Why Assamese-Burmese salad Lato means home to Michelin star Chef Garima Arora

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(Express Photo by Amit Chakravarty) Make us preferred source on Google Whatsapp twitter Facebook Reddit PRINT There’s always a dish you would like to see at the table the minute you are home. For chef Garima Arora, that is Lato. She is not sure if the name is correct or if it has retained its authenticity or how much it has been ‘Punjabified’. Her grandmother spent a few years in Assam where she picked up the salad from her Burmese neighbours and soon it became a favourite with Arora, her grandfather and father. Her memories of having it go back to when she was as old as her three-year-old son Aham, who sits on the kitchen counter top as Arora roasts besan for the salad — a nice brown, not burnt. “For the longest time, Lato was something that my father made. I was 15 or 16 the first time I made it.” Dressed in a lime top and grey denims, Arora is at ease the afternoon we meet her at her parents’ home in Navi Mumbai. Aham runs around with a white dinosaur toy while her one-year-old daughter Asmi takes a nap. The past decade has been eventful for Arora, both personally and professionally. She earned two Michelin stars for her restaurant Gaa in Bangkok — one in 2018 and then in 2023 — becoming the first Indian woman to do so; judged MasterChef India, giave birth to Aham, opened Banng in Gurugram while she was pregnant with Asmi and then, launched Banng in Mumbai. She is now set to open another restaurant — Yaari at the Waldorf Astoria in Kuala Lumpur. It is “an Indian restaurant, more casual and accessible than Gaa… as casual as a Waldorf Astoria will let you be.” None of it, however, would have been possible without her solid support system. “I have an incredibly supportive husband (Rahul Verma),” she laughs, “I genuinely couldn’t have ordered a better one if I could on Amazon. He is perfect.” He paused his career as a commercial pilot, moved to Bangkok and took care of the kids so she could work. Then, there’s her father, who is her sounding board. It was he who inculcated her love for cooking. “He travelled a lot, and whenever he returned, he recreated flavours he had eaten,” she says, adding, “It instilled a curiosity in me — this need to chase new flavours. Food has to make you think.” But being a culinarian wasn’t her first choice. She studied Mass Media from Jai Hind, Mumbai, and worked at The Indian Express for a year before a trip to Singapore changed the course of her life. “That’s where I had a hotpot for the first time and wanted to have it again once I was back. So I just made it.” “I was shocked,” Arora’s mother interjects. “I used to wonder if she could even make a cup of tea?” But that did not deter her father from supporting her when she said she wanted to study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. After a year there, she worked in Dubai with Gordon Ramsay for a year and a half, then with his head chefs, followed by a two-and-a-half- year-long stint at Noma in Copenhagen. Bangkok was meant to be another pitstop. “I was supposed to spend two months there before moving to India as head chef for a restaurant Gaggan (Anand) was planning. The India project never happened. Meanwhile, investors appeared and Gaa was born,” says Arora who ended up spending nine years in the Thai capital. Helming a restaurant for the first time, in a foreign country was an unprecedented challenge for her. Her approach to building Gaa was shaped by her “journalistic training.” “I need to answer the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of a dish.” This methodical thinking gave Gaa its identity, food that is recognisably Indian without being a dish you have tasted before. Indian technique, she believes, is so fundamentally itself that applied to any ingredient, from any geography, the result is still Indian. “The way we bhuno things, the way we layer spices — these are so instinctive that we have never needed to catalogue them. But that’s what makes it Indian.” When she put tandoori durian on the menu as a main course, people told her she would lose her first Michelin star. She put it, nevertheless. The durian is grilled in the tandoor with chilli and amchoor, and served with condiments, pickle and a take on missi roti — you spread the gooey, caramelised, savoury-sweet interior onto the bread like butter. “If I lose my star, I lose my star. I’m not going to not put it on the menu thinking about the stars,” she recalls, adding that while she always wants the stars, she never creates dishes keeping them in mind. The tandoori durian, turns out, is what got Gaa its second star. “One inspector was reportedly blown away by it,” she shares. Gaa opened in 2017 and earned its first Michelin star a year later. Retaining it and getting a second one, she says, is about discipline and presence. “I’m at the restaurant every single day when I’m in Bangkok. It takes a lot to get me out of that place. The biggest investment in any restaurant is not money, it’s time.” Back in the living room in Navi Mumbai, the table is laid out with the ten ingredients that are integral to Lato: rice, raw papaya, lime, salt, red chilli, ginger, mint, ghee, boiled potatoes and chickpeas. “We use very little rice. The bulk is raw papaya. It’s an acquired taste, but you don’t have that luxury today. You just have to like it in the first go,” she jokes, while mixing everything. Every time she comes home, this is the first thing she has. Over the last 10 years, before MasterChef and Banng, she only managed to spend a total of two months in India. Now the trips back home have become more frequent — her parents want to spend more time with their grandchildren. She makes Lato in Bangkok too but the papayas there are never quite the same. “Ours are juicier,” she says. The salad is flexible — more or less of anything, as you like. The dish, like most things in her life, is crafted with intention, love and a quiet celebration. This 11-ingredient recipe was passed down to chef Garima Arora by her grandmother, who lived in Assam. It is her reinterpretation of the Burmese dish Lahpet Thoke. “This is the dish that brought our family together on Sundays, over endless brunches and plenty of wine. It doesn’t look like much, but you have to try it,” she says. ● Grated raw papaya (10 tbsp per person) ● Mix rice (1 tbsp per person), grated raw papaya (10 tbsp per person), potatoes and chickpeas together. ● Season and toss the mixture with besan, salt, red chili, ginger, lime juice and ghee. ● Garnish with mint before serving Heena Khandelwal is a Special Correspondent with The Indian Express, Mumbai. She covers a wide range of subjects from relationship and gender to theatre and food. To get in touch, write to heena.khandelwal@expressindia.com ... Read More