Go fish!

He says his life reads like Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, and Italy's his best place for any meal. As Indigo shows off its best of 10 years menu (on till april), proprietor Rahul Akerkar picks his 10 best food everything

My favourite ingredient
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Has to be fish. Why? I love fish. I've been eating it since I was a child, I'm a very good Konkan Brahmin. My grandmum was a great cook and she used a lot of fishu2026 so fish it is.u00a0

What we make best

I always take something Maharashtrian and westernise it. And there's always a seafood dish on the menu. What we have right now is this Sea Bass in Panchamrut Sauce, which isn't actually a sauce, it's a condiment made of five nectars.

I first tried Panchamrut years ago when my aunt served it at a meal. I tasted some and thought it would go great with pork chops. So I took the recipe from her and we tried it and didn't go so well with pork chops. We played with the recipe some more and then we thought it would go well with other dishes. Finally it became a sauce for fish, which I thought was the best match.

It isn't that you get these bolts of inspiration from out of the blue. Yes, they come but they need to be tweaked.

My eating hotspots in the city

Thakkar Bhojanalay... they do a thali there I love. Whenever I have chef friends from overseas, I always bring them there to eat stuff. People are amazed at the depth and the variety of vegetarian food.

I like Royal China for their dim sums. I like Trishna for seafood. When Anant Ashram was open in Khotachiwadi, I used to love it. I go to Frangipani at the Trident for pizza and I go to Ming's because it's convenient, closeby. I like Bade Miyan's too. Swati... and many others.

My kinda chefs

I like Michael Romano, the chef of a cafu00e9 in New York. I've learnt a lot from him. I like his approach to food, he does robust, very hearty, very flavourful food. And to me that's what food is. Not fiddly flights of imagination. That's all theatre. I like food where you can roll up your sleeves and dig in and eat.

Then there's Alice Waters of Berkley's Shape Anise. She's the grandmother of California cuisine. Her magic is in the way that her food is cooked so perfectly. The balance on the plate, the harmony on the mouth, all those things, that's where the magic is.

Not whether the lettuce is standing up on the plate, that's not the magic.

What I find amazing about her is that her restaurant is 30-something years old and she's never repeated a menu. They change the menu every day. That's brilliant. It's a set menu of three-four courses, every single day.u00a0

Favourite cuisine

I have no favourite food, it's all mood based. It depends on what my tastebuds want. It could be pani puri, it could be sushi. Sometimes it's comfort food, I need my dal chawal. Sometimes I want something exotic, sometimes I want rogan josh. It's mood based. I love sushi, I love pani puriu2026 I love chaat in general and I love stuff from the grill too.

Countries to eat in

Italy, it's phenomenal. This one time, we'd gone up a mountain in southern Italy. It was lunchtime and we stopped by at an inn. They only had fresh pizza. But they poured wine from their own vineyards and they plucked the olives from their own trees.

And it was cold outside, really cold, and they made this warm fresh pizza with ingredients from their garden and from the ocean which was right nearby. It was the best meal I've ever had. It was correct, it was in the right place, had the right ambience, the right ingredients, everything about it was correct, the food was delicious. It's one of those fantastic memories.

Reading food

I love Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain because I've lived that life. The restaurant industry in New York in the 1980s was all sex drugs and food and rock-n-roll. Chocolat is a beautiful book too. Alice Waters' cookbooks are fantastic, Romano's cookbooks are nice.

Food movie

Julie & Julia was very inspiring, I loved it. I also love Eat Drink Man Woman. Ratatouille makes me cry. Even though it's film, you can imagine what the food tastes like. You can taste flavour in your head. Like musicians play a note in their heads.

Who's better than me?

Everyone. I like what other people do. I believe that a lot of people do things better than I do, I believe all of it is an expression of your own skill, your own hand. Actually, there's nothing better or worse, it's just different.

The most divine food and wine pairing

A nice crisp Sauvignon Blanc let's say with some sushi is fantastic. I eat a lot of red meat, so red steak with a good Shiraz or a Pinot Noir is also a lovely combo.