Sanjeev Kapoor was doing his lap of penance in a neighbourhood park in Mumbai when we catch up with him on a Sunday evening.
“I was at my all-time high (weight). So I have been increasing my activity over the last one month. I don’t like going to the gym. Our work environment is indoors, as it is. So I go out for a walk whenever I can,” Kapoor says over the phone.
He has been jet-setting as usual, with three trips to Dubai itself in February. He runs 70-odd restaurants across the Gulf, three in Toronto and one in Los Angeles, and has signed to open 30 more in the next five years.
His high-end brand, Signature by Sanjeev Kapoor, has yet to open in India but has a presence in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Muscat, and is due to open in Saudi Arabia. The more familiar, Sanjeev Kapoor’s Khazana, is running in Los Angeles and Atlanta, and will soon be in San Francisco.
“We have two Khazana outlets and a Yellow Chilli in Toronto. Ten more will open in the Greater Toronto Area.” Yellow Chilli is the cheapest brand from his stable. “Cheap and cheerful, I call it. My staff doesn’t like the description,” he laughs. Calcutta has one on Bangur Avenue.
His appliance brand Wonder Chef is also doing “very well”. “We need to scale it up,” he muses. It is his TV channel Food Food, launched in 2011, that gets Kapoor the most excited. “We don’t lose money. For a standalone channel, that is a huge achievement.”
CHANNELLING FOOD
Despite the variety of food shows, the primary viewer, Kapoor believes, has not changed. “It’s still people who want to cook. That’s why you have short format how-to videos emerging on social media.”
But channels may play around with the core requirement. “You can start with how to cook Hyderabadi biryani and talk about the culture of Hyderabad. Or in the course of your instructions, you may mention you are using chilli from Sankeshwar (in Karnataka), and cut to Sankeshwar to show how the chilli is grown there.”
For his Food Food channel, Kapoor has crafted a bouquet of shows catering to different segments of consumers and consumption habits.
Filmy Dabba Party peeps into the tiffin boxes that Bollywood stars take to the sets. “We tell you what a Boman Irani or a Farah Khan brings from home and how it is prepared,” says Kapoor, who travels continents, from Africa to Australia, sightseeing, visiting restaurants and meeting chefs to learn about the food and the culture of the place for another show, Out of the World.
Since shows around health garner high viewership, there’s Health Challenge where chefs are given a traditional dish not considered healthy to reinterpret in a healthy way.
Children’s food is another big category, and so there’s Mummy ka Magic. “Mothers are always looking for suggestions on nutritious and tasty dishes,” he adds.
The one reason why Kapoor is the most familiar Indian chef is because he was “one of the early adopters of technology” and has always maxed most of the platforms. sanjeevkapoor.com was one of the early websites to go up from India and before he published his first book, he brought out a CD-ROM.
Eight years ago, he launched a YouTube channel, Sanjeev Kapoor Khazana, which now has over two million subscribers with 20 million views per month. His channel Food Food is a separate vertical and has simultaneous online presence, both on YouTube and social media. There are separate apps too.
If Sanjeev Kapoor is giving out recipes for free on all these media, does he not worry about people not buying his books? “I am too generous, you see,” he laughs, before dissecting the economics at play. “You get paid for each YouTube view. Twitter has just started. Facebook will also start. On apps and websites, there is advertising in any case. There are other platforms like Daily Motion and Vimeo, which are also monetised.” Besides, he packages his books specifically for needs and occasions. “For example, I have a collection of wedding recipes which is a perfect gift. We have two books on diet. We just brought out another one, You’ve Lost Weight.”
The bottomline is that Kapoor takes care to stay ahead of the bend. “When I started a food channel, people had asked if I was mad. You never know what becomes obsolete when. Last year I realised audio was becoming big. You may not understand it yet but soon we will depend on audio a lot.”
