Chef Avinash Martin’s pop-up at the Trident Gurgaon a modern-Indian success

Ritika Bhatia

For Chef Avinash Martins, a graduate of the OLCD, Oberoi’s dedicated hospitality training school, life came a full circle when the Chairman of the hospitality group came to him and suggested he do a pop-up at the Trident, Gurugram. The menu is designed as a decidedly modern rendition of classic Indian favourites, an amalgamation of food from all over the country, suitable for a global palate, and yet authentic in nature. The chef, whose restaurant Cavatina Cuchina, an awarded restaurant in Benaulim, Goa.

“When Mr Arjun Singh Oberoi came to dine at my restaurant, he loved the food so much that he wanted me to design a menu exclusively for Trident and make it personal. So that’s exactly what I’ve done!” claims the chef, whose menu itself told a story, that of his days spent training at the OLCD academy, and thereafter working with the Oberoi.

Pride and honour to do something for Oberoi where I started my career

The menu began with an amuse bouche curiously titled ‘Bawa and his tea’ – a throwback memory to the chef’s Parsi friend and his ritual of having chai with bun-malai. The chai turned out to be a pineapple and tomato-flavoured soup, served in a distiller, straight out of a lab, along with a bao filled with fresh malai. A bisibelebath cracker came atop some saoji mutton, along with two cones made up of neer dosa dug into a bowl were filled up with crab xec xec and ghee roast, tom alley butter and masago. A crispy potato and chicken haleem made of items such as chicken liver, slow-cooked, topped with port wine gel was a delight in a bite.

It was clearly very different from your usual fine dining experience, with the flavours bursting in our mouth, familiar and unique at the same time.

The next course was a perfectly cooked litti served on hot coals in an earthen pot. A ghee diya came along to be lit and used to pour some hot ghee on top of the littis. Said chef Martins, “I wanted to play around with the concept of Scotch egg at the same time as the berliner. The item was called ‘Berlin in London’ – a reference to the Berliner, a sweet donut full of custard. Instead, the littis here were stuffed with slow-cooked duck champaran and smoked eggplant. The vegetarian version was cooked with edamame champaran and eggplant, a melt-in-the-mouth experience.

After this, we went in for the entrees. While I chose the dish marvellously titled Painting at Gokarna,  my partner’s dish was called Shahi Shrooms! The second non-vegetarian item, which I chose to forgo for I was too full, was recreated from the chef’s memories of visiting the Jama Masjid area for breakfast after night shifts at hotels. The breakfast at Jama Masjid included a mutton seekh sausage, scotch quail nargisi, dahi aloo cutlet hash, along with a croissant baida roti.

The fish dish was really as pretty as a picture, with a salt-crusted fillet of seabass, clam and kairi sauce, and little nuggets of fried potatoes adding a crunch to the dish. The shahi shrooms, on the other hand, had mushroom galouti, truffled wazwaan croquette, pine nut stuffed gucchi (morels) with Kashmiri chilli miso. At once from no particular place, the varieties of mushrooms cooked different ways brought playfulness and variety to the plate.

Said Chef Martins, “I believe that the presentation is as important. However, whatever you create has to be a flavour success.” The modern aspect of his food included all the different techniques that he used while cooking, from dehydration, slow cooking, to infusion of flavours. He said, “ I’ve stayed away from very conventional methods of frying etc. I’ve used some modern techniques, and yet kept the Indian bit – everything was slow cooked like in the olden times.”

He admitted, that this was the first time that such a menu was created and he came out of his comfort zone, but there was much more to come, given the success of this experiment. Amen to that! We ended our meal on a sweet note – the whiff of the dessert was enough to take us to the temples of this country – with a twist – a camphor laced rabri hid the bal mithai – a sweet from the holy land of Uttarakhand.

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