I sat down with head chef and owner, Aseem Sood and his business partner, Kunal Bhardwaj at Kahaani in Lygon Street. Kahaani means story in Hindi and Aseem wants to tell the story of India's regions and history through his food, which he describes as "unreasonably authentic". The pair looked for a while for a venue, originally imagining that South Yarra would be the place until they came across the space in Carlton. Aseem and Kunal did all the renovations themselves over five months, using as much as possible repurposed material, "handmade", says Aseem, referring to the sanding of the table tops and the exposed brick wall on one side and a clay wall on the other. The bar is made out of an old wooden work bench with bright blue tiling around its base. Upstairs can be used for private dining and functions and is creatively filled with branches and greenery. Aseem and Kunal are currently working on a tiffin box lunch offering and for adventurous foodies, a surprise dish where apart from the protein, you won't know anything about the dish until it arrives at your table. Kunal made me a delicious chai and I very happily listened to their story. Listen here.
Hi Aseem and Kunal. You are running Kahaani together. How do you know each other?
A: Kunal used to have a cafe on St Kilda Road about seven years ago.
K: I used to work for Hyatt and my last job for them was managing Collins Kitchen and I left there in 2015 to open my own wine bar and cafe called Six Degrees. The design there was very organic too. We bought a pallet of repurposed hardwood and used that for everything. I had that for five years. I had a problem with the chef and my friend knew Aseem and he came and helped me. We did some collaborative events there as well and we became friends from then on as well and we decided that we had to get back to our roots and open an Indian restaurant. We thought there was a lack of authenticity in Indian restaurants and that we could bring a point of difference.
I do feel as though people often say that their restaurant is different and brings authenticity, so I am interested to hear what you say.
K: Our story and we have it on our glass as well is that we are unreasonably authentic, so we are not trying to suit any palate, we are not trying to change our food. We are sticking to our recipes. Some of the recipes Aseem has brought from his family. They used to own a catering company. Some of the recipes come from the chefs, some are home recipes. We are trying to do authentic food, not hot, but spicy and authentic.
A: Kahaani basically means story. We are cooking food from the north and also from the south, some street food, some home cooked food. We have a Rajasthani dish with housemade chickpea roundels. We poach them and the poaching liquid gets used to make the curry with an onion and tomato base and that is very homely in the Rajasthan region and I don't think any restaurants in Melbourne or even Australia are selling that dish.
Are you from Rajasthan?
I'm from the north, from Punjab. I studied in Delhi for five years and then I went to Scotland for my training for a year. I was in Punjab for my Year 12 and then I loved to New Delhi for my Bachelor's Degree. The college I was at had a collaboration with London University and they used to send students overseas for their industrial training and you can continue your studies there if you want to. I worked there for a year and a half and then came back and I wasn't happy about what was happening there at the time, the wages were too low for chefs and the industry was low paid. I came to Australia and studied commercial cookery here again and pretty much knew all the trade. I started off at Stamford Plaza, a five star hotel.
You have mainly been in hotels, haven't you?
Yes. I was sponsored and so I worked for the for seven or eight years. From there I moved to the Mantra hotels and was head chef there for a couple of years. Then I joined a catering company, which did the catering for Emirates. We used to do the business class Emirates food from Neil Perry's recipes. After that, Covid hit and that stopped everything. I was sitting at hoe doing nothing. One day I was at home, my wife was at work, and I thought, ok, let's cook something nice, Im home, Im depressed. I made a Chicken Biryani, took some pictures, posted the on Facebook marketplace and said it was for sale. My wife came home and said it was good and all my neighbours said it was nice. So I started a home business cooking all the regional foods, like butter chicken, mutton biryani, goat curry and then Indo-Chinese food here and there. I live in the western suburbs, so the people like Indo-Chinese and Indian food. I started it off and it went very well. I was very happy with what I was doing. Then Kunal's cafe closed during Covid and we started looking for a place. I used to do wedding catering for my home catering business, for 60 to 70 people, but that was holding me back because I couldn't expand. I needed a proper place. Finally we got this place and worked a lot on the menu. We wanted to do a limited menu first of all, do it right, do it authentic. I went overseas to get all the crockery. That's how it started off.
