dbHK Eats: Gaggan

Despite thinking, and even hoping, that it wouldn’t live up to its reputation, dbHK‘s Natalie Wang was charmed by the emoji-only, 25-course dinner at Bangkok’s acclaimed Gaggan restaurant.

The beetroot rose

Straddling two storeys inside a white, colonial style mansion, is the ‘progressive Indian’ restaurant, voted the best in Asia a few years in a row and ranked seventh in the world on the influential World’s 50 Best Restaurants list this year. But something is bound to run afoul at one point or another, and I, on my second visit, was rooting for a misstep, even just a small one.

Maybe a waiter will trip and fall over, chin first, breaking the plate and splashing every last bit of food onto a diner’s freshly-ironed dress. Or maybe a less attentive sous chef would mess up the tweezer-precise plating. Or, after winning accolades, the pressure would finally weigh down on the chef like a distressed writer anxiously pencil biting while wrestling with writer’s block. Anything is possible.

Yet, a few minutes into my first bite of the emoji-only, 25-course dinner, I was certain I was wrong. Everything at the restaurant was run with military precision, smooth like clockwork. Each plate was chef Gaggan’s canvas and his molecular dining concept was at the forefront with sniper-like accuracy – the kind that you can only imagine in a mad scientist’s lab – from presentation, pace of delivery between each course to staff’s interaction with guests, and to the ultimate food on the palate.

The ‘Eggplant cookie’, a coin-sized cookie sandwich that is one of the most complicated dishes on the menu that requires four days of preparation.

Eating at the restaurant is a subversive experience as the food – complete with foaming, burned ‘ashes’ and ‘charcoals’ as well as wooden cages – commands diners’ full attention (not to mention the guess work that went into the emoji menu). And in a restaurant with no background music, the only music that plays nicely to the course of the meal is the humming and roaring of people as they relish the food.

Compared with my previous experience at the restaurant roughly a year ago, the presentation has stripped down the gizmos, no liquid nitrogen was used this time. The result is a more coherent and clean presentation that showed the signatures of Indian cuisine including pork vindaloo, quail chettinad, dosa, paturi but twisted, bent and played with by the talented chef.

In a culinary world, it’s easy to find chefs with great kitchen chops or interesting ideas but robotic imitation or jarring creations are no guarantee of awe-inspiring dining experience, just like when we use Google Translate, nuisances and connotations are often lost.

The Kolkata-born Indian chef Gaggan Anand, who previously trained under the tutelage of chef Ferran Adrià of El Bulli, proved that even dealing with a full cabinet of Indian spices and a variety of traditional curries, innovation can still be made through different shapes and forms with ease and charm.

The ‘chilli bonbon’, a chilled chocolate shell that traps the liquid filling of sauce, cumin, chili, ginger, and other spices, is a delight on the plate, creating a contrast of flavours, texture, hot and cold. One of the restaurant’s most complicated dish is the ‘eggplant cookie’ which reportedly took four days of preparation that involves charring, skinning, cooling, freeze-drying, grounding and moulding the eggplant into a powdered compress. Then the coin sized cookies were sandwiched together with onion chutney jam.

The chilli bonbon

And for wine lovers like us, having a wine list like Gaggan’s is an add-on for the whole dining experience. Its head sommelier Vladimir Kojic has been constantly pushing for interesting, unconventional wines that like the food itself, would generate conversations. Despite Thailand’s astronomical taxes on wine (close to 400%), the Serbian sommelier has revamped the menu with Rieslings from Alsace, orange wines from Slovenia’s Movia as well as a vertical of Ridge Monte Bello.

Just when the room was filled with high spirits as guests were eager to guess the final tasting dishes for desert, the liveliness came to a sudden halt when the chef himself walked in across the dining room into the kitchen. It was an appearance that quickly pulled guests back from their dining feast to grab their phone for a Gaggan photo-op.

The chef, who grew up dreaming of becoming a rock band drummer, without any pretence, came out of the kitchen later to greet each guest at the restaurant. And in a true modern, millennial fashion “signed” the emoji menu with fingerprints from all kitchen staff and himself.

If you are lucky enough to get a reservation, book your plane tickets immediately, as the time is ticking given the chef has announced the closing of the restaurant in 2020. There are already quite a few diners have put down reservations with credit card details for 2020.

Address: 68/1 Soi Langsuan, Ploenchit Road, Lumpini, Bangkok 10330, Thailand