How tinda became a gourmet dish

Restaurants across India are reworking tinda, lauki, bhindi and other everyday vegetables for premium menus. What's behind this shift?

There are few vegetables that can inspire the kind of immediate dread that tinda does.

For many of us, the small, green, round vegetable is less a food memory and more a childhood negotiation. It brings back afternoons when tinda appeared on the lunch table at home and you had two choices: eat it quietly, lest you incur your parents’ wrath, or discreetly start looking around for that packet of Maggi. Though some enjoyed stuffed tinda, where the spices take over and the vegetable itself takes a backseat.

But tinda, for the most part, never had the glamour of, say, a mushroom, bell pepper or asparagus. It was ghar ki sabzi. And ghar ki sabzi, for a long time, was precisely what fine dining seemed designed to escape.

That equation, however, is changing.

Would you pay restaurant prices for tinda? The answer, increasingly, appears to be yes.

At Ikk Panjab, a restaurant chain that explores pre-Partition Punjabi cuisine and works with seasonal menus, tinda has found a place in the conversation around regional food.

At Kikli in Delhi, another restaurant centred on Punjabi cooking, Chappanga Tinda sits among its vegetarian offerings at around Rs 700 a portion. Suddenly, the vegetable that once struggled to excite a child at the dining table is being plated, described and priced as a dish worth seeking out.

And tinda is not alone.

Shalgam, bhindi, lauki enter the menus

Lauki (bottle gourd), tori (ridge gourd), shalgam (turnip), bhindi (okra), yam, sweet potato, taro, ash gourd and a host of lesser-known regional ingredients are making it to menus at top-notch restaurants in experimental as well as traditional ways.

At Avartana, ITC’s South Indian tasting-menu restaurant, bottle gourd (lauki) is transformed into noodle-like strands and served with plum chutney.

At 304, a newly opened bar in Delhi’s GK M Block, lauki and tori form the base of a vegetarian take on the galouti kebab. It sounds improbable. It tastes, rather surprisingly, very good.

“Ingredients that were once considered too ordinary, too local or simply ‘ghar ka khaana’ are now finding their rightful place in restaurants,” says chef Varun Inamdar. At his restaurant in Singapore, 27°West, he has played with familiar combinations such as methi and palak, placing them alongside burrata, or reinterpreting chaat through ingredients such as kale and avocado. The point, he says, is not to disguise the ingredient but to celebrate it in a new context.

Indian homes, he points out, have been extracting enormous flavour from humble ingredients for generations. What is different now is that chefs are looking back at those kitchens and asking: what if we presented this differently?

Local = new luxury

For years, the more unfamiliar an ingredient sounded, the more premium it seemed. Imported produce and international techniques carried aspirational value, while something cooked by a grandmother could easily be dismissed as ordinary. “India has never had an ingredient problem,” Inamdar says. “We have had a perception problem.”

Chefs today are looking inward - into regional cuisines, family recipes, local produce and ingredients that never quite made the journey from community kitchens to restaurant menus.

Prof Kurush F Dalal, archaeologist and culinary anthropologist, sees the shift, although he is careful not to overstate it. “It’s not really a very large shift yet,” he says. But fine-dining restaurants are increasingly looking beyond the familiar repertoire of peas, French beans, potatoes, cauliflower, coloured capsicums and broccoli. Even bhindi, one of the most mundane vegetables imaginable, is being stuffed, deep-fried, finely sliced and fried until “absolutely kurkuri (crunchy)” to become a topping or finishing element.

People want something 'new'

There are, after all, only so many butter chickens and paneer tikkas one can eat. Dalal says the basic Indian restaurant customer has become “a bit jaded with the same old, same old”.

At the same time, a larger middle and upper-middle class, more dual-income households, more international travel and a greater willingness to spend on experiences have created a diner actively looking for something new.

That curiosity is particularly striking among younger urban diners, for whom hyper-local ingredients were rarely, if ever, part of everyday home cooking.

Chef Amit of Pune’s Aragma, a tasting-menu restaurant built around seasonal and local ingredients, says guests now show genuine interest in mahua, karonda, wild honey sourced from Bhimashankar and even persimmon from Himachal. More tellingly, he has watched young diners encounter ingredients they had never heard of and then go looking for them outside the restaurant.

A 15-year-old who has never eaten karonda can encounter it on a tasting menu, ask what it is, and then go to a market and ask their parents to buy it.

That is a significant shift in the relationship between the restaurant and the home kitchen. The restaurant is no longer necessarily introducing diners to something foreign. It can introduce them to something that was always around them — something they simply never noticed.

Desi ingredients meet modern gastronomy

Which brings us to the question that perhaps best captures the change: “Hum tinde ghar par nahin khaate, toh restaurant mein kyun khaayenge?” Because increasingly, the restaurant is giving diners a reason to look at tinda again.

At the Leela Palace New Delhi, Executive Sous Chef Astik Oberoi describes the approach as letting familiar ingredients lead rather than overworking them. Lauki, for instance, can be slow-cooked in a light yakhni, compressed for structure and finished with a delicate glaze. Aam panna can become a clarified chilled consomme; jamun can turn into a kebab glaze; phalsa can become a gastrique or granita.

“Luxury today is about precision, seasonality and understanding exactly what you are serving and why,” he says.

The rise of regional food

For chef Shri Bala of Nadoo, this is part of a broader movement in which regional and micro-regional food is taking centre stage, bringing home-grown ingredients into mainstream cuisine.

Sweet potato, yam and taro from southern India, for instance, are finding their way into restaurant kitchens, as are members of the squash family such as pumpkin and ash gourd.

Moreover, the new pantry luxury is also increasingly hyper-local.

A growing number of restaurants, in fact, have built their USP around local-ingredient-driven cooking. Some embrace foraging - the practice of scouting and sourcing ingredients from the wild - while others build seasonal menus around what is available, transforming these ingredients into refined tasting-menu experiences.

Inamdar calls it “a wonderful democratisation of the Indian plate”. The ingredients once considered too ordinary to command attention are now being accorded the same culinary respect once reserved for imported cheeses, truffles and exotic produce.

And perhaps that is why tinda makes such a satisfying symbol for the moment. It represents what Indian fine dining overlooked: the mundane vegetable, the home-cooked dish, the ingredient that doesn't need an exotic backstory because it has been sitting in our kitchens for generations.

The irony is that chefs aren't necessarily making tinda luxurious. They are making diners curious about it again. Chef Amit believes the movement is still evolving and could take another five to ten years to spread across a much larger part of India.

So perhaps the next time tinda lands on the table, the instinct won't be to reach for the Maggi packet. Maybe you'll ask what the chef has done with it.

- Ends