Over two weeks in February, Chef Saransh Goila, the man revered for his Butter Chicken, will be in London, showcasing his cooking at the award-winning British restaurant Carousel in the UK’s capital. It is an honour alright for the TV chef, author, entrepreneur and restauranteur who had also been listed in Forbes 2019 celebrity 100 list. It is also an opportunity Goila doesn’t plan to squander away to make Indian cuisine more popular globally.
Goila Butter Chicken is going places, literally...
Well, Chef Ollie, who is one of the co-founders at Carousel, and I were introduced by the owners of Dishoom in London. We wanted to see if we could take Goila Butter Chicken for a small pop-up. I decided to take it up because we must always keep pushing the boundaries when it comes to your brand and representing Indian food globally.
To me, it is not just a Butter Chicken pop-up, it’s a lot more. We are representing all parts of India through our Indian food pop-up. We are doing six courses which will reflect diversity in India.
We have dishes from Assam, Gujarat, a Sindhi dish, and a Mangalorean dish on the menu which makes it a very eclectic mix of our interstate cuisines.
What I aim to achieve from this is to make people in the UK aware of Goila Butter Chicken and to take them through this Indian food journey. We also intend to open Goila Butter Chicken and an Indian restaurant in London after this pop-up.
In your opinion, how clued in to Indian cuisine is the West?
Indian cuisine in the West is fairly picking up. It could be one of the large trends in the coming years. I think their perspective of Indian food has always been curry and only restricted to Butter Chicken. It needs to evolve and change. I think they still think of Indian cuisine as a takeaway cuisine.
Therefore, the fine dining meal at Carousel is an attempt to change that. The taste that common people usually enjoy there is Butter Chicken, so the idea is to give them a refined version of the same which is Goila Butter Chicken.
It is to show them that Indian chefs are also progressing with time and are looking to reinvent the wheel and shape our Indian cuisine differently.
The idea is to show them a new light of Indian cuisine in the West. I have already tried a few restaurants there. Indian Accent in London is doing very well and has really broken the market in that sense where people have a new perspective of Indian food.
Are you making attempts to make regional cuisine more popular across India and the globe?
Sadak Chef is a hashtag that I run on Instagram. It is a property where I travel across India to look for local experts who cook dishes that are dying and are unknown or have specific arts of cooking that we are unaware of. I want to promote these artists, dishes and cuisines globally and in India. Sadak Chef is a true attempt to make sure that regional Indian cuisine does not vanish or die in this decade.
Meanwhile, the popularity of Butter Chicken, and of the Goila variety in particular, continues to surge.
The popularity of Butter Chicken continues because it is comfort food. No matter how we evolve and in which direction we go, a few dishes will always be more popular since they have universal acceptability. Few dishes become more popular because they are widely liked by more people. Seven out of 10 people might like Butter Chicken or vada pav or samosa. These dishes tend to travel across the country for the same reason as they adapt to each palette.
The success ratio of those dishes is very high. Therefore, yes, Butter Chicken is going to continue to be popular. For any of the dishes to keep their position in the market and keep trending year on year, one must innovate.
This is the reason why we invented Goila Butter Chicken, it was an idea to take the classic Butter Chicken and serve it in a new format as people got bored of eating the classic version. Yes, I would say Butter Chicken is one of the most popular food items across India though Khichdi I think, is the most popular one while Butter Chicken and Biryani would be at No.2.