Amazing. My question is then, many chefs get to a point where they think they want to have their own place, are you loving it, or is really stressful or is there a balance?
A: There is a balance. That's why we close our restaurant on Sundays and Mondays because we have to give enough time to family. I'm loving it. Kunal is loving it as well, I am pretty sure.
K: We can always do better. No, we are not in it to make a lot of money. We know the industry and we have both been in it for a good 18 years. Hospitality is not about making a million dollars otherwise you have investors. We are here for passion and we want to change the perception of Indian food above and beyond butter chicken. That is reflected in our menu because we are very daring in the way we put the menu together. We have dishes that you would never put on the restaurant menu.
What's an example of that?
K: The Gatte ki sabzi, which is a very staple dish in a village in Rajasthan. In the history of Rajasthan, they had a lot of chickpeas back in the day and they used it in all their food. We use gram flour.
A: Gram flour, we put some yoghurt in and make a dough out of it and some spices, we poach it up and then all the poaching liquid gets used later to thicken up the curry. That is very regional and home made.
K: It's not restaurant food, it's home food.
A: It's the same with the goat curry. The goat curry is from my home. It is very basic and cooked right. I slowly cook the onions and then cook the spices, seal off the goat separately. We use copper pots which I got from Old Delhi and we don't make 20 kilo batches, we just do five to seven kilos at once and it sells out in two to three days and we make it again the next day. We are doing it very authentically. There are a lot of staff shortages in hospitality, so we have gone for a smaller menu, we do it with pride and if it doesn't work, we will see what to do next. Apparently it is working very well and people are loving it.
That's so great. Are Indian people coming?
K: We have fifty-fifty percent of clients. We have good reviews from Indians as well. It depends. India is vast and there are a lot of layers. Someone who comes from deep down Punjab who has never tasted the food served in Gujurat, he would wonder what it is, but people who have travelled and eat widely, or they have been in Australia for longer, they love it. There is not a lot of fat or chilli, that is not Indian food. Indian food is cooked properly, slowly and infused with flavour, that is spices, in the right balance. We have some great reviews on Google from Indians and from non-Indian people as well. We have Lebanese and Middle Eastern people coming as well as Persian people. Those areas are linked.
I am excited to come back and eat. I went to Rajasthan and I did a cooking class in Udaipur with an amazing woman, Shashi, and it was so cheap and we were there for hours and she taught us how to make chai and she had all her different spices. We cooked so many different dishes and I loved the food. I did not have any Delhi belly experience. I ate and ate. I loved it there and it is so beautiful in Rajasthan.
A: It is pure food, actually.
K: You have food in a place that is actually a desert. They don't grow anything. Anything they get there has to be made from dried stuff, so you have something like Dahl Baati which is a lentil dahl and it is nutritious for your body. Lentils are the protein and baati is made out of millet flour enriched with ghee. Regional Indian food is very fascinating.
A: There are a lot of stories.
K: It all links to ayurveda as well, what we need to feed our body.
That makes sense. There's the regional aspect, but did I read also that you're also into historical dishes. Is there a dish on there that has a history to it?
A: Yes. There is a biryani on our menu which is a dum biryani, from the Lahore part of the region. We seal off the meat then put the rice on top, then cover it with a dough and we slowly cook it and it gets cooked in its own flavours. That is very historical. We used to have the galouti kebab that are melt in the mouth kebabs that used to be made for the Maharaja who didnt have teeth.
K: He got so old he couldn't bite and he commissioned a dish that had meat and was as flavoursome as slow cooked meat but that he didn't have to bite and they came up with the galouti kebab and he executed that very well. We are working on a few concepts of the menu where instead of having specials, we will have a secret dish and we won't tell you what it is but you will come in and ask for the secret dish and you will only know what it is when it arrives at your table. We will tell you the meat, but then we will bring the dish to the table and you will have the whole story and the dish as well.
