Bill Marchetti talks of love—for cooking, travelling, and the country he now calls home

In a dimly-lit corner of the otherwise bright room, sits a portly white man. He wears a rather mean beard, the kind which the gora Bollywood baddies, such as Bob Christo, are known to brandish. Had it not been for the Santa Claus belly that he sports, Bill Marchetti, the Head Chef of Spaghetti Kitchen, would have made a glorious villain, for his mannerisms, the way he talks, his hand gestures, and his expressive eyes, all have a theatrical quality to them. However, do not fall for the beard; there is not a single mean muscle in Marchetti, even if he insists that you believe otherwise. “I am scary person inside the kitchen. There I am Genghis Khan,” says Marchetti, and looks at another chef (Tejas) sitting right across the table. Breaking into laughter, Tejas declares that he is really scared of Marchetti when he’s in action. As if to make his point clearer, Marchetti narrates a story. A story, he has no memory of. It is a rather old tale of a time when he was still in Australia. It was one of those days when all the chefs of his restaurant had called in sick. Marchetti and his Head Chef were the two people managing the kitchen, and they were flooded with orders. There was a particular waiter who was giving Marchetti a hard time. The Chef, neck deep in work, was too busy to react then. “Every time, he came to the kitchen he would annoy me. He kept taking panga.” Finally, after taking care of the last order, Marchetti lost it. He picked up his chopping knife and ran after the waiter, chasing him throughout the dining area. “I have no memory of this incident. All I remember is waking up on the cold floor, with a splitting headache,” he reminisces. What had happened was that his Head Chef, afraid that Marchetti might end up hurting the waiter, bludgeoned the Chef with a frying pan, and knocked the air out of him. The impact was such that Marchetti’s mind wiped the memory of that particular incident off. “That, however, was the last time that I murdered anybody,” he adds with a wink. The almost-criminal record aside, Marchetti is a compassionate man. He believes in pushing his junior chefs beyond their boundaries, but in an encouraging manner. “You have to make sure that they feel encouraged. If they don’t feel like coming back to work the next day, then what is the point?” When Marchetti first entered the kitchen he was just 13. It was his mother who introduced him to the kitchen, and what he saw there, “an atmosphere of madness and chaos, where the mercury was boiling at 50 degrees”, made him fall in love. However, the decision to be in the hospitality industry was made a long time ago. “When I was eight years I used to read a lot of biographies of popular restaurateurs, that influenced me a lot and I wanted to become like them.” He moved to India 12 years ago, to run away from a broken marriage. “I was getting out of a nasty divorce, my second in six years, and at that time, Australia seemed smaller to me.” So when the ITC Maratha Sheraton’s GM offered him a job, he took it up. “I had offers from Japan and China and had I moved there I would have made more money, but I chose India, because the people here are warmer. In a matter of few years I made some very good friends,” he says. The good people of India, however, are but one reason for his stay. Marchetti’s “love affair” with India dates back to 1981, a time when he used to be a “spiritual” man. When asked why the word spiritual was put in quotes, he says that, “Everybody was spiritual in those days.” Whether or not you believe it, but Marchetti has made India his home, truly and completely. When asked what his comfort food is, he says it’s a “bowl of pasta”, pausing for a moment he adds, “It also is daal chawal, just depends on what mood you are in.” The conversation, though in English, is sprinkled with Hindi. Words like panga, shanti, jeera often make way into the chat. When asked how much Hindi he knows, his answer is: “all the bad words”, a thing common in most non-Hindi speaking Indians. If you find the Spaghetti Kitchen’s food exceptionally delicious, it is because Marchetti is growing all the vegetables in a farmhouse, and ensuring you eat just food and not pesticides. When he is not cooking, he is travelling. If cooking is his second nature, then travelling could come third. Marchetti has been to all major travel destinations in India, but he says that there is a lot more to discover, after all—“it is a freaking big country.” In this ’freakishly large’ country, he has found his home. “I think I am good here,” he says. “I will be staying here for the rest of my life.”