To understand the audio medium, Kapoor started a radio show a year ago, taking on the challenge of doing a food show without the visual appeal the screen affords it. “It is a one-hour Sunday noon show called Khana aur Gaana, where a recipe is taught in between songs being played. It is the second most-heard programme on the slot. And I got a call from a Dubai station that they want such a radio show too!”
TEACH AND TRAIN
The first Indian chef to become a household name and achieve stardom, Kapoor believes in creating opportunities to create better professionals. “Ten Sanjeev Kapoors can’t do the job; we need thousands.”
So on Food Food channel he has started a contest called Cook Off that pits catering students against chefs with limited experience. The format does not follow a pyramidal structure; each of the 11 episodes throws up a winner. “Currently there is no platform available for professionals. There has to be some recognition for them,” he says, adding that the proliferation of cooking contests on television has not helped the industry.
“It is easy to do a contest with home cooks and call them chefs. But they don’t join the industry. Even if they try to, the industry does not accept them. They are not trained. They can do pop-up or promotional events as they are known faces, nothing more. A dhaba chef capable of preparing tandoori and roomali roti has a better chance of getting a job than a TV show contestant.”
Elaborating on recruitment trends, Kapoor says even if a hotel or a restaurant recruits a fresher, they take in someone who is willing to put in the hours and learn on the job for Rs 8,000-15,000 a month. “For the first two years, you’d be peeling onions. That is the real work. No one would let you cook a dish.... It’s a lot of hard work in the kitchen. I too went through the rounds of peeling onions, cleaning tiles, washing dishes,” he says.
Three decades ago, when Kapoor was a newcomer in the industry, there were just four hotel management institutes – one each in Chennai, Mumbai, Calcutta and Pusa (in Delhi), from where he graduated. “The students had spent thousands to get in expecting to become managers in five-star hotels. But when they passed out, most got jobs as trainee waiters. Look at the kiosks in airports and elsewhere. Who cooks there? Such is the disillusionment that they shift to better-paying jobs like in call centres. Barely 15 per cent in a batch stay on in the profession. Those who survive the grind do well. People should come with eyes open about the future.”
With private hotel management institutes coming in, the focus is on employability. “The course material, training, internship should all be geared towards creating skill sets. Some, like the International Institute of Hotel Management in Calcutta, are doing a great job.”
An hour and 35 minutes have gone by. A message flashes on Kapoor’s fitness band: “New mission achieved.” “I have reduced two and half kilos of the five I put on in winter. I will take care of the rest too.”
Sure, he will, unless another Calcutta trip comes along and he must park his car outside VIP Sweets and pick up 100g of this and that and some mishti doi and polish it all off on the way. “I don’t just love to cook. I love to eat too,” he protests, laughing.
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FEEDING CRICKETERS
An India-Bangladesh series was on. Harbhajan (Singh) and (Virender) Sehwag walked into our restaurant in Dhaka and ordered our signature dish Lalla Massa Daal. It is very rich. Harbhajan said: ‘Kal coach paanch chakkar aur bhagayenge toh sahi... par koi baat nahin’ and dug in.
Now there is more control on the food that sportspersons eat but that does not mean they do not love to eat. Virat Kohli owns a fancy restaurant in Delhi (Nueva). That’s proof of his love for good food, right?
SK’S HEALTH TIPS FOR CHEFS
- Regulate your life.
- Don’t eat everything, just taste.
- More eating would mean more burning of calories.
- Don’t use the elevator, take the stairs.
A recipe of your father’s that you still follow
The mutton curry that he used to make was amazing and I still use that recipe.
A chef whose show you like watching
I find Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver very interesting.
Your comfort food
Khichri.
A food street you love
Sarafa in Indore.
A favourite food movie
Chocolat. I liked Cheeni Kum too.
Favourite street food in Calcutta
Behind Stock Exchange, early morning tea and toast.... And opposite Gangaur on Park Street, there’s a jhalmuri place, I buy from there whenever I am here.