From Do It Again to You Do It. A young chef arrives in Bahrain on his first overseas assignment, all fired up, all excited, all completely convinced he was ready for whatever 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 amazing beach hotels in Mombasa, Kenya though let’s be honest, Mombasa had spoiled me rotten with its warm ocean breeze and abundance of helping hands.
I started work at a good, upmarket 300 room hotel that was perpetually buzzing busy in a way that made you realize very quickly that the luxury of surplus manpower I had grown up with in Indian hotels was firmly in the rearview mirror. Here, the buck stopped with you. Completely, entirely and without negotiation. If you were assigned a job, you finished it with no senior, no assistant, no helper coming to help. 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 barrage of à la carte orders with the other, because the entire Air India crew had apparently decided to wake up at the same time and order breakfast simultaneously. My immediate boss walked up, handed me a clipboard with a function sheet, and informed me matter-of-factly, as though he was asking me to pass the salt, that there was an Indian function in two days. Full blown 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 because I had eaten most of them on numerous occasions. Butter Chicken. Dal Makhani. The works. What my boss had conveniently overlooked was that my entire career had been spent in Continental kitchens, specialising in French cuisine, having worked in some of the finest French restaurants in India. I could coax a perfect beurre blanc out of thin air but this menu was uncharted territory.
The first feeling was pure, unfiltered 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 in a kind of numb autopilot, and then slowly I pulled myself together and switched gears 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 the recipe in twelve minutes. No AI to politely 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 flew out of the hotel, flagged down a taxi, and headed straight to Manama the commercial heart of Bahrain on what can only be described as a culinary rescue mission. I found a couple of bookstores. Most of the Indian cookbooks were for home cooks, and while lovely, they weren’t quite going to cut it for a sixty-cover function. And 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 single 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, carefully writing down every single recipe. By the time I was done, my pockets the next morning looked like a student carrying hidden notes into an examination hall, papers stuffed everywhere, each one a lifeline.
Back at the hotel, I sorted my daily work, quietly planned my attack, and the moment I had a window, I sat down and put together the full market list for the function ingredients, spices, everything. Handed it to my Chef with one firm request: these need to arrive today. By 4pm, I was standing at the receiving bay, inspecting vegetables and spices with the focus of a man whose reputation depended on every single item in that delivery because it did. The meat and chicken, which I’d had the foresight 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 neatly into stainless steel containers and filing them on one dedicated rack in the walk-in chiller. The spices were decanted, labelled, and arranged on the shelf beside the cooking range like soldiers ready for battle. 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 the satisfying ache of a day well spent.
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 simply dropping cream and butter into the Butter Chicken and Dal Makhani, I was emulsifying the butter slowly into the finished dish, a French instinct that transformed the texture into something silkier, richer, and deeply satisfying. The garnishes weren’t just scattered on top, they were arranged deliberately, almost artistically, bringing à la carte plating sensibility to buffet dishes. 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 were let loose on it because you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and I wanted these dishes to be feasted on with the eyes before a single spoon was lifted.
The host sent back a handwritten letter, a proper, old-fashioned handwritten letter expressing how much every single guest had enjoyed the meal. He noted that while each dish stayed true to its roots and flavour, there was something different about them, something extra, in the best possible way. He just didn’t know it was the French within the Indian chef that had made all the difference.
This was, without question, one of the biggest milestones of my culinary journey so far, eclipsing even the “Do It Again” moment I had treasured from my time at the Oberoi Towers in Mumbai. Because that day in Bahrain, it wasn’t someone telling me 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.
