Fashion and food. What's common?
The jobs are the same. The people I deal with are the same. Both are service-created businesses. You need to create the ambience to sell fashion and food. I deal with colour and taste all the time, but in a different sense.
Doesn't designing take away your cooking time?
Not at all, I cook every day!
What all can you cook?
Ask what I cannot cook! I can do most cuisines, My regular menus have a little bit of Chinese,
some Thai, lots of French food, a variety of Goan dishes, different regional Indian foods. I travel a lot and am constantly being exposed to different and newer foods.
What's your favourite cuisine?
Gosh, I think its Mediterranean. I like light, sunny foods, the kind that I can eat in Goa as well.
Are you a better designer than a cook?
Hmmn, let's say people like to eat at my place. I always have well-planned menus and do all the cooking myself. I never, never order from out.
What's the maximum number of people you have cooked for?
About 85, that was a year or so ago, I cooked an all-vegetarian dinner for Sabina Chopra's birthday party. It was a mixed menu because I don't like to stay with one cuisine. You know, vegetarian tacos, hummus, tabbouleh, that kind of thing.
Any weaknesses? Sweets, alcohol?
Chocolates, I eat a lot! And champagne! But I also drink wine, vodka. Feni, not so much. Though in Goa, during the summer, I like to drink urak, that the first distillation of feni.
Which are your favourite restaurants?
The Alain Chapel in Lyons, the Alain Duccase in Paris, Frangipani and Indigo in Bombay, though I am also fond of bhelpuri on the road, those chutney sandwiches, and kulfi-falooda at Kailash Parbat in Bombay.
What went wrong with your restaurant Aubergine in Goa?
Nothing. My partners and I decided it should be the kind of place to eat fusion food, meet friends, it was to be a boutique for my clothes line, the only bar in Goa where you could get Cuban cigars. We meant it to be a fun place. But when we found it was not turning out to be that way, we decided to shut down and reopen it later properly.
Were you cooking at Aubergine?
No, but I had designed the menu and several of its most popular dishes were made from my recipes. My touch was in the ambience, the decor of Aubergine, the way the menu looked. And I decided the name. Aubergine, you see, is my favourite vegetable.
Few people know that fashion designer Wendell Rodricks started out as a Bombay catering college graduate and worked as a Food and Beverage controller at the Centaur Hotel.Few people know that fashion designer Wendell Rodricks started out as a Bombay catering college graduate and worked as a Food and Beverage controller at the Centaur Hotel. He then did a stint of cooking in Muscat before fashion designing caught his fancy. He is now a better designer than he is a cook. Though, he says, he cannot differentiate between fashion and food. "I dress women and I dress salads," Wendell says.
