It was tough to get a reservation at Gaggan, an inventive Indian restaurant in Bangkok. After the restaurant’s third straight win in the closely watched Asia’s 50 Best awards, the wait can easily stretch to four months. A four-person team has been hired just to manage the roughly 500 booking requests that come in every day.
But Chief Chef Gaggan Anand’s ordered it to shut down.
The plan to close his eponymous Gaggan in 2020 is highly unusual at a time when celebrity chefs are more likely to go the direction of Gordon Ramsay and Wolfgang Puck and try to spin their success into global food empires.
Anand believes in an expiration date. He compared himself to a Champagne bottle that, once opened, would eventually fizz out.
He’s taking a cue from his mentors at the award-winning El Bulli, which closed in 2011 when it was still immensely popular and charging $279 per meal. The Spanish restaurant had won the overall World’s 50 best title five times.
The ranking began as a publicity stunt and has grown into an event akin to the Oscars of the food world. Gaggan came in at No. 7 on this year’s global list.
Anand, 39, was born in Kolkata and cooked his first dish at age 7: a packet of instant noodles. He recalls crying in frustration because the finished product looked nothing like the artistically garnished photo on the packet.
His plating skills have vastly improved since then.
Anand interned at El Bulli in 2010 before opening his eponymous restaurant later that year in December.
It was at the Spanish restaurant that he learned to experiment with food. Anand spends the majority of his time in his research and development lab.
Diners are handed a 25-course tasting menu with zero words-just emoji. The menu is a way to transcend language barriers, he said. (Once all the courses have been served and the meal is complete. Diners get a menu with words to let them know what they’ve just consumed.) In true Indian fashion, 23 of the dishes are eaten by hand.
Even on nights when he’s not in the restaurant, Anand runs a tight ship. He trawls social media and sends screenshots of unsatisfactorily prepared dishes to his chefs with feedback and criticism.
“Whichever part of the world I’m in, I can actually see how my food is and whether people are liking it,” he said.
He’s certainly focusing on Asia. Up next, Anand wants to move to Japan and open several new restaurants.
With partner Takeshi Fukuyama of La Maison de La Nature Goh, Anand plans to open a tiny restaurant called ‘GohGan’ that will be open for just 20 days a month. He wants to keep prices down to 15,000 yen ($135) per person.
“I will get my daily bread from all the other restaurants,” he said. “Then, financially, I’m free.”
Coming full circle from the first dish he ever cooked, Anand still loves indulging in noodles, his favourite food. But you won’t find them on his menu. He isn’t confident about his own noodle-cooking skills just yet.
“It’s tough,” he said. “It’s not an easy job to challenge people who can cook amazing noodles.”
The one thing you’ll never see him eat or cook in his restaurant is Broccoli. He just hates how it tastes.
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