When dining at a restaurant, who tosses your salad, grills your steak or stirs the wok? If you’re drawing a blank, join the rest of us.
We meet servers and build a rapport with them, but the actual people who plan a menu and whip up our mouthwatering dishes remain a mystery hidden behind kitchen doors.
However, with food lovers’ increasing desire to expand their knowledge of multicultural cuisine and their swelling support for responsible stewardship among gardeners, farmers and ranchers, the St. Albert Gazette plans to fill the gap.
On the first Saturday of every month, we will run a special Trending feature titled Chef’s Table that highlights a chef or cook from one of St. Albert’s diverse restaurants.
We launch Chef’s Table with Lokesh Jadon, executive chef of Tandoori Fuzion, a relatively new East Indian restaurant that offers an exquisite cooking style rooted in a blend of various age old cultures, eras and spices.
Step into Tandoori Fuzion and the first thing that catches your eye is a metre-high statue of Ganesh, immediately recognizable as the elephant-headed Hindu deity that provides prosperity, fortune and success.
But it’s the restaurant’s aromas that hook you with seductive, come-hither seasonings that to Canadians seem very exotic.
The selection of fragrant curries is a personal expression of executive chef Lokesh Jadon. Born in India’s province of Uttar Pradesh, the experienced chef aims to introduce authentic Indian food that won’t put a hole in your wallet.
His menu is tightly focused and marries traditional recipes with contemporary Canadian palates.
“Many Canadians don’t want real spicy food. They just want a touch of spice. They want to enjoy the flavour. It’s a challenge for us,” Jadon states with a smile.
He’s overcome the challenges by including appetizers, entrees, soups, salads, breads, naans, vegetarian dishes and tandoori delights.
The popular perception is that East Indian cuisine is only vegetarian. Jadon shatters that myth serving meat and seafood specialties that range from chicken, beef and lamb to fish and shrimp.
He is a humble guy and when asked what his culinary philosophy is, he answers simply, “We cannot compromise with frozen foods. It has a different taste. I push hard to always have fresh ingredients.”
Raised in a farming family, his parents grew wheat, corn, vegetables and fruit. The youngest of four children, he learned to cook at a young age.
“We grew our own vegetables and cooked fresh food. We didn’t go shopping,” said Jadon. One of his mother’s most popular home cooked dishes is paneer, a classic Indian dish of cooked spinach with cubes of fresh paneer cheese thickened with cream and onion-masala gravy that inspired Tandoori Fuzion’s menu.
“My favourite food is everything I cook. I really like tandoori. It’s healthy and it has a smoked flavour.”
As a youngster, the idea of becoming a chef never crossed Jadon’s mind.
“I always dreamed about being an engineer – something that had an attractive profile.”
As captain of the cricket team, he placed a greater effort in sports and his grades fell below the mark for university acceptance.
Instead at 17, he enrolled at Institute of Hotel Management in Chandigarh in a culinary program and apprenticed at various New Delhi restaurants and hotels.
He polished his skills at numerous kitchen stations with experiences ranging from cheffing at a mom and pop operation called the Blue Onion to the luxury Maurya Sheraton New Delhi.
The pungent curry station, where chefs develop knowledge and create their own personal blends, aroused the greatest interest. Understanding how curries interact and balance each other is the foundation of Indian cuisine.
While Canadians often assume that curry powder is one spice, in fact curry is a blend of many spices that could include curry leaves, tamarind, coriander, ginger, garlic, chili, pepper, poppy seeds, mustard seeds, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, cumin, nutmeg, coconut and turmeric root powder.
“Every spice has its own importance, its own flavour and it makes a different taste and a different aroma. Different spices give food different signatures.”
Jadon would also like to dispel the notion that spices equate to heat.
“Spicy doesn’t mean it’s hot. Europeans have been going to India to trade for hundreds of years. We have many spices. They give flavour, not hotness. Hotness only comes from pepper and chilis.”
Wanting to see the world outside India, Jadon immigrated to Canada in 2012 and started working at the Overtime Pub in Sherwood Park before receiving the opportunity to create his specialties at Tandoori Fuzion.
Black Pepper Chicken, his knockout signature dish, was created after a patron requested a new creation, something unavailable elsewhere.
“In the beginning we sautĂ©ed it and realized people didn’t give it a good response. We started baking it in the tandoori and added different spices. When we cooked it in the tandoori, the juice stayed in it so it was more flavourful.”
Another regular customer that heartily relishes Indian cuisine brought in a surprise load of vegetables.
“He gave us carrots and we had no idea what to make. So I made a carrot curry soup and people really like it.”
About 90 per cent of Tandoor Fuzion’s clientele is Canadian and the most popular dish ordered is butter chicken. Having grown up in a close family, Jadon hopes families will make Tandoori Fuzion a social gathering place while learning more about Indian food culture.
