Open fires provide a hot take on dining

Tandoors, fires and grills return to the kitchen as chefs try to draw out deeper flavours, and give guests a ringside view of their process

- Prachi joshi

The 'plancha' at HOM in Mumbai; and (left) a dish from Fireside, Bengaluru.

he charcoal embers burn bright, slowly roasting the crescent-shaped green pumpkin slices brushed with tare (a Japanese glaze made from soy sauce).

Once charred to perfection, chef Saurabh Udinia plates them up with pumpkin sauce, scatters toasted pumpkin seeds on top, and slides the plate towards me. The pumpkin has a slight bite to it, which contrasts well with the creamy sauce. At HOM, which opened in Mumbai last month, 80% of the dishes are cooked on fire using the charcoal grill, the plancha (flattop griddle) or the tandoor.

“I have been to really cool, intimate grill restaurants like Kiln in Soho (London) and Burnt Ends in Singapore, but there’s nothing like that in Mumbai where you can watch the chefs in action and see every ingredient being cooked (in front of you),” says Pratik Gaba, HOM’s founder and owner. To realise his vision, the first-time restaurateur roped in Udinia as the culinary director.

The Delhi-born chef has cooked in the kitchens of Indian Accent (Delhi), Masala Library (Mumbai) and Revolver (Michelin-recommended Indian restaurant in Singapore). “I had never done open-fire cooking before Revolver; it’s where I realised that it was one of the better ways of cooking,” he says. The open kitchen is the centrepiece here, and you can take one of the seven seats around it for the “HOM Theatre”, an ll-course tasting menu where every dish is finished over fire as you watch. The food is largely Indian with global influences.

Open-flame cooking isn’t new in India’s food culture—we have always had our tandoors, sigdis and wood-fired