Chef Rahul Akerkar says he cannot neatly classify his cooking as either Westernised Indian food or Indianised Western food. In a 2020 interview with Scroll Food, he traced it instead to a mixed heritage, memories of his grandmother’s cooking, Indian ingredients and cooks, and techniques he encountered in Western kitchens.
How restaurant work became a career
Akerkar recalls that cooking was not a planned profession. While studying engineering in the United States, he began washing dishes at a small French restaurant in Pennsylvania. A chef from Nice taught him to cook, and restaurant shifts helped him earn money for school. He continued working in restaurants while studying in New York.
After a falling-out with his PhD adviser, he left the program. He tried several kinds of work, but restaurant kitchens remained a constant. His parents encouraged him when he decided to pursue cooking more deliberately. He says he spent about three years developing his kitchen and management experience before returning to India in 1989, intending to open a restaurant.
From Western food at Under The Over to a blended style at Indigo
Akerkar first catered from home, briefly helped establish Just Desserts, and then opened Under The Over in Mumbai. He describes the restaurant as an early effort to cook Western food closer to what he had learned in Western kitchens. Starting a business in that period brought practical obstacles, including financing, licensing and finding premises.
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After a spell in Bangalore, he returned to New York to work at Union Square Cafe while his wife, Malini, continued looking for a Mumbai location. That search led to Indigo. There, he says, his cooking became more openly shaped by Indian preparations, ingredients and flavours alongside Western techniques.
He recalls wanting Indigo to offer careful cooking and service in a professional setting. He treated staff as equals and gave servers room to talk with diners. Akerkar rejects the simple label “fine dining” as a description of what made the restaurant distinctive; in his view, its approach to hospitality, detail, design, food and operations mattered together. That is his account of the restaurant, rather than a settled historical verdict.
What “Westernised” and “Indianised” meant in his cooking
Akerkar’s examples make the blend tangible. One dish paired potato-crusted rawas with basil poha and a sauce inspired by solachi kadhi. Another served fish with a sauce based on his grandmother’s raw mango kairi curry. In both, the point was not simply to add an Indian garnish to a Western plate: a remembered preparation or flavour informed the dish’s structure.
He says he drew on a Maharashtrian background, his mother’s Western European side, and experience with American, French, Mexican, Native American and Italian cooking. At Indigo, Indian cooks and ingredients were part of that process. He emphasised flavour and texture balance over making strict claims of authenticity, and described the guiding principle this way: “The ingredient was our hero. We respected cooking techniques, process and seasonality.”
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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →In the interview, he also recalls Indigo building a 300-label wine list and having a waitlist of four to six months when it first opened. Those are Akerkar’s recollections as reported in 2020, not independently audited or current figures.
How he described Qualia in 2020
In the same interview, Akerkar presented Qualia’s food as lighter and cleaner than Indigo’s, and oriented toward sharing: “Today the food is geared towards sharing.” The feature mentioned tuna loin with avocado pachadi, sesame, curry-leaf dust and pickled beets, as well as charred broccoli and cauliflower with Indian flavours. It also described cooking over coal, charcoal and a wood-burning hearth.
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He identified pickling and fermentation as ways to build complex sweet-sour flavours and preserve seasonal produce for later use. He said some ingredients took six to 12 months to develop. These descriptions belong to the interview’s 2020 snapshot; they should not be read as a current menu or restaurant-status report.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The answer behind the quote
Akerkar’s answer is that the distinction between Westernising Indian food and Indianising Western food is not especially useful for describing his own work. He says the cooking emerged from the ingredients, people, memories and techniques around him. As he put it in the interview, “I don’t know if I have Westernised Indian food or Indianised Western food – I don’t do it all the time, but when I do it, it is pretty good.”
The interview is an edited conversation published by Scroll Food on June 3, 2020. Its career recollections and descriptions are Akerkar’s own; its restaurant details and food examples reflect the time of publication.
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