Nobody tells you the most important lesson of your career will be delivered quietly, over five overturned containers, and a béarnaise sauce described as hot mayonnaise with bits and pieces.
When I moved from Delhi to Bombay (now known as Mumbai) a month after getting married, I had a carefully curated list of things I was worried about. Finding a place to live. Figuring out the local trains. Not looking completely lost in a city where everyone seemed to already know exactly where they were going, why they were going there, and probably also what they’d have for dinner when they arrived.
As it turned out, I had worried about entirely the wrong things, which is a special talent of mine that I’ve managed to carry into adulthood.
My real problem was discovering, on the very first day, that I was significantly less good than I thought I was. Not slightly off. Not in need of minor calibration. I mean the kind of gap that makes you wonder if the version of yourself you’d been carrying around in your head had been filed incorrectly from the beginning. That was my actual welcome to Bombay, and it was delivered not by the city but by a béarnaise sauce.
I had never been to Bombay before the move. Delhi was home in every real sense: I knew it, I understood it, it made sense to me, and it had the good manners to make sense back. Bombay was something else entirely. Loud, fast, and completely indifferent to the fact that I had just arrived, was newly married, and was doing my absolute best impression of someone who had everything sorted. Inside, the questions were considerably less calm: Where do I live? How do the trains work? Why is everyone walking like they’re already twenty minutes late for something that happened yesterday?
But the excitement was genuine, because I had landed a job at The Oberoi Towers, in their fine dining French restaurant, Café Royal. For a young chef, this was a very big deal indeed. The kind of place that could genuinely shape your career, or, as I found out fairly quickly, take one look at who you think you are, raise a quiet eyebrow, and suggest with some diplomacy that you might want to start again from the very beginning.
The kitchen was unlike anything I had worked in before. It had the particular quiet of a place that takes itself seriously, where the standards didn’t need to be explained or announced because they were simply there, in everything, in the air itself. Nothing slipped through unexamined. Not almost right, not nearly there, not good enough for now. Absolutely right, or not acceptable. Those were the only two items on the menu, and the kitchen had been running that way long before I arrived and had no plans to introduce a third option in my honour.
I knew within the first hour that this was going to be uncomfortable.
My first day was on the sauces section. The morning started with breakfast room service, which I navigated without any visible catastrophes, and I considered this a minor personal triumph of the sort that deserved at least a quiet internal celebration. Then came setting up the station for lunch: four soups, seven sauces, the full spread. I moved through it all with the quiet confidence of a man who genuinely believed he knew what he was doing, which, I would shortly discover, is a very particular kind of confidence.
By 11:45, everything was arranged neatly in the bain-marie. I stepped back and surveyed the station. It looked good. Organised. Professional, even. I felt the specific calm satisfaction of someone who believes the situation has been thoroughly handled, which, as anyone who has ever felt that way knows, is usually the moment the situation prepares to introduce itself properly.
The sous chef, Chef Karve, arrived to check the station. He went through everything one by one, tasting and checking and saying very little, calm and methodical in the way someone is calm when they’ve done this a thousand times and have absolutely no intention of lowering the bar simply because a new person has arrived from Delhi with good intentions and a confidence that had not yet been stress-tested.
Then the containers started coming out, one by one, each one emptied with a short explanation and the same line at the end: “Do it again, Chef.” Five containers in total. Two soups, three sauces, all to be remade before lunch, which was not very far away at all.
Then he got to the béarnaise. I had genuinely believed it was fine. I had made béarnaise before, and béarnaise and I were, I thought, on reasonably good terms, the kind of professional relationship built on mutual respect and moderate success. Chef Karve looked at it for a moment and said, with complete composure, that it was “hot mayonnaise with some bits and pieces.”
If you have never had your cooking described quite like that in a professional kitchen, in front of colleagues you have known for less than a day, I can tell you that it is a formative experience. There was no shouting, no drama, no theatrical moment designed to make a point. Just a quiet, accurate description of what I had produced, and somehow that was considerably worse than any shouting could have been, because there was nothing to argue with, nothing to defend against, and nobody being unkind. They were simply not going to send that sauce out. The humiliation was total, efficient, and delivered at room temperature.
And that was how the Do It Again era of my life began.
These days, a young chef in a similar situation has options. Look it up, watch a video, find a forum, send a voice note to someone who’ll talk you through it in real time while you both pretend it’s a casual conversation and not an emergency. Back in those days, there was none of that. No Google, no YouTube, no patient digital voice explaining in reassuring tones exactly where the emulsification had gone wrong and what you might try instead. Just the stove, and the expectation that you’d keep going until you got it right, however long that took.
I won’t pretend I handled it with grace. I felt embarrassed. I felt exposed. I felt like the gap between the chef I thought I was and the chef I actually was had just been measured publicly, and it was not a small gap. It was the kind you couldn’t argue your way around, and once you’d seen it, you didn’t forget it.
But Chef Karve wasn’t doing any of it to make a point about me personally. He wasn’t being unkind and he wasn’t enjoying himself at my expense. He was simply maintaining the standard of the restaurant, a standard that had existed long before I arrived and was not going to shift because I’d had a stressful morning and could have done with a moment of encouragement. My job was to meet it, not my version of it, not my best effort under the circumstances, but the actual standard. That is a hard thing to accept when you’re young, because when you’re young, you feel very strongly that effort should count for something, that someone should at least acknowledge you tried really hard and were operating under pressure. Great kitchens are not especially moved by that argument. They want to know if the food is right.
What came next was just repetition. The same preparations, done again and again, corrected again and again, until they were right. It wasn’t glamorous. Some days it was genuinely tedious in the way that all important things occasionally are. But it was the thing that actually built the chef in me, not theory, not enthusiasm, not the confidence I’d arrived with, but the daily, unglamorous requirement to do it again until it was right.
And quietly, without me fully noticing, something shifted. The sauces started coming out right the first time. The corrections got fewer. The judgement got sharper. What had felt like pressure started to feel like rhythm, and I wasn’t just cooking to a standard anymore but starting to own it, to know before anyone tasted it whether it was right or not.
That is the thing no shortcut can give you. The internal compass, the one that tells you before the spoon reaches anyone’s mouth, only gets built one way: through repetition, correction, and the refusal to let almost-right be good enough.
About ten days in, during a mise en place check, Chef Karve went through everything methodically, looked at me, and said there was nothing to do again. No applause, no speech, no ceremony of any kind. Just the clean, quiet absence of a problem. And it was, without any exaggeration, one of the best moments of my entire career, because by then I understood exactly what it had taken to get there.
I also understood something else, which was that this experience was going to follow me everywhere I went: not as a bad memory, but as a standard, a voice in the back of my head for every kitchen I ever ran, every menu I ever built, every team I ever trained. Is it right? Or do we do it again? Those two questions, it turns out, are the foundation of everything worth doing properly.
I never again compromised on the quality of what went out of any kitchen I worked in. Not because someone was watching, not because I was afraid of getting caught, but because I had learned through that kitchen, through Chef Karve, through five overturned containers and one memorably insulted béarnaise, that the right way is the only way worth bothering with.
The best mentors I’ve had in my life rarely gave speeches. They just made me do it again, and again, and again, until getting it right stopped feeling like effort and became simply the only way I knew how to work.
Continue reading Volume 1a of The SHIVRA Series: Beyond the Pass — How 30 Years Redefined the Professional Kitchen.
