The Ultimate Culinary Tour of India

I had joined the group late, along with Suzanne Goin (chef-owner of the Los Angeles restaurant Lucques) and her husband, David Lentz (chef-owner of the Hungry Cat in Hollywood), at Ahilya Fort, an 18th-century palace set in the 4,000-year-old town of Maheshwar, in Madhya Pradesh. Formerly a private home, Ahilya has operated as a boutique hotel since 2000, a bohemian oasis in a part of India otherwise untouched by tourism. With no other guests staying there, it feels like a relaxed house party. On arrival, we are whisked off onto the Narmada River in wooden boats by Prince Richard Holkar, the son of the last Maharaja of Indore, who now runs the hotel. As the sun sets, a thousand flickering candles float peacefully on the water. We each place a votive nestled in a leaf holder into the current, adding our wishes to the cluster of glimmering flames.

We spend our days at Maheshwar lounging by the secluded pool, strolling through the fort’s shady organic gardens, and exploring the majestic ruins of the nearby abandoned 13th-century city of Mandu. If we travel to escape the mundanity of our own worlds, to experience that elusive magic of elsewhere, then in Maheshwar we find a fairy tale. On our last night at Ahilya, we dress for a banquet—the men in red turbans and women in rainbow-hued silk saris, each beautifully woven by women in a nearby cooperative we visited that morning. Standing in the palace’s turret at sunset, Judy, Cristina, and I, in blushing pink, deepest black, and ice blue, are princesses in a tower, if only for a night.

A thali at Shree Thaker Bhojanalay, a Gujarati vegetarian restaurant in Mumbai.

Gentl and Hyers

Dinner is served at a long, lantern-lit table in the fort’s garden, the hum of cicadas trilling in the background. Our guide, Sameer, talks us through the plentiful and unfamiliar flavors on the thali plates in front of us, and he regales us with stories of his own family’s kitchen. His mother, he insists, makes an even better curry—in fact, she makes the best curry. We observe that the kitchen at Ahilya, like the one at the lunch joint in Mumbai, is utterly basic. And yet out of it comes dish upon dish of exquisite beauty: duck in pomegranate sauce, jackfruit biryani, banana in smoked yogurt, tomato curry, many varieties of naan and chapati, still warm to the touch. Our various meals in India have excited us with the possibilities of new spices and preparations. At the same time, the food tradition’s emphasis on family and history, as well as its seeming contradictions—deriving complex flavors from elemental ingredients, eating with your hands in even the finest settings—is a useful reminder to us all of what we have long believed in: the value of simplicity and humility in cooking.