Gaggan Anand Biography

Gaggan Anand is an Indian Chef, owner and Executive chef of the progressive Indian restaurant named Gaggan in Bangkok, Thailand. He started his cooking career after finishing his catering course in Trivandrum, he joined as a trainee in Taj Groups. Before He played drums in various rock bands before embarking on a culinary career. He studied at the Indian Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology.

Gaggan Anand Age

Gaggan Anand was born on February 21, 1978 in Kolkata, India. He is 39 years old as of 2019.

Gaggan Anand Net worth

Gaggan Anand net worth is under review.

Gaggan Anand Family

Gaggan Anand was born to Punjabi parents. HYe was born and raised in  Kolkata, India.

Gaggan Anand Wife

Gaggan Anand is married to Pui Anand. The couples were blessed with a daughter Tara Anand.

Gaggan Anand Education

Gaggan Anand attended a catering college (IHMCT Kovalam) (Indian Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology) in Trivandrum and after receiving a diploma he began working as a trainee with the Taj Group. Anand later left the Taj Group to pursue a career catering in Kolkata and ran a home delivery service from Tollygunge area. He later moved to Bangkok, where he began working at Red, a restaurant that specialized in contemporary Indian cuisine.

Gaggan Anand Chef

He initially started his career as a trainee in Taj Groups. Later, he quit the job in Taj and later went to Bangkok where he started working in a restaurant named Red, that specialized in Indian cuisine. From there he served as the first Indian Chef to intern with Ferran Adria’s research team at elBulli and has to work at many other restaurants. However, he was not satisfied and frustrated because the businesses ‘just didn’t want anything different’. So, he started his own restaurant, ‘Gaggan’.

He opened the restaurant in the year 2010 and from that time it has been selected as one of the ‘World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ by Restaurant magazine. In 2014, it was rated 17th globally and in 2015 & 2016 the restaurant was named the best restaurant in Thailand. The restaurant was placed 10th in 2015 and 23rd in 2016, in the Restaurant magazine. Further, Anand has also planned to start a restaurant in Fukudo, Japan, that has a seating capacity of only 10 and opens only on weekends.

He has also cooked for former US President Bill Clinton and Abdul Kalam Azad, the former President of India, at the age of just 22. After his internship at the famed El Bulli under, he moved to Thailand where he opened restaurant Gaggan in Bangkok. Gaggan has won accolades and rave reviews on both a local and international level. Dubbed by TIME magazine asthe “Captain Kirk of cuisine”, Chef Anand has spoken at BCN Vanguardia, the prestigious International Gastronomy Conference in Barcelona, sharing the stage with some of the world’s top chefs.

He has workshops at Thailand Creative & Design Center’s annual symposium “Creativities Unfold, Bangkok 2012: Design is Opportunities: Innovation, Strategy, Business”, where it was remarked that he is an “innovation and design guru who changed Indian food.” They are located in an 85-year-old whitewashed colonial-style wooden house in the heart of downtown Bangkok, restaurant Gaggan is an intimate space with marble-topped tables, cane furniture and black & white photos, where guests are treated to Chef Gaggan’s modernist re-interpretation of classic Indian cuisine.

He puts Indian food in the fine dining spotlight with his eponymous Bangkok restaurant. At Gaggan, Anand set out to redefine traditional Indian food with what he calls “progressive Indian cuisine,” an approach that gave rise to his signature charcoal prawn Amritsari and yogurt explosion and a 25-course emoji tasting menu.

And since its debut in 2010, Gaggan has won numerous accolades, contributing to Bangkok’s status as a world-class dining destination on par with London and New York. But in 2016 the Chef’s Table star made headlines with his decision to close Gaggan in 2020. It’s an unusual move for a restaurant that held the top spot on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list for three years running and is a safe bet to land a spot on the first Michelin Guide for Bangkok in December.

“I hate to be predictable, so I need to take this break,” Anand tells Eater. He doesn’t want to stop cooking. He plans to open a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2021 with Japanese chef Takeshi Fukuyama of La Maison de la Nature Goh, which he says “will be the future of fine dining.” And lately, more than a superstar chef, Anand is proving to be a savvy restaurant owner.

