Wasabi is small (around 40 covers), hideously expensive and hard to get into on weekends (and often on weekdays too). Masaharu Morimoto is the most famous Japanese chef in Mumbai. His fame derives from the success of Wasabi, the Japanese restaurant he opened at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai two decades ago. It is still the restaurant that the city’s wealthy elite will go to for a celebration, and it remains Mumbai’s most exclusive restaurant.
It was believed – but never confirmed – that Japan airlines crew brought them into India in their baggage. I spoke to Morimoto at Wasabi last weekend. Would people like Japanese food? Would they pay such high prices? Would they find Indian chefs who understood Japanese food well enough to assist the two chefs Morimoto had sent over? There was no good Japanese restaurant in India for a while until Nikko, a company owned by Japan Airlines, began managing the Metropolitan Hotel in Delhi. Nikko opened an outstanding Japanese restaurant, Sakura, with a temperamental but excellent chef and served real Japanese food.
He was on one of his infrequent trips to the city (he has 27 restaurants around the world now) and we talked about how risky the Mumbai venture seemed when it opened.
Many of the ingredients it required (Kobe beef, for instance) were not available in India (this was before the anti-beef frenzy began) but Sakura procured them anyway.
Changes of government meant that ITDC went through many upheavals and lost most of its best people. It has had its ups and downs. I remember going there around a decade ago and being appalled by the drop in food quality and especially, service standards. I tweeted about it. The Taj management reacted foolishly and vindictively to the tweet, but the truth was that the whole hotel was going through a bad phase then. Fortunately, things have been back to normal for a while, and the current top team of Ritesh Sharma and chef Rohit Sangwan have restored the glory of the Taj and of Wasabi in particular. Talking to Morimoto, I was reminded that though Wasabi may have been the most influential Japanese restaurant in India it was not the first. All that changed with the Second World War, when Japan fought the Brits, and soon Japan began to be regarded as a faraway, strangely exotic land and its food became a mystery. In Delhi, for instance, restaurants sported such Japanese names as Ginza and Akasaka, but served food that was resolutely Indian-Chinese. The first totally authentic Japanese restaurant in India opened in the late 1980s at the Ashoka hotel in Delhi. From what I remember, it emerged out of Rajiv Gandhi’s desire to give Japanese businessmen a taste of home. In Japan, unlike India, sushi is served at specialised places, not at every restaurant. So Tokyo had no sushi on the menu and as Indian guests began frequenting it, they got used to real Japanese food. Sadly Tokyo did not survive those upheavals.
Because it was a prestige project, ITDC put its best restaurant manager in charge, and it soon became my favourite restaurant in Delhi.
