Tossed in olive oil and served with a smile, that’s the recipe for Ritu Dalmia’s robust cooking

Often the mention of an aura is pooh-poohed. But if there is indeed something of an energy around a person, then Ritu Dalmia has an impressive amount of it. Hers is a positive one which makes her look ahead, rather than meditate on the past. Perhaps that’s why standard questions about life and her journey so far are met with protests. “I believe mine has just begun. I have so much more to learn, see, taste and do,” Dalmia asserts. There are dos and don’ts when you are around one of the best-known celebrity chefs of our time. A major don’t is to refuse food: “Are you sure that you won’t even taste it, the dessert is freshly made,” she offers thrice during the course of our conversation. However, if one is persistent there are insights into the roads she has travelled down. “Ten years ago when people asked me about my journey, I used to feel like such a young genius. A cool kid, an untrained, self-taught chef. As I get older, I realise I have had many years behind me to get better. Has there been a journey? Yes, indeed. And it has been a fabulous one. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn’t become a chef. It’s so much fun and I even get paid for it.” Truly, it has been quite a ride for the untrained chef who owns three restaurants and has two books and telly shows in her kitty, and the Italians love her Italian khana, also the name of her first book published by Random House. So much so, that they presented her with the Order of the Star, a great national honour. Dalmia runs a small but packed café at the Italian Cultural Centre in New Delhi. The story of this Marwari girl from Kolkata, visiting Italy on a business trip (her family was in the marble tile trade), has been written several times over. It is well-known that young Dalmia was moved enough by the country’s farm-fresh food and the joie de vivre of its citizens, to return home and replicate the cuisine she had grown to love. Today, she has a long list of admirers, thanks to her style and flair. Several of them, such as journalist and food critic Vir Sanghvi, have penned robust testimonials which almost beat the Italian Pecorino (a particularly robust cheese, I am told). But that version leaves out the real spice in the story. Dalmia’s culinary journey began much before — at the age of nine. In good humour she credits her early start to the fact that she often had to fend for herself in the kitchen. “My mother’s a terrible cook. She knows that and is completely nonchalant about it. In her opinion she can’t be perfect always.” Jokes apart, Dalmia knew the saté from the sauté simply because she devoured recipe books as a child. “I had read every cookbook in the house. They were my comic books, and I would scan the recipes and pictures. I remember being more fascinated by Pak Pranali, a popular Marwari book on Continental cuisine, than Phantom.” Then there were the numerous “pacey” paperbacks by the Queen of the Indian Kitchen, the matronly Tarla Dalal (no Marwari kitchen is complete without them, Dalmia tells us.) When her parents would come home from tours (they are avid travellers, a gene that they’ve passed on to their daughter it seems), the young Dalmia would present a seven-course meal with the table set right, cutlery and crockery in place. As Dalmia says, “My pretensions were in place, even as a child. My mother says that half of what I cooked wasn’t edible. Or they would be too tired at that point to care about eating. But they knew I had toiled, so I was always praised.” Her parents still get the seven course meal once a month — at Diva. Dalmia, too, takes a break with kadi-chawal once a month in her mother’s kitchen. We had to ask Dalmia what the first dish that she ever served was. “I was nine. I made rice with baked beans and vegetables.” Quickly she adds that at nine one could be pardoned for thinking that baked beans were “the thing”. Despite these culinary forays, being a chef was not on the agenda at that point. “At 21, I made money working with my father. In the folly of my youth, I thought I would retire and start a restaurant. I clearly remember arguing with a friend who said that one needed to be a chef to start a restaurant. I believed one needed to have flair and taste.” (She still believes that and employs people who are more eager to learn than being trained.) “At 22, I started Mezzaluna, which flopped brilliantly.” That was in 1993, after Dalmia had come back from her Italian business-cum-pleasure trip and seen a famous countess, who ran a cookery school for American tourists, at work. Dalmia struggled with Mezzaluna and was forced to sell it after running at loss for two years. Perhaps India wasn’t ready for Mezzaluna and its mistress then. So, she crossed the seas to set up a successful fine-dining Indian restaurant, Vama, in London, with a friend. Though Vama did phenomenally well, home is were the solid Indian hearth is. Dalmia sold off her Vama stake to come back to Delhi in 2000. She struck gold the second time around with Diva, set up with an investment of `48 lakh (“I was cautious this time”). By then Indian palates and perceptions had changed considerably. Indians were not only eating out, they were treating food as the new entertainment. They cared if dishes were being plated right — quite a flip for a nation that didn’t really care as long as it tasted good. Books on cooking, though omnipresent in desi kitchens, were no longer just about the recipes; they were about the larger experience, ingredients and the joy of cooking. India was ready for Dalmia, and Diva, which began at the posh Greater Kailash in New Delhi. In India, there are only a handful of stand-alone restaurants that survive the long haul. Diva has. And, it has even thrived and grown to include a smaller café for the quick in-between meal. If you like your food to be pretentious then this is not the place for you. Dalmia’s signature style is fresh and wholesome ingredients plated piping hot, to be eaten with friends, family and a bottle of good wine. Obviously, this is a recipe for success, as one food blogger devoted quite some space to rhapsodies on Dalmia’s “shrimp, scallop skewer with a fennel and apple slaw”. Having travelled a winding path, resting ever so often to eat a hearty meal, one wonders what’s next? The usual stuff — start a new branch of Diva at Hauz Khas and an NDTV GoodTimes show on The Travelling Diva (her second book published by Hachette India). But the real fun starts when Dalmia gets to pack her bags and head off to New Zealand for 14 days. On her map are various eateries and wineries, but the French Café in Auckland tops her must-visit list. The café will host Dalmia the very evening she lands in the country. One can only hope that in between all that sipping and eating, she gets hit by a new recipe or her next Diva moment.