Table Talk with Manu Chandra

Table Talk with Manu Chandra
Date: December 12, 2021
Time: 21:00 IST

The various Olive brands, Toast & Tonic, Monkey Bar, The Fatty Bao, Cantan… You’d think I would have first encountered Manu through one of the many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed restaurants he has nurtured and/or created. But when he was making his mark, I was going through a particularly insolvent phase and then rebuilding from there, and fine dining was something that was, as my young friends say, out of my aukat. I first met him when I was editing ForbesLife India, and he wrote for us about the importance of sourcing local ingredients, and since then, his has been one of the voices on food that I’ve listened to carefully. At one point I somehow wound up on the guest list for the opening of The Fatty Bao in Bombay, and had the additional good fortune of having Manu sit with Antoine and I and informally explain some of the thinking behind his ideas.

The making of Chef Chandra started with an early interest in food and what went into making it and presenting it, and continued with formal study (like previous guest Kishi, he trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and their times there overlapped a bit), apprenticing in celebrated kitchens (Restaurant Daniel, Le Bernardin, Gramercy Tavern, Café Centro, Jean Georges), formative jobs (Mandarin Oriental,  Eyvind Hellstrom’s Bagatelle), prizes (a Sea Food Masters Award for the National Recipe Competition in the USA), before he returned to India, where he joined Olive Beach in Bangalore as Chef de Cuisine.

We will chat about this journey and his other formative influences, his work highlighting locally sourced ingredients, what it takes to be a chef, the challenges of running restaurants — multiple restaurants, each with distinct identities — the joys and sorrows of celebrity, The Social Kitchen, an initiative he is part of that wants to “bring families back to the kitchen or table to interact and talk using new kitchen design,” and what he’s been up to since he decided, a few months ago, to leap into the unknown. As ever, be prepared for digressions — these are conversations, not formal interviews — and you’re welcome to nudge us into them or back on topic.

We’ll chat for at least a couple of hours, including questions from and discussion with the audience, and may go on longer, if Manu and you are willing.

Giving back

Table Talk will stay free to attend and free to listen to or watch later, for as long as I can afford to keep it that way. But we would like to use our privilege to help others, so we’re asking our guests to choose a cause.

(I’ll add Manu’s choice here shortly.)

Attending

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