MasterChef India 4 winner Nikita Gandhi studied about Indian food to face the challenges of innovative vegetarian cooking on the show. She tells Divya Kaushik how this win has given her clarity on what she wants to pursue in the future
All those who were following MasterChef India 4 would have easily guessed the result much before the judges declared their verdict. To see Nikita Gandhi emerge as a winner of the reality show was not really a surprise. The three ladies — Nikita Gandhi, Neha Shah and Bhakti Arora — who sustained the challenge of innovative vegetarian cooking truly deserved to be at the top spot in the show. We chatted with Nikita a few hours after the big announcement. Celebrations were still on and Nikita was only busy giving interviews. “It’s like living a dream,” said Nikita, who was born and brought up in Abu Dhabi.
For Nikita, India was nothing more than a vacation destination which she was “not too fond of.” She would come here with her parents to meet relatives. “My parents were born in India but my father moved to Abu Dhabi at a very young age and settled there. So I was born and brought up in Abu Dhabi. Though I often came to India, I never liked spending time here. After staying here for a week, I would tell my parents that I wanted to leave. Then I did not realise that it will be in India where I would get a direction for life,” shared Nikita. But thanks to her mother that she was well-versed about Indian cooking that helped her immensely in the show. “I think it was the combination of my knowledge of Indian food and exposure to world cuisine that helped me carve my own identity. Even when I was not staying in India, food that was cooked at home was mostly Indian and I always followed my mother on what she was cooking. As a child I used to accompany her in the kitchen. When I was eight, I made chocolate cup cakes and those are my first memories of experiments in the kitchen. So I nurtured cooking as a habit since childhood and since I was passionate about food, I always tried to know more about it through books and TV shows. Before we started to shoot this season of the reality show I studied about Indian food to prepare myself for the challenges,” added Nikita.
Despite her passion for food, Nikita dropped the idea of joining a culinary school and rather decided to go to a business school and majored in finance. “I was playing safe. like many students, even I was confused about the course of my career. Many people told me that hotel management courses are a lot of hard work and even after completing a course, there’s no surety on what you will end up as. But I always craved for it. That was when MasterChef India happened and I thought that it would be a good platform for learning. Most of the modern cooking techniques that are now being used in restaurants were unknown to me. But now I am well-equipped,” she said. About her strengths and weaknesses that she discovered while being on the show, she said, “I believe that it is very important to work clean. It was a practise to me to always clean my counter and I think that helps in clarity of thought as well. I was never able to present my dish as I wanted to because of limited time, I feel that was my biggest weakness. I still need to work on my plating.”
After winning Rs1 crore as the prize money, Nikita is sure to join a culinary school. “Now I know where my heart lies, so I would join a culinary school soon. I really need to learn a lot. I will surely return to India because this is the place where I got the direction,” she ended.