First to Party

From spurring on an Indian internationalism to championing community cuisines, why Diva and Ritu Dalmia’s legacy go far beyond the perfect pasta

By Anoothi Vishal

“It’s not a party, I hate parties!” says Ritu Dalmia, vociferous as always, when I message to congratulate her on Diva turning 25. I am checking about the birthday, er party, to which I have been invited. As a very non-party person myself, I have become pretty adept at dodging “events”. But this one is special. And I am going—that “it is not a party” is just as well; just a gathering of two score or such friends of Diva and the diva!

India’s best-known Italian restaurant and its much-loved chef (despite being a rebel and an iconoclast always who does not fear straighttalk!) will always have my heart because I was here when it all happened a quarter of a century ago.

The arancini, parma ham and dainty ravioli that Ritu served up then at GK 2, when it was still the favoured marketplace for those wishing to buy washbasins and tiles, was much ahead of its time. In 2000, Delhi had La Piazza, Bina Modi’s Ego Italian and Flavours as its go-to Italian places, none with the soul, sophistication and fun all rolled into one of Diva. So many of the dishes that Ritu served were absolutely new, nothing that the young Indian had access to before, and I remember spending a delightful evening on the first day it opened, playing chess on the ground floor and then proceeding to a fabulous unprecedented meal. I was in my early 20s, freshly baked from LSR, and had joined The Indian Express a month prior to that monsoonal day in June, when a slow auto delivered me to the restaurant that would change not just Delhi’s dining but impact India’s food scene substantially for the next quarter century. It was almost my first review as the Express’ restaurant critic.

We are all turned 25!
For Ritu and the incredible success she has had since Diva—setting up restaurants in Milan and Dubai, becoming the best Indian caterer doing stylish global events—it is more than a personal milestone. What Diva did was bring to Indian diners a kind of confident “Indian internationalism” whose time had come: A comfort with not just legit international dining without Indianising, over saucing and seasoning everything, but something more.

Ritu started the trend of a very Indian chef cooking a cuisine that she had discovered and learnt as an adult with the same flair and instinct as an Italian chef, while keeping her innate sense of roots alive. This multicultural ease translated into her restaurants, to her staff and ultimately to her diners as well who began to look at the food not as special occasion or foreign but simply something that they liked, with a soulfulness that they could participate in, however different the food was from their home cooking.

This quiet multiculturalism was quite at odds with how India had dined till then, and perhaps does even now in pockets—Punjabi palates in the north, Gujarati tastes in the west, and the South with its own distinct preferences. Instead of the parochial, here, was a restaurant, where the chef cooked global fare with care and precision but what and how she liked, and there were still many takers for it. In that Diva was a trailblazer. It’s only now we are seeing more of such individualistic cooking that is still universal.
In the world of Indian F&B, Ritu is known to be a stickler for quality. The right, high quality ingredients are non negotiable in not just her restaurants but in her caterings too. But she also has an instinct in my opinion for embracing the “right” culinary concept at the right time. If Diva came just in time to tap into a growing multiculturalism among Gen X in India, many of who were going abroad to study and work as first-generation immigrants, Ritu’s move towards regional and community based Indian cuisines (done in her own way, but with a lot of attention to nuance) too came much ahead of its time.

In 2010, I did the first-ever “Kayasth food” festival at Priya Paul’s The Park—the cuisine wasn’t the marketable commodity it has become today, and the idea to plate up my home food had largely stemmed from a column I had written in The Business Standard, my then paper, on the syncretic nature of our culture, the tradition of Hindustani Classical music, lavish hospitality, poetry and so on that was part of the cultural fabric. The dishes reflected all this. But when I thought of cooking my family’s khana with my father and chachi, both exceptionally talented home cooks, it was a very new idea to put bharwan tinde and moong dal ke shami on a hotel menu (apart from the parsinde, kofte and yakhni pulao that connoisseurs in the community lavish their praise on).

Ritu came to dine, as did Manish Mehrotra, and both chose, instinctively, very typical, less celebrated “humble” dishes. It is only now that the “hierarchy” of ingredients is broken and all restaurants are celebrating the hyper local, but both Ritu and Manish had instinctively zeroed in on how we ate at home, earning the respect of my Mathur family, a stickler for taste and “combinations”.
When I started with a series of pop up dinners and lunches, Ritu (along with her big group of friends) was again one of the first to (pay and) come —to try the new, and too support it. (The restaurateur Ashish Kapur was another one who saw the trend of pop ups as “experiences” much ahead of its time). And if memory serves me right, Ritu championed many many different regional cuisines similarly, including, chef Arun Kumar’s exceptional Kerala food (which then led to his journey in becoming a chef from being a filmmaker)! Even today, call her sometimes, and you will find her in Goa, buying different rice varietals and experimenting with these in her own home. It is something innate to be being a chef both the instinct to create and the palate to distinguish nuance.

In 2019, when I visited Milan, we not only did a Kayasth food festival at Cittamani, but I saw Ritu cooking up kadhi for the Italians who loved it at a marquee event there. Her caterings with stylish pan Indian food reflect these many nuances of food experienced first hand and experimented with personally. All this much before all the world and its uncle is dabbling in “hyper local”.

Ultimately, Ritu’s legacy has been in the culinary environment that she has led and shaped in India — an environment made up of all the chefs, managers and even bartenders (who I keep meeting at different restaurants in different cities) who have benefitted from her mentoring, in starting conversations that are absolutely on point and in sync with the social-cultural “mood of the nation” (even anticipating it), and of all the diners who she has fed delicious meals always with humour, candour and warmth.