After investing in Meatlicious, an easygoing wood fire-centered bistro; Gaa, a European-Asian fusion restaurant; and Sühring, a modern German venue, in Bangkok, where he lives, the Indian-born chef is planning to open two new businesses next year: an organic wine and fried chicken bar and a tofu-omakase Japanese restaurant. “I’m becoming an investor in talent,” he says. Eater caught up with Anand during Semana Mesa SP, a food symposium in São Paulo where the chef was the guest star. He discussed the end of Eurocentric hegemony in fine dining, his Indian roots, and his plans to open new restaurants that “change the history of gastronomy.”

Gaggan Anand Restaurants

Gaggan Anand has repeatedly placed his Restaurant’s on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. In 2015, 2016 and 2017, the restaurant was named both the best restaurant in Thailand and Asia’s best restaurant on the list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants as reported by Restaurant magazine.

This was an increase from the third spot overall in Asia in 2014. The restaurant placed 10th, 23rd and 7th overall in the world in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2015, 2016 and 2017, respectively, and remained the only Indian restaurant to ever rank in the top 50. His plans are to close to Gaggan in 2020, he started a 10 seat restaurant that opens only on weekends in Fukuoka, Japan.

He also has investments in other restaurants in Bangkok. He opened a steakhouse named Meatlicious and partnered with Thomas and Mathias Sühring to open Sühring, a modern German restaurant that placed 13th in Asia’s Best Restaurants as reported by Restaurant magazine.

Gaggan Anand Recipes

Gaggan Anand Cookbook

Today, the dish that Gaggan spends most of his time on is called “Lick It Up”. He wants the diners to lift up their plates and lick the pea and mushroom mash clean, “as we did as kids”. When the dish appears, it looks like baby food: a green and brown streak of mash atop which is the phrase in red: “lick it up”.

“If anyone uses their fingers, tell them to stop and simply lick the plate,” Anand instructs the waitstaff. The timing also has to be perfect. Gaggan will play a song by the American rock band, Kiss. Just when the chorus begins “Lick It Up”—the plates will be set down in front of the diners, who will presumably follow the song’s instruction.

Later, at the table, I witness this synchronized service in action. It is the fourth course in a 19-course menu. The first three courses have been stunning. My favorite so far is a yogurt spherification, popularized by Adrià at elBulli, where Anand staged (unpaid cooking internship) early in his career. Spherification is a favorite trick of molecular gastronomists: a pinch of sodium alginate powder followed by a dunk into cold calcium chloride solution causes food to freeze like an egg yolk inside the white. Gaggan’s yogurt ball wobbles as we pop one in the mouth and then explodes like a gol gappa, except that this version is more subtle, inventive and playful.

As the 40 diners watch, Anand introduces the dish which he has named Yogurt Explosion. It is the dish that brought him great fame. “When I close Gaggan (the restaurant) I will serve this dish on the last day,” he tells them. Yogurt will be part of his “last supper”, which should warm the cockles of every south Indian who thinks curd rice ought to be the proper end to a meal—or a restaurant.

Anand has also been influenced by Japan’s culinary purity and minimalism. “Get rid of garam masala,” he says. “Don’t do ginger-garlic paste. Use ginger or garlic.” Brahmin vegetarian cuisine across all the south Indian states epitomizes all these tenets of simplicity. Anand loves Kerala thorans (vegetables lightly sautéed with grated coconut and green chilies), having studied at the Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology in the state. Indeed, simple south Indian dishes may be the next frontier for inventive chefs.

Indian cuisine may well be among the greatest cuisines in the world, but not the version that is served in our restaurants, where the ingredients are doused with sauce to the point where nothing stands out. Anand takes his inspiration from Kerala, where he trained, Bengal, where he grew up, and Japan, where his spirit belongs.

The making of a top chef 101

Anand has already figured out his signature style. But even the best in the business get bored. So then the question becomes: What is Gaggan Anand’s next avatar? That is the question on the minds of most as his multiple award-winning and highly feted Bangkok restaurant, Gaggan, will close in 2020. It will reopen as Raa, to be run by his head chef, Rydo Anton, with a different focus and a new menu. It will be his gift to his staff, says Anand. He will have no control over it.

Anand talks about this a lot. He almost seems to be looking forward to it. “In my 30s, I achieved this success with my restaurant in Bangkok,” he tells his guests. “In my 40s, I want to do something different.”

