A Chronicles of a Chef story.
From Do It Again to You Do It: A young chef arrives in Bahrain on his first overseas assignment in this chef career story, fired up, excited, and completely convinced he was ready for anything the world could throw at him.
Not bad for someone whose only overseas experience up to that point was on-the-job training across four beach hotels in Mombasa, Kenya, though to be fair, Mombasa had spoiled me rotten with its warm ocean breeze and no shortage of helping hands.
I started work at a good, upmarket 300-room hotel that was busy enough to make it clear, very quickly, that the extra manpower I’d grown used to in Indian hotels was a thing of the past. Here, the buck stopped with you, completely and without negotiation. If you were assigned a job, you finished it. No senior, no assistant, no helper coming to bail you out. Just you, your knife, and whatever courage you could scrape together.
One week into the new job, I was flat out managing the lunch buffet with one hand while fielding a flood of à la carte orders with the other, because the entire Air India crew had apparently decided to wake up and order breakfast at the same time. My immediate boss walked up, handed me a clipboard with a function sheet, and told me, as casually as if he were asking me to pass the salt, that there was an Indian function in two days. Full Indian menu. Sixty guests. And since I was Indian, it would surely be a piece of cake.
A piece of cake. Sure.
I scrolled down the menu. The dishes were all familiar, I’d eaten most of them plenty of times. Butter Chicken. Dal Makhani. The works. What my boss had conveniently overlooked was that my entire career had been spent in continental kitchens, specializing in French cuisine, in some of the finest French restaurants in India. I could pull a perfect beurre blanc out of thin air, but this menu was completely unfamiliar territory.
The first feeling was plain panic.
That panic, and what I did with it, is at the heart of Chronicles of a Chef Episode 1: ROOTS. Watch it now on YouTube.
I finished my pending work on autopilot, then slowly pulled myself together and switched from panic mode to problem-solving mode.
Now, here’s the thing about 1992 that the younger generation simply cannot appreciate: there was no internet. No Google. No YouTube tutorial with a cheerful chef walking you through a recipe in twelve minutes. No AI to tell you the seventeen different ways to make a proper korma. There was nothing. Just books, brains, and determination.
I needed cookbooks, and I needed them fast.
After my shift, I left the hotel, flagged down a taxi, and headed straight to Manama, the commercial heart of Bahrain, on what felt like a rescue mission for the menu. I found a couple of bookstores. Most of the Indian cookbooks were written for home cooks, which was nice but not going to help with a sixty-cover function. Then I found it: a cookbook with an entire section of recipes written by actual hotel chefs. I looked up at the sky and thanked the universe. Almost every dish on that menu was right there in those pages.
I rushed back to my accommodation and spent most of the night hunched over pieces of paper, copying down every recipe by hand. By the next morning, my pockets looked like a student smuggling notes into an exam, papers stuffed everywhere.
Back at the hotel, I got my daily work sorted, quietly planned my attack, and the moment I had a window, sat down and put together the full market list for the function: ingredients, spices, everything. I handed it to my chef with one request: these need to arrive today. By 4pm, I was standing at the receiving bay, inspecting vegetables and spices like my reputation depended on every single item in that delivery, because it did. The meat and chicken, which I’d had the sense to ask the butcher to defrost that morning, were already laid out neatly in the butchery chiller.
Looking at it all laid out in front of me, something shifted. This is doable.
That shift is the moment ROOTS was built around. Watch the full episode on YouTube to see how it unfolds.
I got to work: cutting, chopping, building the basic gravies and sauces, cooling them down, packing them into stainless steel containers and lining them up on one dedicated rack in the walk-in chiller. The spices were decanted, labeled, and arranged on the shelf beside the cooking range. By ten that evening, after close to fifteen hours on my feet, the mise en place was done, the prep was done, and I walked back to my accommodation with a quiet smile and tired legs.
First, the daily work, get that done and out of the way. By three in the afternoon, I turned to face the function. And yes, the panic tried to creep back in, because this was a paid guest event and failure simply wasn’t an option. So I did what any chef alone in a kitchen does. I talked to myself.
You know how to cook. You have worked in great hotels. You have tasted some of the finest Indian food in India. These recipes were written by professional chefs. YOU CAN DO IT.
And slowly, surely, dish by dish, it began to happen.
The real surprise: I started adding my own touches. French techniques, quietly sneaking into an Indian kitchen. Instead of just dropping cream and butter into the Butter Chicken and Dal Makhani, I was emulsifying the butter in slowly, the way I would in a French sauce, a small trick that made the texture silkier and richer. The garnishes weren’t just scattered on top, they were placed with some thought, bringing a bit of à la carte plating sense to a buffet spread. It was, frankly, a little beautiful.
I pulled the Banquet Manager aside and asked him to bring the host over to see the buffet before the guests came in because you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. I wanted the dishes to be seen before a single spoon was lifted.
The host sent back a handwritten letter saying how much every guest had enjoyed the meal. He wrote that while each dish stayed true to its roots and flavor, there was something different about them, something extra. He just didn’t know it was the French in the Indian chef that had made the difference.
This was, without question, one of the biggest milestones of my career so far, bigger even than the Do It Again moment I’d carried with me from my time at the Oberoi Towers in Mumbai. Because that day in Bahrain, nobody told me to do it again.
This time, it was you do it.
And I did.
This is the story Chronicles of a Chef Episode 1: ROOTS was made to tell.
Read Volume 1b of The SHIVRA Series: Do It Again, Chef. The Lesson That Built a Career, the moment before ROOTS that started it all.
