Massimo Bottura came to India. His pop-up sold out at ₹50,000 per plate

I’ve been to several Michelin-star restaurants in the last 15 years or so. Two in particular left a very strong impression: Da Vittorio near Bergamo, outside Milan, and Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxford. The latter was so impactful that for a while I knew the courses by heart and would repeat them to myself at night when I couldn’t get to sleep. A hedonist’s lullaby. 

In the course of writing this piece I’ve been running these experiences in my head to understand this feeling I was left with after having the six-course pop-up dinner by Italian icon Massimo Bottura in Bengaluru. A celebrity chef pop-up dinner in one of the best fine-dining restaurants in the country, inside a five-star hotel, sold at a teeth-clenching price, naturally carries a huge burden of expectations. The Johnnie Walker Massimo Bottura Dinner at Le Cirque Signature, in The Leela Palace Bengaluru by Culinary Culture, sold out for ₹50,000 per plate, was such a perfect culinary storm. 

Bottura of the three-Michelin-star Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, is credited with changing the way we perceive Italian cuisine. As columnist Vir Sanghvi reportedly said, before Bottura “the world had no concept of Italian fine dining”. Bottura, who caught the attention of a larger worldwide audience when he was profiled in the first episode of David Gelb’s Chef’s Table, possesses a magical thinking that can extract the flavour essence contained in Italian grandmotherly cooking and interpret it in an unconventional, artistic, high-cuisine language.

When I attended the dinner at Le Cirque, Bottura was engaging and funny; he paid attention to the room, shook hands with everyone, and explained every single one of the dishes in the six-course menu in detail. He knew folks had clearly come for the man on the screen. One gentleman shook hands with Bottura and described it as a “major moment”. In that privileged room of startup founders and entrepreneurs from finance to hospitality, guests were seen often quoting the Chef’s Table episode. As one person told me, this was as close to Modena as they were likely to get any time soon. 

To serve the six-course set menu, we were seated by 8 pm and the room was served together. Bottura had devised the menu to present some of Osteria Francescana’s symphonic masterpieces. Some hit the high notes in perfect pitch. One dish in particular—Pasta al Pesto in Abstract, the first of the six courses—was a chlorophyll-tinged opera in a ramekin. Described as Ligurian pesto “reimagined without pasta to emphasise the individual ingredients traditionally used to make the pesto”, it looked like a puddle of swamp green garnished with some dill and a slick of pesto-y olive oil, hiding below it a silky pasta-coloured custard with hints of truffle. In the mouth, it was rich and biting. It tasted like the most pesto version of a pesto. I understood the lesson I was being taught. How this seemingly ubiquitous sauce served on every room-service menu was meant to taste. It perfectly recounted the cultural and botanical understanding of its author.

This was accompanied by an excellent Johnnie Walker whiskey cocktail, a Cream Soda Old Fashioned, with a bitters blend. I was surprised to have a sweet cocktail as accompaniment but it turned out be a good offset to the creaminess of the custard.

The second dish of the evening was Camouflage Rice, a risotto representing the diverse landscapes of the Emilia-Romagna region, with black squid ink, oysters, winter greens, aromatic herbs and Porcini mushrooms. As an Indian, one feels sheepish to complain about the al dente-ness of Italian carbs, but several of us wondered if the rice was in fact fighting back a little too much to the bite. Some of those grains had a bit of rawness at the centre. But the flavour of the sauces was so intense and silky, I finished the entire plate. Fans of Osteria Francescana will recognise the dish that came next: The Crunchy Part of the Lasagna, in which Bottura “mischievously reinvents the classic Italian recipe while remaining faithful to his childhood memory of stealing the burnt corners from his grandmother’s labour of love”. This dish, first introduced in the ’90s, is no longer on the restaurant’s menu in Modena, so it was a particular treat for the evening. A delectable base of lamb ragu announced itself with a red, white and green parmesan flag blackened at the edges. The meat was perfectly done, and the flavours of the sauce contradictorily delicate and strong. I felt like every lasagna I’d eaten thus far in life was a garish, nouveau riche cousin of Bottura’s quiet-luxury offering.

At the beginning of the dinner, Bottura had promised the diners, “You’re going to be kids for a couple of minutes again.” His dessert, Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart, as much a legend as the chef, was that promise made true. It presented itself as fragments of pie crust surrounded by candied bergamot, savoury capers, dried oregano, and hot pepper oil. The first version of this type of serving was created when his sous chef accidentally broke a lemon tart before service. The result looked so artistic that Bottura decided to serve it in this way henceforth. The Italian celebrity chef has often cited art as a major inspiration, and both these courses looked very artistic. The lemon zabaglione was intense and flavourful, with shards of smooth—and spicy, maybe—pie crust and an herby sorbet.

So far so good, but the highs of the meal were brought down by one of the last three courses. The Cod. Inspired by artist Damien Hirst’s spin-painted canvases, the cod was served on a plate splashed with colourful purees. Cod is not considered a particularly interesting fish in our part of the world—it tends to be bland and soft—and this treatment, even though accompanied by myriad flavours, still felt a bit like a wilted dish.

This was a dinner where I wanted to be wowed by everything in every way, but at the end the force of celebrity and the low points of some of the dishes combined to create a sense of doubt. So, if you’re trying to experience one of the World’s Best Restaurants, is a pop-up the right way to go? I doubt it. For one, the Le Cirque drawing room felt far too crowded, with tables rearranged to make room for the sold-out one night in Bengaluru. Our table was so close to the two-seater next to us that if I’d chosen to, I could have partaken in a conversation with that couple. One particular five-seater had a loudly guffawing lady whose exaggerated laughter often distracted us from our own conversation. It was a dining room not designed for a Michelin-star experience, and saw some diners awkwardly irreverent and others just enjoying the expensive meal. I’m not very hard to please, but when you pay as much as ₹1,00,000 for a table of two, you’re expecting to be the director of the experience, which wasn’t the case here. In fact, there was no intimacy to the experience.

I remember thinking about that time when I bought a spot for chef Daniel Humm’s eight-course pop-up at Mumbai’s St. Regis hotel as part of The World Series by American Express. This was back when his Michelin-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park was still serving non-vegetarian food. The lunch was served in a ballroom converted into a dining space, and we were several strangers seated together at the same table. Back then too the food tasted like it was suffering from cultural jet lag.

When I compare it to my most memorable experiences of Michelin-star restaurants, I realise that it is never just one aspect. It is the hospitality, the environment, the experience of being taken care of at the highest levels of service, combined with a balanced menu of brilliant food, that makes such as meal memorable. Some of us stayed back and chatted after the Bottura dinner, but all of us had the same question: what did you think? The answers quickly flitted to the question of that risotto and its done-ness, before the consensus that, well, this is the best option before getting to Modena.