Dishpatch meets Cyrus Todiwala
Cyrus Todiwala OBE DL was born in Mumbai, and his trademark style blends traditional Indian and classical French culinary techniques and flavours. Together with his wife Pervin, he began cooking at Café Spice Namasté in London in 1995 and took full ownership in 2005. The restaurant is now an award-winning institution renowned across the globe. Cyrus was awarded an MBE in 2000 and an OBE in 2009. He has written seven cookbooks, and appears regularly on TV shows such as BBC One's Saturday Kitchen. We spoke to Cyrus about the inspirations behind his cooking, and his fondest food memories...
How did you get into cooking?
I loved cooking from a young age. When I was a child I was highly asthmatic, and I couldn't go to school sometimes because of the asthma attacks. When I felt better, my mum would drag me into the kitchen to help her and to keep an eye on me. I think that’s where I learned certain food combinations and ways to cook. But having said that, I was not academic at all, so I had to do something that my brain allowed me to do – so I went into catering, and ended up in the kitchen, and that’s where my career really began.
Tell us some of your earliest food memories.
Home. My earliest food memories are of home, and my mum’s fresh hot chapatis, which we sprinkled with butter and sugar, or with rock and sugar. We also used to make a masala scramble for breakfast – which has now become a Mr Todiwala's favourite.
Who has inspired your cooking?
My mum, definitely. My mum taught me how to chop, peel and cut; her style was unique and, to this day, I only use her style for chopping onions. My dad was a good cook too, it was not his profession, but a good cook nonetheless. The people you meet along the way also inspired me, like aunts and great-aunts. And then of course you have people that you’ve worked with who influence you. But it's the people around me that have inspired my cooking – women, mostly, in Indian food. You have to tax their brains because they hold all the secrets which they never give away – and that’s a very difficult task…
Are places an inspiration for your cooking too?
Definitely. When I went into cooking, French food inspired me first – so I started off cooking classical French food. And then patisserie took my fancy, then Chinese food, into Thai, then Goan food, and then into cooking Indian food.
But as a child we of course grew up eating our own food, which is Parsi food. The Parsi community practices the religion Zoroastrianism, the oldest monotheistic religion in the world [an ancient pre-Islamic religion]. It’s Persian food originally. This was a cuisine that you never paid much attention to as a child, because it was something that was cooked in your house, in your aunt's house, your neighbour’s house – in every house. You took it for granted. That was until I actually started my own business, and you think, what am I going to do to bring my own cuisine to the table? And that's when Parsi food came up.
Where are your favourite food destinations?
India, of course, first and foremost. Nothing beats India in terms of a food destination. Food in India is all about street food. If I had to choose somewhere else, it would be Italy or France.
If you could order any Dishpatch box, what would you choose?
It has got to be Michel Roux Jr.’s. It would take me back to my early days of classical French cooking and working with some very, very great French chefs.