From the crackle of curry leaves in his childhood kitchen to helming Hosa in Goa, Harish Rao’s journey traces how memory shapes modern Indian fine dining. He stresses sustainability in seafood, empathy in menu design, and the need for young chefs to learn from home kitchens and villages before innovating, keeping the emotional core of food intact.
Before food becomes a dish, it becomes a story. For Chef Harish Rao, that story is deeply Indian, shaped by regional memory, ancestral flavours and an enduring respect for the ingredients that carry them. His culinary compass points to Madhur Jaffrey, whose writing brought Indian food to the world, and to Chef K. Damodaran, whose work sharpened his own thinking, and to Tamil Nadu, a state he believes could be travelled entirely through its food. He champions Andhra-style Gongura Mutton for its unapologetic sourness and depth, while Tokyo appeals to him for ingredient-driven cooking. But beneath the chef’s technique and travels lies something more intimate. If given the chance to cook for anyone, Rao would choose his mother, bringing to her the sum of everything he has learnt in the kitchen.
For our Celebrating India issue, we spoke with acclaimed chef Harish Rao about ingredient-led fine dining, taking India’s diverse culinary traditions to the global stage, and the evolving language of Indian cuisine.
You'd expect a chef of his stature to have one grand memory about a dish or a moment that pulled him into food. But Rao didn’t have one. "I don't think there was one single meal that made me fall in love with food," he says. Instead, it was the ordinary rhythm of home cooking that stayed with him. He talks about the sound of tempering, the smell of curry leaves crackling in hot oil, the grinding of spices—nothing very dramatic, just simple, usual life, happening around food.
It's only looking back that he realised how much those quiet meals actually taught him. "As I grew older and started cooking professionally, I realised that those simple childhood memories were actually teaching me some of the most important lessons about food—balance, seasonality, restraint and respect for ingredients," he explains. Even now, when he's building a new dish in a professional kitchen, he says he often finds himself walking back to those same memories. The plating changes, the technique changes, but as he puts it, "the emotion behind the food should remain familiar."
Here, Rao’s passion comes unmistakably to the fore. Ask him what "celebrating India" through food means, and he pushes back on the premise of the question itself. "India is not one cuisine," he says plainly. "It has thousands of communities, landscapes, climates, traditions and cooking techniques." He points out how differently a coastal Kerala household cooks compared to a farming family in North Karnataka, or a Chettinad kitchen in Tamil Nadu, or a home in Andhra. Same country, completely different food worlds.
What excites him, he says, is that so much of this regional knowledge is still being uncovered, even by Indians themselves. And he's firm about what should happen with it. "The role of a chef today is to take that knowledge forward, not erase it," he says, adding that Indian food doesn't need to be dressed up in Western techniques to earn respect.
Rao has spent a large part of his career championing South Indian food specifically, and he has strong feelings about how the world still misunderstands it. "The biggest misconception is that South Indian food begins and ends with dosa, idli, sambar and filter coffee," he says. Those dishes matter, but they're a small slice of something far bigger. Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, he explains, all have their own distinct food identities and within each state, things shift again from one community to the next.
He's also keen to bust the idea that South Indian food is mostly vegetarian and light. "There is an extraordinary repertoire of meat, seafood and game cooking, along with complex techniques involving fermentation, smoking, curing, roasting and slow cooking," he adds. The world is slowly catching on, but there's still a long way to go.
The question, then, is why Indian fine dining has become so intent on looking inward. Rao credits it to a mix of curiosity and access. Chefs today, he says, can travel, research, and source in ways earlier generations simply couldn't. And diners have changed too, as most are no longer satisfied with just a pretty plate. "They don't just want something beautiful on a plate; they want to know the story behind it," he says. He also sees a shift in how once-overlooked ingredients are being treated, such as millets, native greens, banana flower, regional rice varieties, and local seafood all things that were once considered humble and ordinary. "For me, the most exciting part of this movement is that it allows chefs to look within India rather than always looking outside for inspiration," he adds. And what should Indian fine dining chase next? Not European validation, that's for sure.
Rao believes it is time for Indian cuisine to develop a language of its own—one rooted in fermentation, pickling, curing, smoking and slow cooking, techniques that have long existed within the country’s culinary traditions. It also calls for a reconsideration of what luxury itself means. Today, he argues, luxury need not be synonymous with rare or expensive ingredients. It can be found in knowledge, craftsmanship, authenticity and, above all, an experience that could exist nowhere else.
Chef Rao has spent a lot of time working with seafood, including at Sea Salt Madras and that time has made him think hard about what responsibility really means in a kitchen. For him, it doesn't start when the fish lands on the counter it starts much earlier, with how the fish is caught, whether the season is right for it, and who the fishing communities are that bring it to us in the first place. As he puts it, quite simply, "The ocean is not an unlimited pantry."
He's just as thoughtful when he talks about the time he spent curating menus for children with autism, because that work taught him how deeply personal food can be. Texture, smell, temperature, colour, even how familiar a dish looks all of it can change how someone feels about what's on their plate, and Rao says this experience changed how he sees a chef's job altogether, stretching it far beyond just the restaurant.
And if there's one thing he wants young Indian chefs to really hear, is to learn your roots before you try to reinvent them. Spend time in home kitchens, talk to your grandparents, and travel to the villages where these dishes come from. Take the time to understand why a technique exists before you decide it needs changing. Because only then, he believes, does innovation actually mean something.
After more than nineteen years in professional kitchens, Rao says his focus has moved from technique to meaning. He still cares about doing things well, but now he asks more questions before he even starts cooking where does this dish come from, why does it exist, what memory sits behind it. And crucially, he's learned when to hold back. "You don't always need to add more," he says. "Sometimes the best thing you can do for an ingredient is to simply allow it to speak."
This philosophy is exactly what led him to Goa, where he now helms Hosa. He describes Goa as a natural meeting point, a place where people are curious about food and comfortable with cultures blending. Through Hosa, he wanted to tell a wider South Indian story, not just spotlight one state. "It is about taking those memories, techniques and flavours and giving them a contemporary expression while keeping their soul intact," he says.
He's equally passionate about Goan food being underestimated. Beyond the familiar dishes, he points to kokum, toddy, seasonal greens and local seafood as ingredients that deserve far more spotlight, alongside the traditional knowledge of preserving and fermenting that surrounds them.
Perhaps the most exciting question for Indian fine dining is not how far it can travel, but how deeply it can look within.. And if the question is what lies ahead for Indian cuisine, Rao has a remarkably simple answer: “Rooted.”