Every restaurant chef who makes it to the top 10 has some commonalities. Cheffing is brutal business—long hours in the kitchen, finicky diners and the possibility that any of the numerous variables can go awry—so hard work is a given. The consistency of delivery is necessary, but a plethora of assistant chefs and the expeditor—staff who stand in between kitchen and dining room to make sure that the orders are perfect and filled on time—can take care of that: the final wiping of every plate before the dish gets sent out.

An intuitive understanding of food and drink is a hallmark. Anand has this. “Bengalureans eat less salt than north Indians,” he tells the kitchen. “So reduce salt in all the dishes.” There are a few important ingredients that take a chef to the top of the restaurant world. First on the list might well be artistic integrity. Figuring out your cooking style, both in terms of technique and value system, and then sticking to it. Refining it, yes, but also cultivating a “voice” that is unmistakable.

All great chefs have a signature, whether it is the farm-to-table fanaticism of Dan Barber of New York’s Blue Hill Farm or the painstaking, yet simple-looking, layers cultivated by chefs like Daniel Humm of New York’s Eleven Madison Park, currently No.1 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurant list; or the clever wizardry of Heston Blumenthal or Grant Achatz. Anand falls in the last camp. His signature style mixes Indian cuisine with Japanese minimalism using modern food science techniques.

Anand is a Punjabi who grew up in Kolkata. Like every other Bengali, Anand loves culture. It is a word he uses often. His tastes are hardly Indian: he eats ramen noodles after his shift, likes natural wines (with no sulphites), admires Japanese cuisine, listens to rock music (Dream Theater, Foo Fighters, Pink Floyd, Guns N’ Roses), and hobnobs with patrons from around the world. At the end of the day, though, his connect to his homeland is visceral and rooted. Like many of us, he love-hates India—for where it could be relative to where it is. “India is one of the few countries that still retains an identity and culture,” he says. “It shows in our saris, our rangoli, our festivals and, of course, food.”

When I ask him the one dish he would eat for the rest of his life on a deserted island, he promptly says that it is the Bengali murighonto or a bowl of rice, potato/pumpkin and fish head preparation. He ticks off his favorite Indian foods—Amritsari chhole, Kerala fish fry “in a beach shack, with fresh toddy”, Rajasthani ghevar, chaats from Uttar Pradesh, and Mysore Pak from Sri Krishna Sweets, which began in Coimbatore and now has branches everywhere. He visits India every Diwali, typically Kolkata, where his mother lives.

As part of Taj’s four-city trip, Anand has taken his chefs to iconic restaurants in every city. Karim’s in Delhi (not great was the verdict), Swati Snacks in Mumbai (they loved it). In Bengaluru, the entire team raved about Karavalli at The Gateway hotel by Taj, which served, according to Anand, some of the best food he has eaten. “That raw-mango salad and ghee-roast prawns were amazing. That last dish he (chef Naren Thimmaiah of Karavalli) served with a leaf-wrap is going to influence my dishes.” The dish is called Meen Eleittad. It is fresh black pomfret with Malabar spices wrapped in a banana leaf.

Knowledge—both wide and deep—is necessary but not essential. Anand has a quick mind, a great memory for names and faces, and collects food trivia almost in spite of himself: “India and Brazil are the only two countries that grow Robusta coffee beans and Arabica. All other countries only have one or the other.” Later in the evening, he waxes eloquent about green tea: “I have spent 75 hours studying tea. Please don’t kill green tea leaves by pouring boiling water. The finest teas only need water that is 55 degrees for the leaves to curl perfectly.”

Perfectionism is another thing that he aims for. Like any professional or athlete at the top of his game, Anand is finicky when he wants to be. When he learns that The Taj West End serves Perrier sparkling water, he winces. “Can you please inform all our pop-ups that our official water is San Pellegrino?” he tells his publicist, Meenakshi Kumar, an erstwhile lawyer who trained in culinary school. While explaining his take on idlis, in which the batter takes on a soufflé—like lightness topped with a chutney foam, Anand stops mid-sentence and says, “Change that plate please.” He may project a casual, relaxed vibe but his eyes record everything.

