The Chef You Know, The Vikas Khanna You Don't - By Vir Sanghvi

There is an essential paradox to Vikas Khanna. At one level, he is extraordinarily humble and accessible. He talks to everyone - whether it is his friend Shah Rukh Khan or a fan meeting him for the first time - with the same degree of respect and attention. He is conscious of his fame but even more conscious that it can inconvenience other people.

Some years ago, I was waiting for him at a restaurant in Bangalore. The moment he walked in, all the chefs in the open kitchen abandoned their stations and ran to mob him and to ask him for selfies. Vikas was friendly and obliging and posed for every picture. But he also realised that he had disrupted the service because the kitchen had stopped functioning as the chefs had turned into fan-boys. So he went to every single table and apologised for the disruption.

Last month, he wanted to go to the popular Benne restaurant in Mumbai. When he got there, he saw that there was a queue for tables and, of course, those waiting in line recognised him and chaos seemed set to ensue. He got back into his car and quietly drove away.

Also Read: Zohran Mamdani Breaks Ramadan Fast With Vikas Khanna At Chef's Bungalow Restaurant In New York

That's the essential humility of Vikas Khanna, and when he sat down with me for a long and exhaustive conversation for the launch episode of my Table One podcast, we talked about incidents like these.

But the more we talked, the more I came to terms with the Vikas Khanna paradox. Because he wears his fame so lightly - he is not just the best-known Indian chef in history, but his popularity reaches levels that film stars will envy - we all feel we know him. And yet, in reality, we know so little about the man behind the fame and nothing about his motivation. In some ways, the real Vikas is almost unknowable. Unless he is willing to let you look inside.

We know that he is from Amritsar, but how many of us know that one reason he left India to seek his fortune in America is that he was tired of constant harassment. He wearied of the demands of policemen and officials, and the final straw was when they bulldozed his small stall because he would not bow to their demands. He was broken, he says, when that happened.

We know that he won a Michelin star at Junoon in New York, but we forget the years of struggle. At one stage, he cooked tawa chicken on the streets of New York, and when his parents came to visit, they were so distressed that they tried to take him back to Amritsar and to the comfort of the family home.

It's those years of heartbreak and heartache that gave Vikas the desire to make it big. And yet there has never been a master plan for his success. Nobody expected Junoon to get a Michelin star within nine months of opening at a time when Indian food was generally denigrated in America. The MasterChef break came because Uday Shankar, who then ran Star TV, came to Junoon, saw him in the kitchen, and thought he would make the perfect host.

Nobody expected MasterChef to become such a success and to change how chefs were perceived in India especially as the first season (made without Vikas) had not had much impact. And Vikas has stuck with the franchise for 15 years even though he has stopped doing TV in general. With MasterChef, he feels emotionally attached to the show and its contestants.

Nor do most people realise why he opened his wildly popular Bungalow restaurant in New York. We think of Vikas as having been consistently successful over the last decade, but deep inside him, he felt that he had abandoned the path that had first made him successful: the acclaimed restaurant chef.

I was surprised to hear him say on the podcast that Bungalow was a comeback for him, just as the recent super hit movies marked a comeback for Shah Rukh Khan. The New York Times, the only rating that matters in New York, gave Bungalow three stars, making it the only Indian restaurant in this century to have received this accolade.

In America, Bungalow's success is legendary but in India, we underestimate what success in New York, the world's restaurant capital, means. When Bungalow opens for reservations for the week, every single table gets sold within ten seconds. Vikas keeps tables for walk-ins so every night, in rain or in snow, a long queue forms outside the restaurant. People will wait for hours to get in because a table at Bungalow is so prized.

Most chefs would get arrogant with this level of success, but Vikas personally goes to every table. If there is an elderly person or a differently abled guest, he will go to the reception area and personally escort them to their tables. If you are celebrating a birthday, he will bring the cake and the candles to your table himself. It's become so much a part of the legend of Bungalow that even people who are not celebrating anything will say that it's their birthday just to get time with Vikas. He says he often knows when people are bluffing, but is good-natured about it.

And yet, even the success of Bungalow masks a deeper motivation. For Vikas, the success of Bungalow is his sister Radhika's, not his own. Radhika moved to America, looked after him, and became the key figure in his life. When she fell seriously ill, Vikas was devastated. In the several months that she was in the hospital, not only did Vikas get her the best medical treatment available, but he also refused to let her eat hospital food, cooking three meals a day for her.

When he lost her in 2022, it was like a part of him had died. I remember talking to him during that terrible phase and wondering how he would have the strength to go on. In the end, he finally put his life back together again by devoting it to Radhika's legacy and memory. He refuses to take credit for Bungalow's fame and prominence and attributes them to Radhika's blessings. He knows, he says, that wherever Radhika is now, she is still looking after him.

He is slightly more together now, but in the years immediately after she passed, he was unable to talk about her without his eyes filling with tears.

I found, while talking to him for the podcast, that you cannot know the real Vikas Khanna if you only focus on the fame and the success and get distracted by his effortless charm. Deep in his heart, there is pain and vulnerability. He has got over the setbacks of the early years, the racism he faced in the West when he started and the struggles. But they have left their mark. And behind his cheerful manner on MasterChef, there is loneliness, and there are unshed tears.

It is to his credit that he has turned the pain of losing Radhika into motivation for creating one of America's greatest restaurants. And it is a mark of his essential decency that in every situation, instead of focusing on his own heartbreak, he focuses on making the people he is with feel comfortable.

I have known him well for 15 years, but it was only when he spoke so honestly during the podcast that I realised why the money and the success no longer matter so much to him. It's love, kinship and human relationships that count for
him.

Vikas is as human as the rest of us. And his decency and humanity make him the man that he is.

(Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author