Chef Dipna Anand from london’s renowned restaurant, Brilliant, is on a mission to promote healthy Indian cooking and goodness of curries. She talks to Divya Kaushik about taking forward the family legacy through a recipe book
Once you know that chef Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity bad boy who is known for his knack for perfection, was at some restaurant to not grill the owners but to learn, the restaurant does not require further merit. Such is the case with Southall’s Brilliant. The chef was at the Indian family run restaurant to learn how to cook Indian food as part of his TV show Cookalong live. The restaurant is famous across london for its Punjabi food with Kenyan influence. And lately there’s another feature that’s drawing more crowd to Brilliant — the restaurant is serving “healthy Indian food” and promoting the goodness of Indian spices through its dishes. It is thanks to Dipna Anand, the third generation chef from the family, who joined her father’s business owing to her passion and interest in food.
Dipna runs an Indian cookery school, carries out food demos and pop-up chef events and even lectures at The University of West london. She won the national award from The British Nutrition Foundation for her study that spoke about food for heart patients. “That was in a way a turning point as then my father suffered from a heart attack and it was surprising to us as he never drinks or smokes. But it was due to the food, laden with calories, that was causing the harm to his body. Some of us fail to understand that if we only consume Indian food throughout the day, with most of its fried stuff and greasy curries, we are making our bodies prone to a lot of health problems. So I decided to promote healthy Indian food. In my lectures, I have been talking about the health properties of Indian spices and how with a few variations in cooking methods and ingredients, we can make Indian food really healthy.
In my study I presented recipes that can be tweaked to be healthy, like mushrooms stuffed with soya, tandoori salmon marinated in gramflour and low-fat yogurt, mulligatawny soup with crème fresh,” shared Dipna, who not only has been incorporating more healthy options to the Brilliant’s menu but also has come up with a book, titled Beyond Brilliant. It is a recipe book featuring some signature dishes of the restaurant. “It was difficult to incorporate each dish from the menu but I have included the popular ones and the healthy ones. The book is now in Australia, USA and it is getting known worldwide. It is divided in sections and I have also included some dishes that were a part of my brother’s wedding to let people know about the great Indian wedding food,” she said.
Dipna does a lot of research on food and makes sure that while working on healthy recipes, the flavours are not lost. “I believe that in the name of fusion, confusion should not be presented on the platter. For example, you can’t add soya sauce to methi chicken in the name of fusion but you can surely add parsley to enhance the flavour of the dish. likewise, when I am working with our chefs on healthy recipes I often tell them that we may decide to change some ingredients in a dish but that ingredient should blend with the original flavours of the dish. Also I noticed that to prepare any curry chefs fried onions in dollops of butter, that surely add taste but make the dish unhealthy, to save time. I tell the chefs that they should not be lazy and take their time to cook food in less oil to make it healthy. The curry culture has picked up in london and Friday is no more the day for fish and chips but for curries, but no one wants to have a curry with butter floating around,” said Dipna.
As per Dipna, the Kenyan influence in their dishes makes them different from the rest. “My grandfather, Bishen Dass Anand, originally came from India and he used to cook for the maharajas. He decided to open up a small place in Nairobi in 1955. By 1963, Brilliant was an established name. But sadly after his death my father and his brother moved to london after some political problems in Uganda along with other businessmen. My father and his brother decided to carry forward my grandfather’s legacy and thus opened Brilliant in london, which got famous in no time among people who moved from Kenya. One can see a lot of Kenyan influence, in terms of techniques of cooking, in our food,” she said. So far, Dipna has not given a thought to the idea of opening Brilliant in India, but if at all it were to come, “it will serve Indian food with a Kenyan touch.”