Adaptability is an important thing for chefs. Either they evolve and change course or die. For any business to thrive, its founders have to look to the future and change course. Chefs typically take one of the two paths. Once they have paid their dues inside the kitchen, they become businessmen like Mario Batali, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Nobu Matsuhisa or Wolfgang Puck, opening more and more restaurants across the world.The second path is to go inward and be super-exclusive like Adrià, Jiro Ono or Magnus Nilsson, who take purity and integrity to heart. Both paths are rife with danger and the prospect of curveballs. Noma, once the world’s best restaurant, is now closed (since 2016) with the future opening in Copenhagen uncertain.

Restaurant magnate or minimalist?

The trick for Anand is to decide his path: as a restaurant magnate or minimalist? For now, he seems to be doing the former while purporting to want the latter. After closing Gaggan, he plans to open a 10-seater restaurant, GohGan, in Fukuoka, Japan. He is most excited about this collaboration with Japanese chef Takeshi “Goh” Fukuyama, whose much-awarded restaurant in Fukuoka, La Maison de la Nature Goh, is one he admires. Together, they plan to start an ultra-exclusive restaurant that will open only on weekends every alternate month.

Anand also plans to open a tofu fine-dining restaurant in Bangkok. “I am supposed to do the impossible, right? Nobody in Asia has done something like this. I will kill the market.” And whet the appetites of vegetarians like me. The format is still fluid and the opening date is far away: 2021 to be precise.

Currently, though, he has invested in at least five restaurant ventures, including Sühring, Gaa, Meatlicious, and Wet. He opened the steak restaurant Meatlicious (also in Bangkok) with his Thai wife, Pui. He plans to open a wine bar, Wet, hopefully, next year near his restaurant Gaggan, with his sommelier Vladimir Kojic, who prefers natural wines. They plan to import 35,000 bottles. When I ask Kojic what it is like to work for Anand, he says, “Things will be normal and then suddenly it will be chaos.” Predictably, chaos erupts during a lunchtime conversation when a staff member threatens to quit. “See, I told you,” says Kojic, who has seen this narrative before.

Anand’s partnership with chef Garima Arora, previously with Noma and later sous chef at Gaggan, has seen many curveballs. First, her restaurant Gaa was to open in Mumbai, then it opened in Bangkok earlier this year. It serves Indian-inspired organic international cuisine and is already getting accolades. Anand has also partnered with the Sühring twin brothers (Mathias and Thomas) and their restaurant, Sühring, is already on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

He detests chefs who are “dishonest” with their food, by which he means chefs who are confused about what they want to cook and serve. “Spanish people eat octopus soft in a Romesco sauce. Japanese eat it hard in a takoyaki or sashimi. One needs to figure out how you want to serve your octopus,” he says.

I meet Anand at The Taj West End at 11am. It is later that evening that he will preside over a 19-course meal at Masala Klub, but I am to spend the day with him. My plan is to take him to Russell Market for the photo shoot. That doesn’t go as planned. He walks out of the fish section because they are selling sharks. “I stand for sustainability and look at these guys, selling sharks,” he says.

Later, over lunch at the West End’s coffee shop, Mynt, Anand tells his team to taste the vegetarian appam-stew that is brought in. Anand hates buffets: “They remind me of the kind of cooking I used to do (in the early days of his career) and are a great way to recycle leftovers, so why would you eat at buffets?”

Francesca Ferreyros, his Peruvian chef, tells me how they brainstorm for new ideas. Many of their dishes are now inspired by the pop-ups they do around the world, she says. Each month, four teams have to create two dishes and bring it to Anand for testing and approval, she says. Sometimes, Anand lays out the contours of a dish. The vegetarian stew that is poured over the appam is brought in. It has cubed carrots and beans floating in coconut milk. “How about if we make granules that are the color of these carrots and beans and pour fresh coconut milk on the table?” says Anand. And so a dish’s journey to Gaggan restaurant begins.

At lunch, the finger bowls finally arrive after a slew of à la carte dishes. “Guys, this is a thin lime soup,” says Anand. “You dip your finger in to give flavor.” He bursts out laughing and then turns serious. “We should do a soup like that. Where people can put their fingers in.” Team Gaggan travels with some 200kg of excess baggage everywhere, says Kumar, the publicist. On this visit, they worked with the Taj’s own chefs to create dining experiences that were sold out, in half an hour of being announced on email to the Taj InnerCircle members. For Anand, this is a victory lap in his homeland before he moves, perhaps permanently, or as permanently as a peripatetic chef can be, to Japan.

