A Plate Is Like a Canvas, My Ingredients Are Like My Colours - Chef Shagun Mehra


I chose this career path in a very natural way whilst keeping in tune with my upbringing and my family's well-off treasures of food and beverage.


1. Tell us about your background and journey.

My father is a hotelier and I grew up running around in hotel lobbies and kitchens ever since I was a little girl. Food, beverage, hospitality and service from the heart has been my life. It has been a part of my upbringing. I am the fifth generation of my family in the business of food.

I have studied at some of the best schools in the world in my field. I studied at Ecole Les Roches, Switzerland. Then I studied at Le Cordon Bleu, Paris to sharpen my culinary skills. After that, I studied wines at the Wines & Spirit Education Trust, United Kingdom.

I was able to bring about the knowledge of Europe to India and started to work & focus on indigenous Indian ingredients and contemporizing them, giving them a platform in Western plates and working towards traditional regional Indian cuisines and techniques. I worked on finding ways to highlight and accentuate them.

2. What led you to take up this career path?

I was always very very keen to do something creative with my life. I am a creative person. I consider myself an artist first before anything else. I was very inclined towards food.

A plate is like a canvas, you know, my ingredients are like my colours. So I was able to find my creative vent through cooking and also inside a bottle of wine where I find the nuances and the different aromas and flavours that come with wines.

Hence, it called to me which is why I chose this career path in a very natural way whilst keeping in tune with my upbringing and my family's well-off treasures of food and beverage.


3. Does one's approach change when cooking profesionally and at home?

Yes! Cooking at home and cooking professionally are two extremely different things. In some ways, they are similar as well because you put love in both. But cooking professionally, you need to be a lot more precise.

There is no room for mistakes. There is only room for improvement. Whereas at home, you can take the liberty of making mistakes and then working on it or improvising on it. So that is the prime difference between cooking at home and cooking professionally.

4. Is there a dish you particularly associate yourself with?

Gosh, you caught me off guard with this question. I am a very simple person haha. But if I would associate myself with a dish it would probably be Ridge Gourd salad.

I think I am like my Ridge gourd salad which is a salad made of Turai, Chana dal, pomegranate, coconut. Very very simple ingredients but beautifully mixed with a hint and an accent of smoke sesame oil that brings that complexity. So I think of myself as a simple dish but with a lot of complexity.

5. Can cooking be learnt at culinary schools or natural talent is required?

Cooking skills can be sharpened at a culinary school. You can learn to cook and learn to do techniques in a culinary school but the natural inclination to cooking has to lie within your heart and within your person.

For instance, there are great chefs and cooks like a Bhelpuri guy or a Vada Pav guy or a Jalebi maker. These are all artists and they have not been to culinary schools but they are great artists that can cook really well.

A mother who cooks for her children and her family, you know, so there is a lot of natural talent that lies within people. Culinary schools just give you a platform to be able to express it more. It's like if you're naturally good at drawing but if you go to an art school of course they will teach you more tricks of the trade.

So it's not that if you don't go to a culinary school you won't be able to be a great chef. If you go to a culinary school and you have a natural talent then great! 'Sone pe Suhaaga.'

6. Which is your favourite book and why?

My favourite book in the world is "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" by Richard Bach. Its a very beautiful book that speaks about a spiritual journey of a person through a Seagull and how one can actually evolve themselves and elevate themselves in their life and what we are capable of, to be able to fly to the horizon and rise above our own mental conditioning. This is why this book is so special to me.


Shagun Mehra
Chef | Oenophile
Instagram - @shagunmehra_

Interviewed by - Suhani Mangleek

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