Kitchen museum to chronicle India’s culinary heritage

New Delhi

For at least 15 years, the Amritsar-born chef has been collecting pots and pans besides other utensils from India for the upcoming one-of-its-kind’ museum in Manipal, Karnataka.

“It is a very big project I want to preserve all of our country’s rich culinary history. There is no other place in the world, believe me, which has such diversity. And what better way to do it than with food,” says Khanna on his visit here recently.

The MasterChef India judge and celebrity face of Junoon, a modern Indian flagship restaurant in New York with a branch in Dubai, has been with anthropological zeal scouring for old kitchen utensils during his visits to India. “You can find in my treasure trove vessels from Kashmir, Jammu, Pune, Hyderabad, Kochi, the list goes on. For the past 15 years whenever I visited India I have been carrying a piece of it back in the form of kitchen utensils. Be it ladles, colourful rolling pins for making chappatis, measuring cups or a huge variety of tea strainers from different regions of the country,” says Khanna.

A graduate from the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration, Manipal University, the chef wanted to repay his alma mater and tied up with it for the USD 4 million ‘Culinary Arts and Culinary Museum’. For now, the treasures collected by Khanna, which include plates from Goa made by the Portuguese while they were here, an over 100-year-old ladle with an iconic design used to serve devotees in a temple, an yesteryear seed sprinkler, an ancient samovar (tea pot) and others have been stored in a godown and will go into the museum, which is expected to be open by 2020.

“The idea is to have a living museum, to be continuously updating its collection. For some time, we displayed utensils in my New York restaurant and we had patrons who donated their generations-old vessels to add to the collection,” says Khanna.