buy a masala dosa, the classic south Indian pancake stuffed with beetroot as well as the usual mildly spiced potato. Four office workers standing next to me in neat nylon-mix white shirts eat theirs from steel trays.
Kapoor – like the McDonald's and the malls and the office workers – is in part a product of the new "Shining India", the India of the near double-digit economic growth, information technology and a new sense of being an emerging power. The big break for Kapoor, now 46, came in 1993, as economic reforms and satellite television transformed the Indian social, political and media landscape after decades of socialism. A successful hotel chef in Mumbai, he was asked to host a cooking show on the best-known of the new TV channels. He chose to make a homely but attractive dish of cheese-filled spinach dumplings and a complicated stuffed chicken breast with saffron and orange liqueur. The former – shaam savera – is now established as his signature dish. No one remembers the chicken.
But as much as the cooking, it was the medium that Kapoor mastered so rapidly. Television is what gets you noticed, Kapoor explains early in our interview when I've finished my dosa and he's finished switching his new channel's data banks. Its power was made clear to him, he says, when he went searching with his wife for dried soya grains in Mumbai many years ago and found all the shops had sold out. Only then did he remember that he had cooked a dish with them earlier in the week. His television channel is doing very well, he says, and quotes numbers which, as ever in India, are eye-popping. Of 120m households with cable or satellite in India, more than half are Hindi speaking (rather than English speaking), and Kapoor's channel is being watched by around 12%. A quick back-of-the-envelope scribble shows that this means around 8m homes.
This month Kapoor is in the US to launch a new book, which he will then bring to the UK: Mastering the Art of Indian Cooking.
"Indian cooking is in-your-face food," says Kapoor. "But maybe some subtlety is coming in now." He launches into a brief history of recent evolutions in Indian cuisine. He has an interesting perspective, not least because his television show, for which he has cooked three dishes a week for 18 years, has played a significant role in changing what is being cooked in several hundred million kitchens.
"This is a hot, tropical country," says Kapoor. "Sixty years ago there were no refrigerators. Food was cooked in the morning and had to last all day. So the principles of pickling were used: spices, fats, salt, preservation in sugar, all to keep it safe and edible when you couldn't keep it cold. Now that is beginning to change. Our vegetables are beginning to look like vegetables when they are cooked."
In India, food still plays a significant role in establishing status. Take the local English- language news magazine Outlook. The cover story earlier this month was headlined "Eat Street" and was essentially a rediscovery of the joys of street food. "No more humble fare, the rich variety is wooing ever more patrons," the magazine tells its largely middle class readers who now, for the first time, are able to look at cheap roadside cooking as something if not exotic, then deliciously authentic. The following issue featured recipes for the aspiring chef. They included a "surf and turf" with beef fillet and prawns.
Beef, of course, is traditionally banned for Hindus, and high-quality cuts are almost impossible to procure in India unless you have the supply chain of a 5-star hotel. And prawns, unless they are straight from the sea, involve risking a patchy refrigeration chain. Other recipes were for chocolate mousse – though all chocolate is imported and impossibly expensive – and black pepper chicken with a sauce made with red wine (the cheapest bottle of local plonk costs six times a labourer's daily pay) and a tin of tomatoes.
Tomatoes – another ingredient introduced, like chillis, around 400 years ago – are readily available, but canned, and only found in high-class grocery shops in major cities where, shipped in from America or Europe, they cost a fortune. These recipes are, of course, aspirational. Only the smallest fraction of Outlook readers have the skill, kitchen or cash to follow such recipes. They are there in the magazine like the features on watches or cars or the hundreds of full-page advertisements selling new apartments where the water is clean, the power never goes off, the flat-screen TV (perhaps showing Kapoor's food channel) hangs on a clean white wall and there's a view of a golf course.
Part of that dream exists, of course – for those with money. There is somewhere between five and 10 times more wealth in India now than there was 20 years ago. Roughly two-thirds of the country has seen only incremental benefits, if any at all, during this period, which means that the cash is concentrated at the top. One of the things those at the top are now spending their money on is food.
On the TV screen in Kapoor's office, a starlet is standing with contestants at a stove. Programming is all about participation: there are local versions of Ready Steady Cook and a show devoted to foreign cuisine. For a long time the latter was "continental", which meant anything vaguely European but adapted for an Indian palate. This is dying now, says Kapoor, and the "Indian pasta" – penne with tomatoes, chilli, coriander and masala spices, for example – is taking over.
The key for Kapoor is not just the change in people's taste but the change in their cooking habits. The irony in India is that those interested in cooking are those who have the least need to do it. Most Indian middle class homes have both a full-time maid and cook. This means complicated architecture for new apartments, with two kitchens built into many designs: an open American kitchen for the owner and a closed-off Indian kitchen for the staff.
"The affluent classes have their maids do all the washing and chopping," says Kapoor. "Then they kind of put it together and say: 'Look what I cooked.'"
The coming trend in Indian food in India, Kapoor believes, is rooted in a reaction against globalisation. "People are much prouder of everything Indian. We are seeing that with regional Indian food that is beginning to get genuine recognition," he says. "It will get healthier; hybridisation will continue. It will be more inventive, more bold. It will change as we change, and people will continue to worry if it's authentic or not."
And street food? "Well, it's cheap and convenient, and that's why people eat it. But there isn't a very large repertoire and there's not much that is really street food. A dosa is actually quite an involved dish, and the roadside is not really the place to do it."
Outside, the office workers are going home and ceding the space on the street to teenagers heading to the local cinema and its attached Cafe Coffee Day, one of the new coffee bars that are springing up all over India.
I head towards the sea, to the famous Juhu beach, where I find hundreds of Mumbai families out taking an evening stroll. Spitting seeds on the wet sand, dropping shiny wrappers, belching with abandon, they tuck into chaat, bhel puri and potato fritters and sip their fluorescent-green syrup drinks. I pick up a plate of Singapore noodles with fat, deep-fried green chillis and a fresh lime soda and join them.
