Turning up the eat: Vir Sanghvi interviews chef-restaurateur Garima Arora of Banng

She has worked at Noma, set up restaurants in Bangkok, earned two Michelin stars. See how she made it back home, to set up Banng in Gurugram and Mumbai.

How does a young journalist in Mumbai, who doesn’t really know how to cook but wonders if she could open a restaurant one day, end up chef-owner of a world-renowned establishment in a foreign country, winning two Michelin stars at the age of 36?

(Photo via Lah)

The story of Garima Arora is remarkable by any standards, not just because of what she has achieved but because of how singular her journey has been.

After college, she began her career with The Indian Express and quickly realised, she says, that she wasn’t cut out for journalism. Her father, Anil Arora, had always promised to pay for a postgraduate course abroad. He had imagined she would want to do an MBA or, after she joined the Express, study journalism. Instead, she surprised him by saying she wanted to learn how to cook.

“He probably thought that I would get this out of my system and then come back to Mumbai and get a ‘real job’,” recalls Arora, 38. So he agreed and helped her go to Paris, in 2010, for a course at Le Cordon Bleu. To his surprise, the daughter who had never cooked at home discovered she enjoyed working in a professional kitchen, and said she would stay on in France.

Arora worked at a patisserie and then a small bistro in Paris, and decided that she wanted this life. Maybe she would open a restaurant one day, but for now she was content to be a chef.

It can be a hard life, but Arora threw herself into the deep end, applying to and being accepted at Verre, a restaurant that Gordon Ramsay then ran in Dubai, which had proved to be an ideal training ground for young chefs. (The Michelin-starred Jason Atherton and Angela Hartnett are among the many who worked there.) It was a typical high-pressure British kitchen with shouty head chefs and long hours, but Arora says the experience proved valuable.

Then came the job that would change her life. She wrote to Noma in Copenhagen in 2013, asking if she could work as a stagier (unpaid intern) for a few months. At that stage, perhaps even more than now, Noma was regarded as the best restaurant in the world, one that had changed all the rules of cooking. It also had an unusual way of functioning. There were 12 chefs who worked with the brilliant and charismatic founder, Rene Redzepi, to create the trend-setting menus. But there were always about 30 stagiers, who did all the grunt work, handling prep for the restaurant’s immensely complicated dishes.

Every three months, Noma bade goodbye to one batch of stagiers and welcomed another 30. That meant 120 stagiers passed through the kitchen every year, partly to see what they could learn and partly so they could say to future employers and credulous guests: “You know, I worked at Noma”. The chance to parlay this experience into well-paid jobs prompted thousands to apply for the gig.

Most stagiers are quickly forgotten at Noma. Arora clearly excelled, because Redzepi offered her a job as a full-fledged chef. She enjoyed working with him, learned a lot, and stayed for three years, but her heart was in Mumbai, where her boyfriend Rahul Verma, a pilot, was working with Jet Airways. Redzepi was reluctant to let her go and even explored helping Verma find a job in Copenhagen.

Then she got an offer that could actually take her home. Gaggan Anand was planning a restaurant in Mumbai and wanted her to be the chef. She took the job in 2016, and went to Bangkok to work at Gaggan for two months, so she could familiarise herself with his dishes.

As it turned out, Gaggan’s Mumbai restaurant plan fell through. He and his partners then offered her the opportunity to open her own restaurant opposite the original Gaggan. Though it meant staying on in Bangkok, she accepted because it was near enough to Mumbai that she and Verma could travel to see each other regularly.

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Gaa opened in 2017, with an international menu that had Noma influences but also acknowledged her Indian roots. A year in, Gaa won a Michelin star, making Arora the first Indian woman to run a Michelin-starred restaurant.

It should have been smooth sailing from then on, but things began to go wrong. Gaggan and his partners had an acrimonious falling out and Arora departed, taking the Gaa name with her. She put her own money into a new Gaa, but just as the restaurant began gaining acclaim, the pandemic struck. She struggled to stay afloat, even borrowing money from her father.

By the time life returned to normal, she was bruised but resolute. The new Gaa regained its momentum and, in 2023, Michelin awarded it two stars.

Since then, Arora has been challenging herself. She first refused and then took on a role as judge on MasterChef India, in 2022. A reserved person, unlike the extroverted chefs who usually make it to television, she was surprised to find that she enjoyed the experience, and says she would gladly do it again.

Then, just as she was toying with the idea of a Thai restaurant because she loves the cuisine, restaurateur Riyaaz Amlani called and asked if she would open a Thai eatery in Gurugram with him. “How did you know what I was thinking?” she said.

The duo opened Banng last winter and it was such a success that they have already opened a Mumbai version in August. Arora is often at the Banngs, but credits their early success to Manav Khanna, who started his career as her first intern at Gaa and is now chef at the Banngs. She couldn’t have done it all, she adds, without chef Kanta Lerdvisetkul aka Jibbi, head of special projects, R&D and menu development for Banng, and the backbone of her operation.

All this raises the question: When will she open a Gaa in India. “I am open to the idea,” she says. “But I have no such plan yet.”

I am sure she will bring Gaa to Mumbai at some point, but for now things are going very well. She married Rahul Verma a few years ago and they have two children. It is the rare long-lasting long-distance relationship that succeeded, though she jokes that “I think our relationship worked because of distance!”

That’s quite the arc for a woman who gave up journalism to study cooking because she thought she might want to run a restaurant one day. The TV role and Michelin stars were never part of the plan. But she’s certainly not complaining.