After closing his world-famous Bangkok restaurant last summer, Gaggan Anand was in new digs within two months in the south east of the Thai capital. At his new place, the chef is letting his creative juices run wild, resulting in a boundary-breaking dining experience. In the final instalment of our three-part ‘Powering Creativity’ series in partnership with Miele, we take a wander through the mind of the Indian chef and Miele Generation 7000 ambassador to discover the inspiration behind a Gaggan Anand dish
The rich colours of life
Classifying Anand’s creative muses into a neat list is not an easy task. Irreverent and gregarious, he’s known for breaking the rules, always with a dash of innovation and humour. His main source of inspiration, he says, is the world itself. “I find inspiration in life and humans, culture, music, everything. Once, we had this purple ingredient in the kitchen, and from that we got an idea to make a purple dish,” he recalls.
Anand now likes to go around the restaurant and ask diners how many purple ingredients they can name – most can only mention a few. “So we remind them of how many purple things you can eat. Purple onion, cauliflower, kale, edible flowers, garlic, octopus, dragon fish, eggplant… There are nearly 40 different purple ingredients we use at the restaurant. We shape them into a purple heart that you feel kind of guilty to break, because it’s so beautiful,” he explains.
To complete the experience, the dish is served to Prince’s Purple Rain, exemplifying the chef’s eclectic inspirations in one bite. Coincidences, colours, music and flavours all come together into a dish. “It’s a zone,” he says. “People listen to Purple Rain and eat the dish, and they are in the zone; we’re creating a special mood for them.”
Anand's purple heart dish
Sibilance for success
When he’s getting creative in the kitchen, Anand follows a five-point checklist that represents his foundations for a great dish. “We look at the philosophy of the five Ss,” he says. “Sweet, sour, spicy, salty and surprise. These five elements together make a perfect dish.”
Despite this minimalist ideology, his dishes still carry an impressive level of complexity. “A simple bite might be made by eight or 10 different kitchen hands through a process that takes a week, but when you eat it, it’s just one bite,” he says. “When you can have something so good for such a short time, you want more, but you can’t get it. So that bite has all the elements of a completely outstanding dish, but at the same time, it teases the diner.”
Challenging the concept of possibility
At the new Gaggan Anand, the chef is striving to craft a gastronomic experience unlike any other. In order to do this, he has been inspired by what he calls “the impossible” – creating dishes that are seemingly unachievable. “In the four months we have been open, I don't even know my costs, I don't know if I'm selling at high price or low price. But one thing I know is that I'm making sure that people are getting something they never expected,” he says.
The chef brings the example of a dish he was able to prepare using a Miele Generation 7000 oven. “It’s half a crab sashimi with coconut ice cream and half a cooked crab curry – but both come from the same crab leg,” says Anand. “The whole leg goes in the oven, but only half is cooked. That’s incredible. How can you have a piece of shellfish that is half cooked and half uncooked? It’s impossible – only one oven can do that. So we exploit that ‘impossible’ and make it into a dish.”
The half cooked, half raw crab dish
Harnessing technology
The Kolkata-born chef views technology as an important tool in the kitchen. Ever a fan of cutting-edge equipment and techniques, his kitchen gadgets are often the source of new ideas. “Without technology, you can't go from point A to point B, but you also have to understand how you can exploit it and make sure your food doesn’t taste like technology,” he says. “You have to understand how you can use science to create good things in life. But we're not scientists, we’re chefs. We look at the possibilities and surprises that technology holds.”
Anand applies this principle in his monaka dish, which is based on a crispy rice cracker. “You cannot buy this cracker anywhere in the world,” he says. “It’s served as a sandwich with a fish curry and five essential herbs, along a coconut ice cream. We make the monaka in the Miele M Chef, a technology that allows us to create a texture and a shape that nothing else can. Through technology, I’m transforming a simple dish into something new; something that no one can understand.”
Conjuring memories
When looking for creative inspiration, Anand also focuses on the reactions he wants his food to trigger in the diner. “I play with emotions and how we emotionally react to food,” he says. “Today, the nightmare of every chef is to have two people sitting across from each other at the table and spending all their time on their phones. That is a disaster. So I ask myself: ‘how can we connect people?’”
For the chef, the answer is in serving dishes that will create new memories, engaging the customers in memorable ways. “I want my restaurant not to be a number, not to be compared to others, but to be an experience that makes you say ‘wow – that was a memory’. I love the idea that people will come to my restaurant and ask, ‘Why did he do it?’; ‘How can he do it?’; ‘Why have I not eaten something like this before?’ Curiosity is the most important factor of an emotion.”
Music as the food of love
Both at the old Gaggan and at the new Gaggan Anand, music is an important part of the experience and has been a source of inspiration for the chef. “Music and food are both very emotional. Both are memorable and both are forms of art. Songs are about expressing feelings and behaviours, and a menu is like a music album – you take each song or each course, and it forms a journey that takes you through the ups and downs of life.” 
Burnt chilli and fig leaf
Respect for craftsmanship
Some of Anand’s creative ideas have also been the result of his will to support local artisans and producers. The menu at Gaggan Anand, for instance, comprises 25 pieces – one per each course – which, when put together, make up the floorplan of the restaurant. The handmade menus are made by a 70-year-old artisan whom Anand met and subsequently employed.
“Sustainability is not only about ingredients; it’s not about using no plastic – most of all, we need to sustain the art of cooking,” he says. “Artisans, ceramists, the people who have no more jobs in this industrial era. Giving them sustainability is the most important thing and that's how we work. It's a human effort.”
His motherland
Although he has been based in Bangkok for a decade, Anand defines his approach as “progressive Indian cuisine” – therefore, his native country provides an important source of creative inspiration. “The more I travel to India, the more I see, and the more I see, the more I can understand my country and reinvent Indian food,” he says. “If you're not from India, you might never think that my food is Indian, but if you are, you will recognise the flavours that your mother cooked.”
At Gaggan Anand, the chef pays tribute to his homeland through a special dish. “When you go to a French restaurant, you might look out for the best bread and butter. At an Indian restaurant, you look out for the best rice,” he explains. Anand takes this concept to the extreme in his baked rice dish, which is cooked in 54 individual portions, one for each diner in every sitting. The chef hired four chefs to work on rice alone. “It’s 40g of rice, 40ml of chicken or mushroom stock, and the dish is finished exactly one minute before being served,” he says.
“This is the biggest difference. No restaurant in the world cooks rice individually. It’s very meticulous. That’s how perfection can be achieved.”
For more on Gaggan Anand and Miele’s Generation 7000 series, follow @TheWorlds50Best on Instagram. Read the other instalments in the series, in which Helena Rizzo and Kyle Connaughton explored what powers their creativity, and stay tuned to 50 Best’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channels for the latest news, features and videos.
