Southern soul, global face, and an experience to cherish

The term South Indian food invariably brings associations of tiffins in small eateries or meals in crowded messes across the southern peninsula. South Indian flavors however can also be nuanced, refined, clean and modern. Call it contemporary South Indian food, Modern Southern cuisine or what you may but the flavors of India’s southern states are becoming more and more accessible and the cuisine more approachable than ever before.

To understand the transition, we catch up with chef Ajit Bangera over a meal at his restaurant that has changed the perception of South Indian food since its inception 4 years ago.

Avartana, located in the heart of culture rich Chennai, is a showcase of contemporary South Indian food firmly anchored in the traditional flavors while being fascinatingly innovative in the interpretation of the cuisine and its presentation. Much like the restaurant’s name, the dishes are an expression of magical art, with each one featuring unique concepts in modernist iterations and progressive renditions.

Meals in Avartana are served as set course tasting menus. Christened as Maya, Bela, Jiaa, Anika and Taara they come in seven, nine, eleven and thirteen courses. Each menu is a series of pre-plated small bites that gives you a glimpse of authentic South Indian flavors. “A tasting menu ensures our guests get to try everything and are not bound by portion sizes, ” chef Ajit Bangera tells us as he introduces his elaborate 13-course menu. The focus on visual appeal, says chef, helps the guest to re-imagine the cuisine. To ensure the essence is not lost in translation, the service team presents each dish with a description and suggestions to eat. “Please eat this at one go, ” our server Prakash, who has been explaining every dish he is presenting, tells me as he presents a smooth sphere on a bed of fried potato spirals. I follow instructions and find a delicate dish exploding in my mouth to reveal complex flavors that are at once novel and familiar.

“When we conceptualized Avartana, we wanted to create a space that showcases contemporary South Indian food, firmly anchored in the traditional flavours and ingredients while also being innovative, ”chef Bangera tells us as we talk further about the concept that has won uncountable awards and inspired many similar experiments across the globe. And so they got a team that understood traditional flavors but worked with modern technique. “This way while our chefs knew how the food should taste, they were not bound by the traditional way of cooking it.” The next dish on my plate demonstrates exactly that. A lobster dumpling with chili jam and a sprinkle of gunpowder could very well belong to a Michelin Star restaurant in Europe. Clean and minimalist in presentation but complex and complete in taste it showcases the expertise of the team.

It is not only the food that demonstrates the thought that has gone behind Avartana but also the design. The sprawling restaurant with clean lines, modern adaptations of age-old motives like banana blossom, banana leaves and a boat prow running through the wall conveys both tradition and modernity. An open kitchen meanwhile sets the stage for conversations.

When and where did the journey of modern South Indian start and how did it develop into what we are experiencing today, I am compelled to ask chef Bangera even as we wait for the next course. “We wanted a place that would rest on the bedrock of innovation and local tradition; while fine dining restaurants usually played by the rules, we dared to be different.” The idea, informs chef, took months to fructify and the team shed blood sweat and tears to arrive at the menu.

The next offering – Uthukuli Butter Chicken with Malabar Parotta and butter toffee in beetroot casing – turns out to be a shining example of this hardwork. A small Taluk in Tamilnadu, Uthukuli is known for its rich pure and beautiful butter and the team ensured they make the best of it by dedicating an entire course to it. The chicken is buttery and peppery and just the right quantity, the parotta is tiny and the flakiest I have eaten, and the toffee, a piece of butter wrapped in beetroot paper is a work of art. The vegetarian version of the dish uses morels and with my love for morels, I ensure I eat that too. A tad too full I marvel at the ingenuity of the team and how they make the the simplest of flavours shine through. Post the chicken, morel and parrottas, we await a course of lamb rice with aubergine and golden garlic yogurt.

At every step of the meal one wonders what could the next course be, especially after you have tasted preparations like roasted pork belly with baby idlis, banana flower fritter with mustard mayo, raw mango sorbet with citrus foam and shrimp dumpling with chili jam. What comes next however is a delight. The Fennel Panacotta with Angel Hair Caramel, also the last course of the meal, turns out to be the most extravagant of them all. The pannacota looks like a real egg what with a runny yolk (made of mango puree); the caramel nest with tiny edible flowers is so realistic that you take a while to figure whether or not you should eat it. Once you taste it though, you don’t want to stop. “Our vegetarian guests are sometimes taken aback by this, ” chuckles chef, “but we manage to convince them to try it.”

But is this an effort to make South Indian food fashionable, or is it genuine concern about preserving the heritage and building an ecosystem that can make the traditional flavors more relevant in the current context. I ask. "Our food is firmly grounded in traditional flavors and ingredients and exemplifies an exclusive blend of traditional and progressive renditions of Southern Indian Cuisine. The idea is to create inventive recipes that blend with flavors from across the Indian Peninsula and techniques from across the globe and remain relevant throughout." He signs off.

India Homepage

You may also like:

Talking superfoods and sustainability with Nandita Iyer