This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
Vanika Choudhary is surrounded by a mind-bending array of salts, pickles and ferments. There are yuzu-fermented cherries, achars (pickles) made from swede-like tamyung from Ladakh and herby Himalayan salt. “It’s my way of spotlighting and preserving recipes and foraged ingredients that are precious to our country but never make it to the mainstream dining scene,” she says.
The founder of Mumbai’s fine-dining restaurant Noon is in London for a two-day residency at restaurant 180 Corner. It’s part of an international tour, during which she’s been gilding her reputation for creating innovative dishes that offer a taste of India’s regions. Last night, her 10-course tasting menu revealed her flair for marrying flavour and texture, with dishes including charcoal-grilled lamb in a fermented pumpkin marinade, foraged mushroom with fava bean miso and sourdough roti served alongside pungent wild garlic and plump, yellow chilli-daubed lobster.
Eight years ago, Choudhary quit her job as COO of a media company to pursue her vision of fostering a farm-to-table movement in India’s largest city. She didn’t complete any formal training, focusing instead on absorbing culinary knowledge from her family, before opening her first venture, Sequel, in Mumbai in 2016. She set aside time each day to expand her knowledge of ingredients and take courses in culinary nutrition — resulting in Sequel’s focus on seasonal, organic produce and dishes that reflect her upbringing in the Kashmir city of Jammu.
Here, close to the foothills of the Himalayas, her father, a silk producer and botanist, would nurture crops and sun-dry morels on the roof. Meanwhile, her mother and grandmother would use a pestle and mortar to pound seasonal achars: mango in summer, fiddlehead ferns during the monsoon, galgal (aka hill lemons) and kohlrabi in winter. And when Choudhary was pregnant and living in Mumbai, craving the flavours of her childhood — gucchi pulao (pilau with morels) and kanji (a fermented carrot drink) — the concept for her next venture, Noon, gathered pace. “Everything I’d observed in our kitchen growing up shaped me as a cook,” she says. “But as much as I loved eating my grandmother’s food, I realised that for Noon, I wanted to create a new language for Indian food, based upon our incredible indigenous produce.”
So began a creative journey that saw Choudhary return to Jammu to finesse her family’s recipes and spend time in the mountains, followed by a transformative period at the monastery of Buddhist monk and revered chef Jeong Kwan in South Korea, which enhanced her understanding of ancient preservation techniques.
Noon opened in 2022, and its menu is informed by up to 150 ferments — including miso, mead, garums (fermented fish sauce), vinegars and kombuchas — that take inspiration from Korea and Japan but spotlight indigenous Indian ingredients. “It’s fascinating to observe the alchemy of fermentation — how air, water, salt, mustard oil or spices completely changes an ingredient’s flavour profile,” Choudhary says. She adds that India’s own rich history of preservation — from the achars found in every home to regional specialities such as kanji or sader kaenz (a fermented rice-water drink) — is often overlooked. “The onus on us as chefs is to preserve this legacy and carry it forward,” she notes.
The menu at Noon takes inspiration from Korea and Japan but spotlights indigenous Indian ingredients.
Photograph by Assad Dadan
That same intent drives the links Choudhary has forged with rural communities and farming collectives in India. In the north, she works with Ladakh Basket, a Kashmiri social enterprise comprising 35 women farmers, and she has similar connections in the Western Ghats, in the south. “When it comes to bringing about social change, it’s not just about establishing financial freedom for these women — it’s also about impacting biodiversity,” Choudhary says.
She’s also keen to address the decline in foraging she’s seen in many of India’s more remote regions in recent years. Choudhary showcases wild foods at her restaurants in an effort to revive the practice and retain vital skills — and she’s already seeing the impact.
“These people [in remote areas] are going back to foraging, which was something they’d stopped doing, and now, for the first time, that produce is being used in a restaurant,” she says. Across a vast country where recipes and methods can vary hugely over short distances, Choudhary works with remote rural populations with the aim of keeping alive micro cuisines and their stories. “A lot of our culinary traditions are oral, and that’s why it’s important to spend time with tribal communities, to understand where our food culture comes from and how we’ve evolved — they’re our best teachers,” she says. “As a chef, I genuinely believe you can’t look at food in a progressive way unless you know the history behind it.”
Choudhary hopes more people will become aware of the huge diversity within Indian cooking. This ambition plays out at Noon through menus accompanied by maps of India that chart the origins of ingredients and influences, whether that’s fermented sourdough rotis from the north, mahua trees from Central and Southern India or the ubiquitous jackfruit, whose use in savoury achars Choudhary subverts by making ice cream with it.
Choudhary opened her first venture, Sequel, in Mumbai in 2016 without any formal culinary training after quitting her job as a COO.
Photograph by Assad Dadan
Some dishes, such as crab pani puri, take inspiration from Indian street-food snacks or traditional workers’ staples, and are given an elevated twist, while others are based around seasonality. Among Choudhary’s favourite ingredients are Kashmiri morels, fiddlehead ferns, which appear during the rainy season in the Himalayan belt, and Ladakh’s skotse (a garlicky herb that only grows above 18,000ft), which Choudhary’s team picks, sun-dries and compresses into fragrant bundles.
The chef is currently writing her first book and has further international collaborations in the diary, but she still sets aside time for foraging trips, whether in Kashmir, Ladakh or the Western Ghats. “Unless you’re out there, you’re not being curious enough and you won’t be aware of what’s hyper seasonal, which is an intrinsic part of foraging. Without this you can’t create a menu,” she says.
Back at Noon, Choudhary and her team experiment with a range of techniques to turn this rich inspiration into a constantly evolving menu. “Research and development is a massive part of what we do and it’s this process that encourages you as a cook to push boundaries to create something new,” she says. “You learn from the past and you ferment the future.”
Published in Issue 23 (spring 2024) of Food by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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