Being dyslexic meant chef Niyati Rao had a tough few days at school. “I wasn’t good at core subjects like maths and science. I was bullied a lot,” she says.
The bright spots in his day were quiet times in the family kitchen, watching his mother and grandmother cook. She soon learned that food can make people happy. It was the ability to feel like a superpower, “and I wanted that superpower.”
Fast-forward a few years and, at the age of 28, Rao is co-founder and head chef at Ekaa (Hindi for unique or peerless). It’s a cozy food-agnostic fine-dining restaurant in his home city of Mumbai, offering ingredient-first Indian fine-dining (khichdi with trout roe and kombucha gel; or Japanese-inspired grilled Bombay duck). Unusually, it encourages diners to ditch cutlery and use their hands.
Earlier this month, Ekaa came in at #93 in the expanded list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants (compiled by 50 Best, an initiative of media house William Reid). The extended list also includes Delhi’s Bukhara at #52, Mumbai’s Americano at #66 and The Table, Mumbai at #78. Meanwhile, Mask (Mumbai), Indian Accent (Delhi) and Avartana (ITC Grand Chola in Chennai) rounded out the top 50 at #16, #19 and #30 respectively.
Rao says she dreamed of making it to the list as a teenager, even before joining the Institute of Hotel Management (IHM) in Mumbai. “We’re a very young team here … that means we’re doing something right,” she adds.
Founded by Rao and 29-year-old Sagar Neve, a former colleague, the 14-month-old restaurant was born during lockdown. While establishing and nurturing, the two also fell in love and got married in January. At their inception, the dream was to create flavors and combinations that were new, distinctly Indian, and so delicious and inviting that they would live on forever.
“Decades ago, someone came up with the idea of frying small puris and filling them with spicy water. This is how we got Panipuri. I don’t want to give the world a new version of Panipuri but to create something that can be understood in a similar way perhaps a century from now,” says Rao.
One of these is Bombay Duck, Gore-Keri, Fish Floss, Cucumber, a Japanese delicacy called Hitsumabushi.
“That dish is grilled with a soy-based sauce. We don’t get the quality of eel here that this dish requires so we use bombil or Bombay duck, which has the most beautiful texture,” says Rao. “The fish is grilled over charcoal in a sauce whose base is gore keri, a sweet, spicy mango pickle made in Gujarat. It’s topped with mackerel fish floss and served on a bed of Northeast sticky rice cooked with ginger. On the side, spicy coriander pickled cucumber and mushroom broth. is.”
Why approach good food? Rao attributes her love for precision and high standards to her first stint in the restaurant business at the exclusive Zodiac Grill at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. “I was a 20-year-old management trainee who got the chance to play with ingredients like foie gras.” Then came a stint with Morimoto’s legendary Japanese restaurant Wasabi, also at the Taj. “At Wasabi, I realized that the world of food is big but the world of ingredients is limitless. And I learned how the quality of an ingredient can make a difference. I don’t think anyone gets better or fresher content [in the city] than Morimoto.”
She interned briefly at Denmark’s Noma, which has been named the world’s best restaurant several times, but had to rush due to the pandemic. “It was still very academic,” she says. “I saw the chefs there work magic with regular ingredients like pumpkin. They respect their content and therefore the world respects them.
The menu created by Rao and his team is a reflection of what he learned at these establishments, and the love and care that his mother Hetal Rao, a pharmacist, and his grandmother Suhasini Desai, a homemaker, put into everything they cook. , she says. “My mother makes prawn and bamboo curry. She travels to Dahanu, about three hours from the city, to buy fresh bamboo shoots during the monsoons. She serves it with krishna kamod rice, sole curry and fish fry,” says Rao.
She also mentions her family’s annual crab curry, made using a recipe passed down through the generations. and a trip to Japan with his late father that included a visit to the Tsukiji fish market. “My love for food definitely comes from my parents. When we traveled as a family, we were encouraged to try everything. When you do that, you start to respect and understand other cultures. That’s when the boundaries start to fade,” says Rao.
If Ekaa’s menu is unusual, so is its kitchen. “Guests can walk in and talk to us. At the FIFA World Cup final last year, we had a guest who wanted to be updated on the score because we were playing the game on our phones.”
It has come a long way from his first dish, Rao adds with a laugh: a bowl of Parle-G soaked in milk, which he presented to his father as a cake.