Chef Who Cooked For Leonardo DiCaprio Will Open Indian Food Truck In Moncton
MONCTON – Former Windjammer chef Anishkumar Narayanan is building a food truck to sell “authentic” cuisine from north and south India, where he’s originally from.
“Actually I was planning to do some Western cuisine for the food truck. Then I thought, we need to give a different experience here, you know? The real, authentic experience. I thought let’s do Indian,” he said.
Narayanan had worked in the four-diamond restaurant at Moncton’s Delta Beausejour hotel for five and a half years. Trained in French and Italian cuisine, he has cooked for the likes of American actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former British Prime Minister David Cameron during his time working in fine-dining establishments, including the Seabourn Cruises, in Europe and the Middle East.
Now he’s ready to return to his Indian roots. And he plans to stick to traditional recipes.
“One thing I always believed in my career, if we make a classic, authentic cuisine, we should not compromise the recipe, flavour, or spice level,” he said.
He’s confident people will like his recipes. He’s tested his spicy south Indian butter chicken at the Shediac market for two years under the booth name Incredible India, and people kept coming back, he said.
But if you’re not the biggest fan of spicy food, don’t worry. Narayanan says depending on which part of India a dish comes from, the flavours can also be sweeter or less spicy.
The food truck is 80-per-cent built and will open by mid-April at the latest, he said. Having a mobile shop will allow him to serve customers in more than one city.
At his home in Dieppe, Narayanan has kitchen cabinets and a garage filled with home-ground spices. He also has his own blend of a dozen or more spices, called garam masala, which is unique for each Indian household.
When Huddle came to meet him, Narayanan was about to cook fish curry and fermented rice pancakes called dosa, a popular food from South India.
As he roasted some spices – coriander seed, garlic, onions, tomatoes, curry leaves, ginger, green chilli, dried kokum fruit and mustard seed – for the curry and put dosa batter on the pan, he talked about his love for traditional Indian cuisine.
“Indian food I learned from my mom,” he said.
Born to a modest family of three boys, Narayanan began helping his mother in the kitchen when he was eight. That’s when the love for cooking began. He took a deeper interest in his mothers’ cooking in his teenage years, when eating out made him feel like he was losing the flavours of home.
Although he studied electronics, his heart was always in food. After telling his parents he wanted to become a chef, they encouraged him to study culinary arts professionally. He enrolled in hotel management and hospitality degree to study French and Italian cuisine and grew his career from there.
Today, he sometimes gives free cooking lessons in hopes of changing North American habits of eating processed foods. He said if the preparation time is managed properly, it’s not that time-consuming to eat meals with fresh ingredients daily. And the food tastes better.
Narayanan lives this philosophy at home with his wife and two children, too. His seven-year-old daughter helps in the kitchen sometimes.
Food is really important in our culture. We keep time for food,” he said. “But nowadays, we don’t teach our kids how to cook. We have to teach them what we know.”
For his food truck, called Avatar, Narayanan also won’t use processed food or a deep fryer, and the spices will be home-made.
Avatar will serve butter chicken with naan; chicken curry with basmati rice; pork vindaloo with rice; masala dosa with potato stew and tomato chutney; various samosas; tandoori chicken kabobs and beef kafta. Maybe eventually, the fish curry will make it to the menu, he said.
A few minutes before taking the fish curry off of the stove, he sprinkles some garam masala on it.
“The garam masala is always the last. That way it maintains the flavour.”