Each Taj dinner begins with a flower and lamp ceremony. The menu cards look pretty with Anand’s signature emojis in lieu of words. There are 19 courses with many triumphant dishes and a few failures. Lick It Up, for instance, is a great concept, but for a diner to lick a plate in the company is humiliating—in my view. Indians lick their fingers and hands anyway, as anyone who has tried to stop a running rasam on a banana-leaf plate knows. Anand could have fostered the sensation of eating with the hands and licking the food without subjecting his guests to this.

Overall, though, the food is brilliant. A dazzling, painstakingly prepared eggplant cookie: puréed eggplant (like a bharta) squeezed into a mould in the shape of a cookie with an onion chutney jam in between. It takes “four days to make and 4 seconds to eat,” says Anand. A “charcoal” that looks like burnt wood but is made with edible bamboo, is delicious, with hints of Amritsari onion and chilli. A surprising combination of green tea with melons and tomatoes.

How do you rate food? Taste, of course, but also whether it is memorable. By that standard, Anand succeeds. The memory of his dishes last long after the evening. As he shuts shop, Anand wants to leave behind another kind of memory. “Here is the scoop,” he says. On the last day of Gaggan the restaurant’s existence, Anand plans to upload all his Gaggan recipes as a free, sumptuous e-book that can be downloaded by anyone.

“It will be my gift to my country and my chef community,” he says. “I may not be able to stop poverty or make India less hungry but at least I can gift my recipes to aspiring Indian chefs.” Great entrepreneurs, they say, are characterized by unrealistic ambition bordering on hubris. Is Anand a visionary or is he delusional? Is there a difference?

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@beardfoundation where Our American tour started midway we cooked at @chinalivesf and @troismecla where it ends see guys tomorrow for the last dinner #gaggan #troisecla #jamesbeardhouse #worlds50best

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Gaggan Anand Interview

Why Gaggan Anand Is Closing His World-Renowned Bangkok Restaurant

When did you realize that you had achieved international fame?

Gaggan Anand: I would say I realized that when I officially opened Gaggan. When the first dish went out, it had charisma and charm to pull people in. We have never had a bad day, and that’s the best thing ever. Restaurants have ups and downs, and in seven and half years we are just going up and up, which is a blessing but sometimes scary as well. It’s just like a video game: You have to go to the next level and the next one. You get addicted to it, but you always have to play better. So you constantly evolve, and that is what Gaggan is all about.

The idea [for Gaggan] came from a dream, and I’m living this dream today. I’m traveling the world to the best cities, in the best airlines, in the best seats to stay in the best hotels. It’s incredible, the attention that I get, and I love it all, but then I realize that in the end, if I don’t go back and cook better, this won’t be worth it. And this is the Gaggan I’m trying to be.

Why was Thailand the best place to open a progressive Indian restaurant?

Gaggan Anand: It was destiny. I had lived in Bangkok for two and a half years by that time, and the city is the best of East and West. Despite the crazy traffic, you have good infrastructure, hospitals, airports, schools, and, obviously, good food. In Thailand, food starts at one dollar — and really good food at that — and the cuisine is very similar to Indian: the chiles, spices, and the ingredients.

Thai food came from Indian Hindu and Buddhist cuisines. Imagine if I were trying to do that in Nordic countries, in Canada, South Africa. I would really have a struggle to find ingredients, but in Bangkok I have all I need within five meters. And Bangkok is also one of the Asian cities with the lowest cost, and this made my risk more doable. I can serve a 20-plus course menu, with seafood, uni, toro, and other expensive ingredients for $6 USD a course, which would be impossible in many cities.

How has your Indian heritage influenced your rise in fine dining?

 Gaggan Anand: As an Indian, I always had this dream. Indian cuisine has given pepper and sugar to the entire world. Ingredients that are now present in every kitchen in the world came from India, and isn’t it about time that an Indian chef be presented in that top bar?

In the last 20 years we had a big shift and in the last 10 this shift was even bigger. Fine cuisine was in Europe, New York, London. Now, people are opening their minds to other cuisines, not only chefs and foodies, but regular people who love to eat. Now, one can compare a top-class restaurant in Paris to a top-class meal in every part of the world. You don’t have to go to a specific city to eat in a fine dining restaurant.

