By the time you read this, Gaggan Anand may have opened Raga on Delhi’s iconic Janpath for previews. So, the media will get to try the food and you will hear more about it in the days ahead.
And despite all the accolades Gaggan has won over the last decade and a half (Asia’s best chef for a record five times, etc), he has always felt incomplete without a restaurant in Mumbai or Delhi. It is no exaggeration to say that Raga is the most awaited restaurant opening of the last several years. I went for a pre-opening tasting and, jaded cynic that I can sometimes be, I was unable to resist being blown away. It is well on its way to becoming the best restaurant in India. Not that he hasn’t tried. Garima Arora was set to run the restaurant, and to prepare, she worked for several months at Gaggan in Bangkok. At the last moment, the deal collapsed. And though Gaggan had other offers during that period (including a restaurant at Atlantis in Dubai), he turned them down and kept looking for a restaurant in India. To Gaggan’s surprise, Kalra agreed to everything. Eventually, Kalra prevailed and Gaggan saw his point: If you are calling it a homecoming, then don’t price it so high that your friends and relatives can’t come to your home. I have eaten Gaggan’s food so often that I wondered if he would be able to surprise me, given that all his greatest hits would be on the menu. I needn’t have worried. Rather in the manner of a great rock band, which keeps tweaking and rearranging its hits when it plays them live, Gaggan and Rydo have made the classics seem fresh and exciting. This is the best version of the Yoghurt Explosion yet. The much-imitated Gaggan creation of golgappa pani in a sweet sphere is reinvented. Finally, Delhi, which has lagged behind Mumbai, so much may have the distinction of being the location of the best restaurant in India.
In 2016, he signed up to open a restaurant in Mumbai. He only disagreed with Gaggan about how much to charge. Kalra wanted to cap the set menu at around ₹ 11,000. Gaggan, who had charged ₹ 50,000 at his Hyatt residency thought this was too low.
Because serving food to his own people has long been Gaggan’s dream, raga is a homecoming for Gaggan, but it is also the culmination of several unsuccessful efforts by the chef to open a restaurant in India,. They had a name (Nuage, which means cloud in French, a play on Gaggan’s name), a location (Bandra) and a head chef.
