Mumbai's chef Garima Arora, GAA's rising star
Garima Arora is the first female Indian chef to earn a Michelin star
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Last Updated: Jun 17, 2019, 11:17 IST4 min
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Gaa’s website describes its dishes as being derived from “techniques from around the world” and using indigenous Thai ingredients. Serving only 10 or 14 set course menus, either regular or vegetarian versions, a typical menu might include duck doughnut and organic, burnt coconut sugar ice cream. Arora’s own favourite is crab in cold macadamia milk. “When you bite into the crab you are hit with the flavours of peppercorn and jaggery,” says Arora. “It embodies everything we’re trying to do here at Gaa.”
Her signature dish is inspired by the Indian street snack bhutta: Grilled young corn, seasoned with black salt, chili and lime and then served with corn milk on the side for dunking. Another favourite is called simply “jackfruit”, and incorporates both ripe and unripe samples of the giant tropical fruit. The unripe fruit is served with pickles and an Indian bread made from ripe jackfruit.
For inspiration, Arora travels every two months to northern Thailand to source new ingredients. Among her more unusual finds: Canistel (also known as eggfruit, similar to an avocado) hor wor (herb with lemon verbena flavours) and salad root (a vegetable that looks like licorice).
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Arora inherited her love of cooking and her entrepreneurial ambitions from her parents. Both are also entrepreneurs, running their own event management company. Arora recalls from her childhood that, whenever her father came home from business trips, he would immerse himself in the kitchen, whipping up new dishes. “He’d be happy and smiling and cooking and having fun,” she says. “I started thinking, ‘This could be something I could do’.”
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Arora went first into journalism, studying mass media at Jai Hind College in Mumbai and then working briefly as a reporter at the Indian Express. Even though she loved cooking, it wasn’t as respected a vocation as journalism. In 2008, she took the plunge, left journalism and moved to Paris to attend the legendary Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. From there, she has had a star-studded career, working with some of the world’s best chefs. After graduating in 2010, she got a job with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay in Dubai at Verre (later renamed Table 9).
Working under Ramsay’s famously brusque management was a painful initiation, she says. “I was in my early 20s and had a huge sense of ego and entitlement,” she recalls. “I learnt a lesson in humility.” Next came a three-year stint at Noma in Copenhagen—a two-Michelin star restaurant ranked as the best restaurant in the world by William Reed Business Media, the UK-based publisher of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Its celebrity chef René Redzepi taught her that cooking can be an “intelligent exercise”, as she puts it. “You start questioning—where can I source this herb? Why am I using this herb? How can I use it in this dish?” she says.
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The result was Gaa. Arora holds a 20 percent stake, with the remaining 80 held equally by Anand and three Gaggan investors—two Bangkok tailors and an IT professional. “They let me be and let me run this by myself,” she says. The restaurant is named after her, too: Gaa is derived from the first two letters of Arora’s first name and the first letter of her surname.
She says she has so far managed to avoid importing the tyranny and drama of celebrity chefs she experienced elsewhere (hint: Ramsay). Instead, music plays in the kitchen to soothe frayed nerves. Her only regret, she says, is that running a restaurant means spending less time in the kitchen. As Gaa is open seven days a week, Arora spends all her waking hours there.
“You’re cooking all this glorious food,” she says. “But you never have the time to enjoy it.”
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First Published: Jun 17, 2019, 11:17
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