Contrary to what a lot of people assume, I never went to culinary school.
No fairytale stories of cooking at age four. No grandma-taught secrets passed down in spice-stained notebooks. I only stepped into a kitchen—really stepped in—when I was twenty. And not in someone’s home, but in the chaos and clarity of professional kitchens.
And here’s another one that tends to surprise people:
I didn’t start learning how to properly cook Indian food until last year.
My foundation is French. The logic, the order, the structure.
Stocks, fonds, reductions. The technique of medium-rare steaks, perfectly turned vegetables, clarified sauces. It’s measured, annotated and passed down in books that weigh as much as your ego on a bad day.
It’s also beautiful. Because when you do it right—when your sauce nappes just so, when your jus hums with balance—it feels like playing a perfectly in-tune instrument.
But here’s the twist: the deeper I go into Indian food, the more I realise this cuisine is no less refined. If anything, it’s more demanding.
Indian cuisine has never needed the validation of a brigade system or Escoffier’s categorisation to be genius. But because it was passed through hands, not textbooks, people assume it’s instinctual. Untrained. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
You want systems? Indian food has them.
You want technique? Try tempering mustard seeds without burning them. Try knowing when a dish needs jaggery and when it needs nothing at all. There’s no thermometer for that. No recipe that’ll teach you how intense this turmeric is.
A French stock has four ingredients and a 500-year-old protocol. An Indian gravy might have fifteen, in proportions passed down by memory, not measurement. You sneeze wrong, and it’s ruined.
French food is a technical discipline. Indian food is technical and volatile.
It’s oral tradition meets alchemy. Controlled chaos. And that’s a level of mastery you can’t fake.
So yes—I found my fundamentals in France. But the finesse? The real finesse?
That’s what I’m learning now. In ghee, sweat, burnt fingers and a stubborn love for every dish I once thought I already knew.
I was left to find myself.
And somehow, I got home by way of France.
But India… India is where I’m learning to cook. For real.