We are all voyeurs. Gossips, even. Most people call me the human avatar of Switzerland: politically correct (unless I’m getting a drink with Pankaj). Week on week, my industry’s bulbous rumour mills winks and elbows that neutral stance. Given how transient the industry is, it’s impossible to keep up with reactions. By the time you form a hot take, we’re on to the next hot situation. But, there have been 3 instances that suitably shook up the industry to be discussed time and again. Prateek Sadhu, made one such media boogie.
In 2022, Prateek announced his departure from Masque, which fed the rumour mills and WhatsApp chats for more media cycles than I have seen dedicated to food news. This was not just a chef leaving a restaurant. This was Prateek Sadhu leaving Masque, the restaurant he had helped build into one of India’s most consequential dining rooms, at precisely the moment when the world seemed to be noticing.
There were theories. There were theories about the theories. There were private conversations, public speculation and, naturally, very few actual answers.
I ask him to track back to his last week there.
“I remember the quiet more than the service. Everyone talks about the last service, but what stayed with me was walking through the kitchen after everyone had left. I was sitting in my usual corner thinking about day 1 and all these years of building Masque to what I had become,” he shares. “It was emotional, not because I was leaving a restaurant, but because I was saying goodbye to people who had become family.”
He had every reason to traverse the familiar road, leverage the recognition in the maximum city, spin the media machinery that comes with being one of India’s most talked-about chefs. Instead, he chose a remote cliff that came with no guarantees of demand. Guests, and kitchen staff included.
Prateek leans in, “I underestimated how lonely creating from scratch can be. When you begin again, there’s no reputation or all those awards that can do the work for you. You have to earn it all over again, and that is incredibly humbling”. I vociferously nod along to this extremely familiar, extremely naked confession.
After a long, long gap, I met him on the terrace of The Leela Palace, where Jyoti (Kumari, journalist and previously Guest Editor of The Lab Mag) was moderating a conversation. We hugged extra tight, discussed his sneakers, and then where he’s been. He revealed a vision of building a limited-seating restaurant near Kasauli (the name Naar was still WIP). He was part excited, part contemplative, part nervous. “We haven’t seen anything like this in India. Dekho kaise chalta hai yeh (let’s see how it goes).”
Prateek has always had a complicated relationship with geography.
He grew up in Kashmir, left during the exodus of his family, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and worked in some of the world’s most revered/complex kitchens like The French Laundry and Noma. He returned to India and became one of the architects of Mumbai-based Masque, where he helped make the case that Indian ingredients could be treated with the same intellectual seriousness afforded to produce in Copenhagen, California, or Paris.
He’s been vocal for local well before it was press-release-sexy.
His relationship with the local land and its spoils continues to be strong, if not deeper. Naar’s proposition is simple and ambitious: India does not need to borrow culinary vocabulary from the west, it needs to investigate its own.
I ask Sonakshi (Soni, Head of Operations) what attracted her to this, well, start up? She flashes her infectious smile and shares, “Naar feels like something we’re figuring out. It has shaped me as much as we’ve shaped it. To build a place we believe in, rather than trying to make it fit into an idea of what a restaurant is supposed to be – this is very personal.”
After many missed opportunities and rogue schedules, I find my way up the winding roads to Naar. Typically, I’m never too excited before a tasting as it helps remove bias and expectation when writing a story. The anticipation of this meal, however, needed more than a couple of self-chats to settle the endorphins and a resolve to form any opinion 48 hours later.
Getting to Naar ain’t easy, as if designed to test the sincerity of anyone claiming they really want to eat there. It is a destination restaurant in the most literal sense. You have to choose it and once you arrive, you are there for one thing and one thing only.
Prateek is crystal clear, “A full reservation book is never the goal, it’s the byproduct. Naar was built to tell the story of the Himalayas and new India. I would be far more worried the day people came only because it was difficult to get into, and not because they were curious about the food, and the people who run Naar.”
The restaurant takes its name from the Kashmiri word for fire. The menu moves through six Himalayan seasons, and its ingredients and techniques look across the enormous arc of the Himalayas, from Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh. The restaurant attempts to make a particular sense of place legible to people who may have never encountered it before. It’s in response to the growing demand for restaurants that can instinctively tell you where they are. The great restaurants of the past decade often made themselves legible through technique: fermentation, fire, foraging, precision, style of cooking. Not the kind of restaurant that may feel familiar and comforting, but is a generic bore and and begs a head-scratch when looking at the final bill.
We start at the salon for cocktails and snacks. It’s cosy, charming, laced with trays of in-house tinctures, infusions, ferments, and preserves that Dixit Dagora proficiently uses for a killer shake and stir. Chatter flows as freely as the cocktails for this crew that Deepika and Rajan Sethi put together for the Mohali launch of Anyday Espresso. Special shout out for the pass arounds, Bhaang Jeera being the clear winner.
We move to the dining area to commence the 12-course Himalayan degustation. His Kashmiri identity and displacement are enormously powerful, but a part of me hopes that the story doesn’t turn into a predictable “chef discovers his roots” narrative. With minimal reflections from their past innings, this menu is as relaxed as it is measured. The stand out course is Sunderkala – hand-rolled wheat noodles served in a fragrant, umami timru (locally sourced pepper that is citrusy and tongue-numbing) broth. Whilst the Butternut (local squash in a sweet & sour sauce) and Askalu (jackfruit with a local pepper dust) courses didn’t quite match up, Dirty Cheese Toast, Kashmiri Morel, Sabudana Bread with a corn custard courses smashed it out of the park.
When reliant on ingredients that are entirely local, there are fewer places to hide. Food aside, it’s delicious to see the jugalbandi between Prateek and Kamlesh (Negi, Executive chef Head of Research) – whilst the former understands how to make native ingredients more and more popular, the latter honours that beautifully and innovatively on the dinner plate.
I ask what he’s like before service, Sonakshi answers “Focused, usually thinking about ten things at once, doing the last checks, you know the areas that usually get missed by all of us. The closer we get to service, the calmer he seems to become. It’s almost like the chaos has a rhythm to it for him.” And after service, I pry further. “His listening cap is on. He wants to understand what we saw, what we noticed, and how that compares with what he saw during service. I think that gives him direction, a sense of where the two perspectives are, and how to bring them together,” she observes.
At Naar, the remoteness is not an inconvenience to be overcome. It is part of the proposition. The mountains are not mere wallpaper. The mountains, weather, smoke, produce, seasons and journey maketh the menu. Moving cities to open a 16-seat restaurant in the mountains could very well be an enormous act of ego. So the rumour mills said. I don’t think so. It’s the dismantling of it, and then building a new identity bereft of it.
I ask what would surprise the Prateek Sadhu who left Masque and saw Naar today. “Taking the biggest risk, that everyone called a career suicide, will bring you the greatest sense of peace. Sometimes, you have to let go of something wonderful to build something meaningful. Sometimes, the hardest choices require the strongest will,” he smiles.
Which brings us back to the original khus-phus gossip – Why did Prateek Sadhu leave Masque?
I am beginning to think we asked the wrong question. The more interesting question is how a chef asked diners to make a pilgrimage, and somehow became more globally visible by becoming more geographically obscure.
The gamble wasn’t opening a restaurant in the hills. It was to leverage credibility and drum enough curiosity where people will travel within India specifically for India.
Turns out, we are willing to travel for food and Naar feels like the conclusion of that argument; an extraordinary validation of a business decision that looked borderline irrational on paper.
Turns out, the gamble was worth it.
