From journalist to celeb chef, the legend of Jiggs Kalra

June 17, 2019 11:28

'When I first met Jiggs in the early 1980s, neither of us had any idea of what a big deal he would eventually become. Jiggs had started out in regular journalism (with Khushwant Singh's The Illustrated Weekly of India) and had moved on, nearly a decade later, to becoming a full-time food specialist.

'While his food journalism was fine, there wasn't much call for food writers in those days.So Jiggs became an all-round food expert. In that era (the 1980s), Indian food was divided into three categories: what we ate at home, what the great cooks of the streets and the traditional restaurants served up and the cuisine they taught at Catering College.

'Nearly all hotel kitchens were run by Catering College graduates who were all content to turn out roughly the same sort of food at restaurant after restaurant. Jiggs is the man who broke that pattern,' writes Vir Sanghvi of Jiggs Kalra, the man who created the cult of celebrity chef and redefined what we ate at restaurants, in the Hindustan Times, here.

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