Patience And Dedication Are The Two Hallmarks Of HHI’s Chefs

HHI is a luxury hotel in Kolkata with a reputation for chefs doing more than the activity of cooking up sumptuous dishes because they (chefs) travel across India in reputed hotel management institutes for giving lectures on the different concepts of cooking.

Last year, the lead chefs of Kalash – HHI’s Kolkata’s multi-cuisine restaurant – travelled to HHI’s hotels in Varanasi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad and stayed for almost a month-and-a-half in each of the hotels. They spent this time period in undertaking lectures regarding the usage of modern flavors and ingredients to prepare age-old dishes. It is no surprise that their lectures featured a huge turnaround of hotel management students, HHI’s employees and even the general public; after all, they have been proving the mettle of their expertize every single day in cooking up signature dishes of Kalash – highly famous among the Kolkata public and seen as the best creations in their fields among all the hotels in Kolkata.

In these lectures, the chefs put forth their own learning curves and highlighted two factors required for every good chef:

• Patience

• Dedication  

Although, there are no conclusive surveys done as per the chemical process of cooking; the chefs stressed on the fact that cooking is a highly scientific process involving no dearth of chemical reactions in terms of simmering, boiling, wafting etc. and catalysts, for example spices and herbs.

According to the chefs, their endeavors were concentrated on bringing back the culinary atmosphere of the bygone days and the challenge that they faced was the absence of the actual ingredients needed for bringing back such an atmosphere.

Their recipes are closely guarded secrets and, therefore, can’t be given here as examples. A generic list, as they had cited, can indeed be given:

• The usage of herbs

• The usage of charcoal-enabled cooking

• The usage of hand-ground mixtures and pastes

• The usage of wooden tools

• The usage of cooking utensils made from burned mud

Cooking in this manner is no different than a trial-and-error process; therefore, patience and tenacity are highly required. An assiduous approach needs to be undertaken in a way such that every mistake made results in form of learning or another. Here lies the aspect of dedication, according to the chefs, because this element of learning has to be imbibed if one is to make progress in the goal of resurrecting the past.

Somewhat a gist; the earlier paragraph more or less sums up the crux of the learning given by these two illustrious chefs of one of the most phenomenal hotels in Kolkata.

Author’s Bio: HHI group of hotels is a hotel chain which runs hotels in the cities: Kolkata, Varanasi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar and Pune.