Gaggan is a man of dualities and uncontained possibilities. Time spent with him often produces whiplash: charm followed by provocation, generosity followed by defiance. The moments can polarise. The genius, however, does not.
In interviews, the multi-hyphenate frequently toys with the idea of retirement, though reality tells a different story. The recent stop-press murmur around his upcoming India restaurant makes that abundantly clear. Gaggan, it seems, does not exit. He recalibrates.
I first met him during his residency at Hyatt Regency, New Delhi. He spoke about capitalism, entrepreneurship, and why chefs shouldn’t be influencers. What struck me, then a junior writer, was his patient restlessness. His perpetually shaking leg betrayed an urgency to outrun time itself, while the fact that he offered that time so generously to a young writer was its own quiet lesson in grace. That, and his genuine love for the written word.
The second meeting was at a pop-up at Inja; a jugalbandi of Asian and Indian flavours. I, expectedly, was at the table with backbencher energy and rascal banter. Turns out, that’s the energy he gravitates to.
The third time lingered longer. This time, the observations were on and off the record. Food may dominate his mind, but music and his daughter have his heart wound tightly around their little pinky. He is as intense as he is wickedly witty, often veering into the unhinged inappropriate. He has an appetite for controversy, and insistence that his cuisine is more than food. In silences, an inner tension surfaces, a naked emotional landscape of unresolved emotions, almost as if a wrestle between loss and memory.
Raised in Kolkata, Anand’s first devotion was not the stove but the drum kit. Rhythm came before recipes. His early years were complicated and challenging, a phase that I sense shapes the man I interview today—gritty, visceral, ambitious, with an emotional relationship with food and success. His hunger is not one that fame can quiet. It has merely intensified, sometimes sharpening into obsession.
His career reads like one of his tasting menus: layered, global, deliberately disruptive. Formally trained at the Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology, Anand cut his teeth with the Taj Group. When he moved to Bangkok, he spotted a gap in the market with no real avenues of fine dining. In 2010, he opened Gaggan in Bangkok, a restaurant that redefined Indian cuisine for a global audience but also turned the idea of a tasting menu on its head. Anand’s cuisine married science with spectacle. Molecular gastronomy techniques learned during an internship with Ferran Adrià’s elBulli informed dishes that were sensory detonations. By 2015, Gaggan was Asia’s numero uno restaurant and repeatedly ranked among the world’s top ten. The ascent was meteoric, bordering on urban legend.
In 2019, disputes with business partners led to Anand’s resignation, bringing a turbulent decade to an abrupt close. In hindsight, he has described that ending not as a full stop, but a comma.
Fuelled by personal savings and debt, he opened Gaggan Anand with much of the same team: incredible talent like Vlad and Rahul, alongside a fiercely loyal brigade who chose conviction over more lucrative offers elsewhere. It was a quiet but powerful signal of people-first leadership, the kind management consultants like me love to diagram but rarely witness in the wild.
This was not abstract inspiration, but a very real, personal moment when he decided to stop settling for mediocre and push himself. And push, oh boy, he did.
Financially, his success extends far beyond Michelin headlines. His portfolio spans Bangkok and collaborations across Japan, Mexico, and soon…India. While the flagship commands formidable prices, Anand has openly stated that it was never designed for profit alone. With food costs reportedly brushing 95% of revenue, the dough comes instead from diversification, collaborations, and constant reinvention.
Anand insists his food isn’t about science, but about joy, curiosity, and pleasure. Courses unfold in chapters, punctuated by rock music, the dining room behaving more like a venue than a restaurant. My meal at Gaggan wasn’t merely cooking; it was performance art steeped in cultural provocation and dismantling an archaic dining format.
He has spoken about using food as a sensorial passage to agitate, unsettle, and delight, without leaning on obscure luxury ingredients. As someone deeply fatigued by out-of-season, high-carbon-footprint superfoods, his use of drumsticks and colocasia root feels almost rebellious. I will quietly look away from the lazy use of paneer.
Music structures his kitchen. He talks about the custom speakers with as much passion as the dishes that run like tracks on an album: rhythm, tempo, crescendos, and reprises. This isn’t just a cute anecdote; the tasting menu consciously ran like a setlist, engineered to move emotion the way sound does.
The kitchen seems to run on a shared appetite for risk. At its core is head chef Fabio Costa, a steady counterbalance to Anand’s theatrics, translating provocation into precision night after night. Rahul Kanojia brings a deep, almost instinctive understanding of Indian flavour memory, anchoring the menu in familiarity even as it veers into the unexpected. Vladimir Kojic, the lovely Serbian sommelier, is as playful as he is rigorous about wine pairing. Together, they function less like subordinates and more like a band, each attuned to the same rhythm but playing different instruments. Loyalty here is not ornamental; it is operational.
He references street food as an emotional calibration of sorts, something I observed upstairs at Ms. Maria and Mr. Singh. Perhaps this is his way of preserving culinary heritage, a framework that deserves to be front and centre, resisting the abominable homogenous cuisine in metro cities that so often masquerades as “cosmopolitanism”. For him, food isn’t haute dining; its muscle memory, nostalgia, and authenticity woven into an experience. It should unexpectedly pop back into your memory, exactly like the one who got away.
The man embodies restless ambition and perfectionism that borders on defiance of convention. He doesn’t want Indian cuisine merely noticed, he wants it reimagined and celebrated at a larger scale. I like him because he’s gone on record dismissing the idea of “curry” as a reductive, colonial shorthand, choosing instead to champion and reinvent regional dailies.
Reddit threads and late-night, many-whiskies-deep conversations often debate whether the experience is “a bit much”. Perhaps. Don’t go if you dislike ceding agency during a leisurely meal out. But go, unequivocally, if you’re curious about food that carries punch, theatre, and rebellion in equal measure.
Without revealing too much (he’s recently banned the usage of phones at the tasting), the experience offers a rare sense of raw newness in a field that often feels over-curated, rehearsed, and emotionally distant.
A punk percussionist turned avant-garde chef, Gaggan Anand treats food the way musicians treat sound: as a composition, an expression, and provocation. He remains one of gastronomy’s most compelling contradictions: brilliant and polarising, creative and combustible, unafraid to burn down his own Michelin legacy in pursuit of the next frontier.
The question isn’t what story he leaves behind, but whether the world of cuisine would look remotely the same without his ladle and his fire.
