Kitchen non-confidential

Saransh Goila at his new studio. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi

A behind-the-scenes development took place at Goila's Butter Chicken (GBC) last month. The entire back-end operations of the chain were moved to a central kitchen in Govandi. Housed in an industrial estate, it's spread over 1,500 feet, with a capacity to churn out 500 kg of chicken dishes a day. Initial chinks in the form of an inefficient delivery system were ironed out, owner Saransh Goila tells us, adding that the idea behind the endeavour is to ensure consistency across all GBC outlets in Mumbai.

But now, there is another development. A section of this space has been turned into a kitchen studio. It's a compact room around 200 square feet in size. The wall at the rear end has a couple of shelves displaying jars of condiments, colourful mugs, and decorative potted plants. A kitchen table with a wash basin lies underneath. And the hob on which the actual cooking will take place stands a few feet in front, with the rest of the room kept empty to host either participants for workshops or camera crews for the YouTube shows that Goila plans to film, since the reason he's launched this studio is to open up his culinary world to a larger audience.

"We aren't going to restrict this place to the F&B community. Anybody who loves food and is curious about what a [commercial] kitchen looks like is welcome, because I feel that people in this industry aren't keen to share what happens inside. They don't want to show what sort of appliances they use or how chefs work. Why does it have to be like that?" Goila asks, adding that kitchens are usually considered to be dark, dingy places where one wouldn't want to be working, and he wants to help change that mindset.

So the planned trajectory for the space is to later have around 10 people at a time over for masterclasses. But before that, Goila will film a couple of shows starting tomorrow, one of which - Naani Ki Rasoi Se - he is most enthused about. "It's going be a show where people from different communities share the recipes that their maternal or paternal grandparents have passed down. There will also be video bites that the contributors will share of their naanis and daadis, apart from pictures of the recipe books that have been handed over to the current generation," the chef informs, revealing how - while the rest of the central kitchen is dedicated to increasing GBC's profits - this studio has been set aside as a space where Goila will share the knowledge he accrues about food with the rest of the world.

AT: Goila's Studio, Shah Industrial Estate, Deonar, Govandi East.

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