Biting Off More Than I Can Chew

A Maverick Chef Remembers

Up and down and round and about. That’s been Rahul Akerkar’s story as a chef-restaurateur: full of flavours but sometimes with something going off, not in the kitchen though!! Undeterred, Rahul has pushed on with a sabbatical now and then, but eventually here to stay

Text: Farzana Contractor

Bombay will forever be indebted to Rahul Akerkar for giving it Indigo in 1999. The restaurant was revolutionary for its time. That’s where we headed most weekends. Fine-dining outside of a 5-star hotel was quite unheard of. Indigo offered just that. European, American, international – call it what you will – but Bombay loved the food Rahul was dishing out. From this quaint old bungalow, just off the main Colaba Causeway, with period furniture, a little waterbody with marigolds floating in it. A narrow al fresco courtyard and a terrace on top. It was magical.

He was a man who was driven. Passionate, even eccentric, a maverick – that's what everyone thought of him. He couldn’t care less and did what he wanted to, with great flair and pomp. Which is to cook and serve his guests and take the accolades in stride, lightly.

Soon after Indigo opened, Busybee who really liked the place, passed away. But just before he did, he prophesied that the two guys to watch out for, who would change the culinary landscape of Bombay, were; Rahul Akerkar and AD Singh. They both proved him right.

Strangely 10 years before Indigo, when Rahul had returned from America where he had gone to study, he and AD had a delectable tryst; together they launched Just Desserts, which had caught everyone’s imagination. People loved it. The late Vinod Mehta, who was the editor of Sunday Observer, used to rave about it. Today, when you think back, it was just a simple eatery on the corner across Bombay House, the Tata headquarters. Nothing fancy, but with great vibes. How times have changed now.

So, you will get to read all of this and more, much more, in Rahul’s book, a biography where he recounts the many stories that make up his life, culinary and otherwise. About the early years when he was “able to test-kitchen the Indian palate.” Like he says, “My niche then, as now, was Western cuisine and ‘true to taste’, which means Italian without Indian spices, French without Indian spices and American without Indian spices… I think you get the picture. I wanted to let true flavours and authentic origins of that particular cuisine stand out.”

Going down memory lane, being honest is not easy. But Rahul does it. He is actually unapologetically honest; he has always been so. Therefore, he addresses it all; the good, the bad, the ugly. What went wrong in his life, why Indigo shut down, how Qualia happened, how that shut down. The mistakes he made, the trust which was broken, the price he has paid. All of it, with names changed so as not to “burn bridges.”

I always knew Rahul was naïve. Not a canny businessman. His success story would have been different had he been so.

I sure am glad Rahul abandoned his PhD in Biochemical Engineering and instead turned to working in restaurants in New York, doing odd jobs and discovering he loved to cook! His trailblazing restaurant, Indigo, went on to be recognised as one of the top restaurants in the world. Paving the way for others, including Indigo Delicatessens, Neel, Qualia.

Fans of Rahul will love reading Biting Off More Than I Can Chew. It’s another matter that I think, he did not. He delivered. And he continues to do so under the Aditya Birla banner; we now have Ode at Worli, and Waarsa and Flint at NCPA, Nariman Point.