Actually, the fine dining definition has changed a lot. In the last 20 years, when you went to a fine dining restaurant, there were tablecloths, and those things. Fine dining restaurants looked like bistros and bistros looked like fine dining restaurants. Today, it is a complete turnaround. Chefs today look like rock ’n’ roll artists, wearing slippers, not shaven, with lots of tattoos. Today, people love it when a chef refuses his prizes and says “fuck it.” The concept of luxury has changed. This is very game-changing, and I’m glad to add some new colors to that.

At Gaggan, you use street food to inspire new dishes. Why is this approach important to today’s food scene?

 Gaggan Anand: I am going to cook in [Massimo Bottura’s] Gastromotiva Refettorio in Rio for those in need, and I googled Brazilian comfort food. I have to cook something they can really recognize. That’s the point: Indian cuisine for me is recognition, a way to bring back my memories, from my life in India and all the street food I have tasted. So if an Indian street food vendor comes to my restaurant, he will recognize the roots of Indian cuisine to then discover something that can be hidden behind it.

At Gaggan, you have always looked for a more playful, whimsical touch, in dishes like your lemon cheesecake ice cream in the shape of Minions and an emoji menu. Why do you think food has to be fun?

 Gaggan Anand: I believe in fantasy, in seduction. Food is seduction. A good dish has to seduce you to focus only on that, forgetting about the music that is playing, the people around you… even if only for a few seconds. But now, the problem is that 50 percent of the people who are coming to my restaurant are going there to judge me and to judge my food. They compare: I ate at Narisawa, I ate at Noma, I ate at Heston [Blumenthal’s restaurant]. There are people who go to Gaggan only to check a list, and I don’t want to be compared.

It is an insult to me and to other chefs, so I realized that I had to be far from this trap that this prize and competition culture has established in gastronomy and create an experience that couldn’t be compared to any other. That’s why I started the emoji menu, [started serving] dishes you eat with your hands, and [created] a faster way to serve a 25-course menu. I have to [impress] that 30-year-old foodie guy who traveled the world with his thousand-dollar camera when he comes to my restaurant by serving him random and challenging food. I want to make him think “why” and “how,” “why” and “how” all the time.

You have opened more casual restaurants in Bangkok recently. Why did you decide to go in this direction?

 Gaggan Anand: I have always believed that Gaggan is one restaurant and it will always be one restaurant. It can’t even move a hundred meters from where it is, otherwise it may fail. So as a chef, I also became a restaurant owner and investor, and also a guy famous in Bangkok for bringing something new to the country. So I take advantage of this to bet on some new concepts, such as a steakhouse with wood fire, something very uncommon [in Bangkok], or a German restaurant run by two very talented twin chefs [Thomas and Mathias Sühring, Anand’s partners]. I’m opening an organic wine and fried chicken bar next year, which will be called Wet. And also a Japanese restaurant, Minara Tofuten, a tofu-omakase. In two years Gaggan is closing, so as a restaurant owner and a businessman, I need to survive. The horse needs its grass.

Why did you decide to close Gaggan by 2020? And what do you plan to do after?

 Gaggan Anand: I made up my mind when I opened Gaggan in 2010. Because every restaurant has a 10-year life span nowadays, otherwise it becomes very predictable and I hate to be predictable. I didn’t think Gaggan could last for so long, and I am really glad it did. My next restaurant will be a venue where Japanese chef Takeshi Fukuyama and I will be cooking together, which is something that has never happened in the world, changing the history of gastronomy.

GohGan will open in 2021. We meet every four months and most of our innovations come from this collaboration, and because of this I asked him last year to open a restaurant together. We have met to cook many times and every time we get better, because we have affinity and freedom to work with each other.

We plan to open only six months of the year with 10 seats per day. It’s very limited, exclusive even, because it will be in Fukuoka, not in Tokyo. I think this [restaurant model] could be the future of fine dining. My idea is for a place where the personality of a chef is 100 percent present in his food. It’s like a concept more than a meal.

And besides Fukuoka, is there another city outside of Thailand you’d like to open in?

 Gaggan Anand: I would love [to open in] London, because London loves Indian food. And I would love the challenge to change Londoners’ idea of what Indian food really is. They say: “I love my curry, I love my chicken masala,” but I would show them how chicken masala is a British recipe, not an Indian one, and prepare many Indian dishes for them.