What a cool idea. I like it.
K: We will do one or two dishes and that will be our playground where we will experiment with all of those dishes and bring out some punchy flavours.
You have to be very focused on what you want to do in life, in any of the things you do, but if you want to be a chef, it is even more so. When you are a chef, you look at food and you want to do something with it. It’s not boring. So, if you see a piece of meat, you want to do something, you start using your mind and that motivates people. I think that is very important if you want to become a chef, you have to love the food first of all, otherwise you can’t do it. ~ Aseem Sood, Kahaani
Do you need special equipment like a tandoor oven?
A: We have a tandoor over. We do naan bread in there and of course we have our copper pots in which we cook all our meats, the curries. We have a fire grill. We smoke our meats and make homemade cheese, the paneer is all homemade.
Aseem, your family had a catering company so did you always know you wanted to be a chef?
A: I always wanted to be a chef, that is very true. At the age of eight or nine I remember my aunt used to come and I would make stuffed piranthas. I was very passionate. We had people working for us who had been there for fifty, sixty years. Their mothers used to work for us and I have seen them cooking these recipes my entre life. I grew up with it. My grandmother used to be from Agra and she introduced a lot of food into our life. I used to draw very well, so either I wanted to be an architect or I wanted to be a chef. They were the two things I wanted to do. My uncle was an architect and he still is and he asked if I wanted to do that and I said no because I was from a very small town and I thought nothing would happen there so I had to move out. Then I moved to Delhi where my grandmother from my mother's side lived and I enrolled in a college there and that's where it started. Then I came to this country and good chefs have taught me many things and it has kept building.I think food is life. I love it. I think it is the only thing I can do. During Covid I thought, what is going to be next? Should I start driving a truck or a taxi? I had to make a living. Then that biryani thing came up and I started selling it and from there it kicked off. I did that business for two years from home and I still have those clientele, they come here to eat my food. They love it. That keeps me motivated to do more, to do new things. We are bringing new things to people who have never had these things before, we have Bengali style gobi they would never have had before in their life. It is our take on true Indian food. We have kale ki chat, which is our version of Delhi chat which is a palak chat (spinach leaves), they lightly batter it and make a chat out of it. We have replaced the palak with kale which holds very well and is more understandable to people as well. It comes with tamarind chutney, fresh green chutney and we do a beetroot coulis. People love it, it's tangy, it's crunchy, it's sweet and sour. We keep playing with things and every three or four months we will change some things. India is so big, you can keep exploring.
In terms of being a leader in the kitchen and a leader of your staff, what is your style?
A: I am very calm. I like to do a lot of things by myself. Of course I train my staff properly, I try to keep the secrets to myself until I have full confidence in them to do it. Then I start showing the how to make the curry or how to make the base of a sauce. Very small things like cooking off onions for one curry or cooking off onions for another curry, the colour of the onions makes a lot of difference, if you have cooked it too long, the caramelisation of the onions will bring a sweeter taste, sometimes you just need the rawness of the onions in the dish. Those small things I teach my staff and they are excited about it as well.
Do you think anyone can be a good cook?
A: Of course. Cooking comes from the heart. If you are cooking with love, anyone can become a chef or a cook as long as you want to learn and you are willing to do it, the sky is the limit.
I think it takes a lot of resilience as well though, doesn't it? It's long hours and it is hard work, so I think you have that love, and you learn the recipes and you cook, but you need to know what the onions do and all those other things and then you have to stick at it. What would your advice be to a young person who was thinking about becoming a chef?
It is very hard, first of all. Things are getting expensive, if they want to be a chef, it is not a high paid industry and you need a lot of commitment for this kind of job and of course long hours. You have to be very focused on what you want to do in life, in any of the things you do, but if you want to be a chef, even more so. When you are a chef, you look at food and you want to do something with it. It's not boring. So, if you see a piece of meat, you want to do something, you start using your mind and that motivates people. I think that is very important if you want to become a chef, you have to love the food first of all, otherwise you can't do it.
262 Lygon Street, Carlton