Achal Aggarwal is obsessed with perfectly-cooked food which tastes, and looks, good

For all who survived the good-old 1990s here is a pop quiz—who was that grinning man who ruled your hearts, stomachs and television sets? If you saied Sanjeev Kapoor then you are spot on! Chef Sanjeev Kapoor has inspired a whole generation of chefs, including a young Delhi boy, who grew up watching Kapoor’s Khana Khazana. Like other youngsters, he dreamt that one day he, too, would be like Kapoor—teaching India its spices. But the boy did not just dream—he became a famous chef much like his inspiration. Today, Achal Aggarwal is a known name in the foodie circle. He is one of those rare Indians who can treat Japanese food just right, like it is done in the country. According to the Sous Chef, when he first saw Kapoor he took seconds to decide that he wished to be a chef. He remembers that he was watching Sanjeev Kapoor cook, when something clicked in his brain. Being the meritorious middle-class boy, Aggarwal believed that it was best that he kept his dreams to himself till the time he could make himself heard; apparently no parent wished to see their beloved son become a bawarchi. Instead, Aggarwal took the mommy’s boy route—in the pretext of helping his mother, he began to experiment with dishes he saw being cooked on television. For a while the charade went well. “The family was happy gorging on the dishes that I cooked,” till the day he was banned from the kitchen. The reason: the young man belonging to a strict Hindu family had cooked beef. The ‘lifelong’ ban was lifted after several years. But more of that later. He might have been banned from the kitchen, but he pursued his hotel management course from the Institute of Hotel Management Catering Technology and Applied Nutrition in Meerut. Afterwards, he joined Hotel Metropolitan (Sakura) where, to his surprise, he was put into the Japanese Kitchen. The selection procedure, he tells us, was unique and just a little bit absurd. While chefs are usually asked to prepare a dish or two to get a job, Aggarwal and other candidates were asked to sketch a fruit basket placed before them. That was that. Based on his sketching skills, he got his first job. “They probably judged me by my precision with which I made the sketch. One can not prepare the perfect Japanese plate without precision,” he explains. In the beginning Aggarwal was not all that pleased with his job as the cuisine did not excite him much. “I thought, why Japanese food? What is there to even cook in it? They do not use spices and are happy eating raw fish,” he says. Once he began learning more, he realised that Japanese food was so much more. The Japanese style of cooking left a deep impact on him. So much so that even if he is making a contemporary Indian or a spicy Mexican dish, he makes sure that vegetables are cut in uniform shapes. It irks him if the ingredients are not ‘right’. A Japanese effect indeed! Sakura was a great learning curve, but it was far from what he wanted. Like every other dreamy-eyed young man and woman who enters the kitchen, he, too, wished to work with the Taj Group of Hotels and the Oberoi Group. With his second job, that dream came true. This time, he opted for the Indian Kitchen, at the Rajvilas, Oberoi Group, Jaipur. As fate would have it, he was, by mistake, put in the Continental Kitchen—one of the biggest mistakes of his life. For someone who called himself a chef, he failed to make a decent omelette. “My Chef asked me to make an omelette. I thought that he was asking me to make a Japanese omelette, so I began hunting for a square pan (yes, the Japanese like their omelettes square). The Chef, however, was not amused. He asked me to make a ‘regular round one’,” he remembers with a chuckle. Aggarwal started making the regular round one. In India, when you make an Indian masala omelette we put dollops of fat in it to fry it till golden brown. In the Continental Kitchen that is short of a disaster. Aggarwal’s masala omelette was hurled straight back at him. The Chef kicked him out. But Aggarwal was not ready to give up. He went back and grovelled till he was allowed back to learn the art of the perfect omelette. In the following week, all he made were omelettes—30 of them in six days. It took all of the 30 omelletes to convince the Chef de Cuisine that Aggarwal could cook. His Chef may have finally known but Aggarwal’s parents still remained in the dark about their son’s intentions. One Diwali night found Aggarwal’s relatives asking him to cook dinner—since he was studying hotel management. Till that time Aggarwal had not revealed his plan of becoming a chef to his parents. Nevertheless, he cooked the meal which comprised of paneer makhani, Gujarati kadhi, bhindi masala and rice. Aggarwal says that his father figured out his intentions by simply looking at the meticulously prepared meal. The decision worried him, nonetheless, he gave Aggarwal two years’s time to make a success of it. If he could build a respectable career in these two years he could go on. Today, 12 years later, Chef Aggarwal is the Sous Chef of Megu, The Leela Hotels. He has worked in some of the best kitchens of the country including a Michelin Star restaurant. He has worked with some of the best Chefs of the world, some of who gifted him kitchen knives. He modestly tells us that he loves his knives a lot and carries them around everywhere. He says he is a bit fussy about them (in reality, he absolutely hates it if you touch them). But then, why won’t he? Those finely chopped vegetables and the perfectly shaped fishes we love so much are a by-product of those knives.