It is just before the lunchtime rush in New Delhi’s Café Diva, a restaurant serving Italian-influenced contemporary fare, and owner Ritu Dalmia is in the kitchen to check up on her young Indian cooks and their output.
With cropped hair, thick spectacles and a waist-length chef’s jacket, Ms Dalmia is a formidable presence as she delivers rapid-fire instructions and critiques in Hindi to the young men she affectionately addresses as “children”. A self-taught chef, she declares: “This sauce is too thick. The taste is good but the consistency should be thinner.” The young man cooking a plate of spaghetti with fresh tomato is told firmly to “put the basil first”.
Supervising unschooled Indian cooks who do not have an intuitive understanding of the Italian food they are preparing is one of the biggest challenges for Ms Dalmia, culinary driving force of five successful Italian restaurants in the Indian capital. “They are terrorised by me,” she admits. “I have trained them, but where will I give them the palate?”