A Russian chef cooking at Indian Accent in Delhi makes for an interesting meeting of culinary worlds. But Chef Ekaterina Alehina wasn’t here to create an obvious Russian-Indian mash-up. Her three dishes, borsch, seabass, and gingerbread, offered a glimpse into a very different way of looking at food.
Alehina is the chef and owner of Biologie, a restaurant in Ilyinskoye in the Moscow region. She has been awarded both a Michelin Red Star and Green Star, and has been named Chef of the Year by Palm Branch in Russia and Woman of the Year by Glamour and GQ. Her cooking draws on science, art, fermentation and the natural world, with an interest in what happens when ingredients are pushed beyond their usual forms.
Back in the days, before moving into professional cooking, she was, as she puts it, “a big science nerd.” At Biologie, that curiosity has found its way into the kitchen. The restaurant takes its name from biology and looks at the relationship between animal, plant, fungus and bacterium through food.
At her one-day four-hands lunch with chef Shantanu Mehrotra, Alehina’s cooking met Indian Accent’s contemporary take on Indian cuisine.
The borsch was probably the clearest introduction to Alehina’s cooking. There was beetroot, of course, but little about the dish resembled the steaming bowl one might expect. She oven-roasts the beetroot, dehydrates it and then ferments it in its own fresh sap, turning it into something closer to a jam.
“My aim is to surprise diners by changing the essence of the ingredients on the plate, but without resorting to special effects,” Alehina says.
The seabass came with Dutch porridge, seaweed, enoki and fish fumet while dessert was gingerbread with apple compote, raisins, honey crumble, elderberry panna cotta and spiced ice-cream. There were Russian notes, but also plenty of influences from elsewhere.
Mehrotra’s food brought a richer, more immediately recognisable Indian character, from the sweet-sour meetha achari pork ribs to the lamb shab daig and his khubani ka meetha with crème fraîche and malai papad.
Every course was accompanied by a wine pairing.
Science is one part of Alehina’s story. She had been painting for years before she began cooking professionally, and the kitchen eventually became a place where the two interests could meet. “Gastronomy is one of the ways that you can share your scientific and artistic vision with the guests continuously, day after day,” she adds.
Japan has also held her interest for years. “I’ve been studying Japanese for a very long time,” she says, drawn to the culture’s relationship with ingredients and seasonality, as well as the idea of wabi-sabi, which she describes as “the beauty that was gifted with time.”
When Alehina was building Biologie, sustainability was one of the first things she thought about. Instead of buying everything new, the team collected old furniture and restored it. Equipment from restaurants that had closed was repaired and put back to use. Even the plates came from an old woman in St Petersburg and date to around the 1940s.
The kitchen follows the same principle. Scraps are composted and the compost is used in the garden to grow vegetables. The restaurant works with local and foraged produce, while fermentation helps extend the life of ingredients. “As a chef, it’s really important for me to centre on the quality of the ingredients that I use,” Alehina shares.
For this lunch, Alehina and Mehrotra didn’t try to turn their cuisines into one. Mehrotra brought his own vocabulary to the table, while Alehina arrived with techniques and ideas that have shaped her cooking. For a four-hands lunch, it was less about fusion than about letting two very different kitchens speak in their own accents.