Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: How the kulchette got its name, and other stories
The kulchette, the kulcha’s cool cousin, is on menus worldwide. It’s rare for an Indian food term to go viral. It’s a welcome addition, and a flex for us all
Strap: The kulchette, the kulcha’s cool new cousin, is on menus worldwide. It’s rare for an Indian food term to go so viral. But it’s a welcome addition, and a flex for us all
Do you know where the kulcha originated? If the answer is no, then relax. Nobody really does. All the usual suspects have often been cited. The kulcha may be named after a Persian biscuit, which has a similar name. It could have been brought to India from Central Asia by the Mughals. Or it may have been created by cooks in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kitchen.
One of these theories may be right. Or they could all be wrong. That’s how it usually goes with the history of Indian food.
But do you know what a kulchette is, where it originated, and who gave it this distinctive name?
That one’s easy. I can answer all of those questions.
A kulchette is a sort of small kulcha that many chefs, from the late Floyd Cardoz to Manish Mehrotra, have played around with. But the definitive version was created at an Indian restaurant called Revolver in Singapore. Revolver turned its little kulchas into luxury dishes, shaving white truffles on them and topping them with caviar. Because neither truffle nor caviar is a traditional Indian ingredient, it invented the name kulchette to capture the more international nature of the dish, and later took its signature kulchettes to the second Revolver in Dubai, where many different kinds of kulchettes are served.
All of this information is readily available if you do a Google search for kulchette. But what Google won’t tell you is who invented the name kulchette.
It was my friend Sameer Sain, who founded Revolver as a way of transforming his passion for Indian food into a high quality restaurant.
Last Sunday, at the MKT restaurant in Delhi’s luxury Chanakya mall, I found kulchettes on the menu. MKT’s kulchettes are topped with cheese, with mushrooms, with chicken and more. I sent Sameer a photo of the menu and he was surprised to find how quickly his little kulchettes had travelled the world. He should be pleased, I told him. How many people get to name a dish that, even when it is served thousands of miles from its restaurant of origin, still uses the name you thought of, because it has passed into regular usage?
The rapid assimilation of the term kulchette is an unusual phenomenon in Indian food. For the most part, our dishes either use traditional names or are named in the most literal manner possible. For instance, Murgh Mussalam, a traditional dish, has been around for centuries with the same name. The more recently invented tandoori chicken takes a literal name: It is a chicken cooked in a tandoor. Naan is a traditional Persian name for bread. Keema naan, a more recent creation, is literally a naan stuffed with keema. And so on.
When dishes have distinctive names (which is not very often), they are sometimes named for the cities or restaurants of origin. For instance, Dal Bukhara, which you find at Indian restaurants around the world, was perfected by the Bukhara restaurant in Delhi. On the other hand, Bukhara itself has nothing to do with the city in Uzbekistan - certainly not in cuisine terms - that it takes its name from.
Very few recently created Indian dishes have names that have passed into the language. Eggs Kejriwal is one of the few I can think of. The dish was created at Mumbai’s Willingdon Club and named for one of its members but would have remained relatively obscure had the newly opened Bombay Canteen not put an improved version (brioche bread and a green-chilli chutney invented by its opening chef Thomas Zacharias) on its first menu in 2015. Other dishes named after individuals have faded: The Taj Mahal Hotel rarely serves its Salad Currimbhoy any longer.
I imagine we take our lead from the British, masters of the very literal name (ie fish and chips). Even some of the slightly more imaginative British dishes have dubious origins. For instance Beef Wellington has nothing to do with the Duke who defeated Napoleon. It is basically the same as the French bœuf en croûte.The earliest references to it are American and date back only to the 20th Century.
The Italians do better with names, though their best-known dishes are also relatively recent. Carpaccio was invented as late as 1950 by Harry’s Bar in Venice, and named for the Italian painter Carpaccio because an exhibition of his works was running at the time. (Harry’s Bar had already invented the Bellini cocktail in 1938 and named it after the eponymous painter so there was a precedent.)
Other Italian dishes may have falsely evocative names. Pasta Carbonara is often said to take its name from charcoal workers who enjoyed it after a hard day’s work. In fact, the earliest reference to it is from 1950. It was created to feed American soldiers after the fall of Rome in the Second World War and was made with the eggs and bacon of military rations. (One theory is that the restaurant that fed the soldiers was called Carbonaro.)
The French do better with names. The Napoleon pastry was actually popular in Napoleonic times and though it is a mille-feuille, a classic French pastry dish, it’s called a Napoleon around the world because that is easier to spell and pronounce.
In classic French cuisine, there is a logic to names. If a dish includes the name Parmentier, it has to include potatoes. (Parmentier promoted potatoes in France in the 18th Century). If a savoury dish includes the word Florentine, then it contains spinach and is named because of the influence of Catherine de Medici, a Florentine princess who brought spinach to France (or not; her role is controversial). If a dish includes the word Melba, then it was almost certainly invented by the great chef Auguste Escoffier in honour of the singer Nellie Melba. (For instance, Peach Melba or Melba Toast.)
The Chinese, unlike the Europeans, don’t necessarily use the names of dishes to honour people. One of Sichuan’s most famous dishes is Ma Po Tofu, which sounds suitably exotic until you discover that it means Pockmarked Old Woman, and is named for the lady whose restaurant made the dish famous. On the other hand, Chinese dishes can have evocative names. Ants Climbing The Tree sounds so much better than Noodles With Minced Pork, which is what the dish really is.
I am not in favour of calling anyone pockmarked (obviously!) but I do think that dishes should honour their creators and have names that evoke their flavours and appearance. And every once in a while, every new creation should have its own kulchette moment.
From HT Brunch, October 11, 2025
Follow us on www.instagram.com/htbrunch
