At the table with Chetna Chopra

Chef. Forager. A woman who spent a year on a coffee farm in Honduras because that felt more honest than working in a Copenhagen café.

Chetna Chopra has a problem with garlic. Not garlic itself, obviously, that would be nuts, but burnt garlic in places where it doesn’t belong. In Italian food, Asian food, yes. In an aioli, no. It’s a lesson ingrained deep in her kitchen instincts at this point, because the Italian chefs at the University of Gastronomic Sciences made her redo it ten, twenty, thirty times. “Bruciato,” she says, mimicking a pan being thrown. “It means burnt. Start again. They did that over and over until I got it right.” This is a useful way to understand how she cooks: with a precision that comes from having been made to care about small things for long enough that caring is now just habit.

She grew up in Delhi, in a family where recipes were treated as delicious problems to be solved. Her mother’s benchmark for Pindi chole was the version at an iconic restaurant in Connaught Place, and the bar was accordingly high: the first attempt had too much garam masala, the second was missing something, and they made it five or six times until they got it right. That kind of rigour, applied at home, to food cooked for each other, produced a daughter who went to Italy, studied at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, affiliated with Slow Food International, and then spent a year on a coffee farm in Honduras writing a thesis on shade-grown coffee in agroforestry systems. “I didn’t, like most others who went to the culinary institute, go work in a Copenhagen restaurant or coffee shop,” she says. “I went to Honduras to study on a farm.” She says it without particular pride, more as a statement of what made sense to her at the time, and it’s the clearest expression of something that runs through everything she does: the desire to understand a thing at its root before she does anything with it.

Before culinary school, she was a food researcher, back in Delhi from Bombay, working on a long-form, ingredient-obsessed food magazine that got a big funding round, built a test kitchen in Defence Colony, and acquired a KitchenAid. She sat and tested recipes, researched, published, tested again, and it was that kitchen, she says, that got her into cooking properly, cooking as practice rather than eating as interest.

Then came Italy: one year at Pollenzo, one year in Central America, and she came back changed, as people who have spent time working the land tend to come back: slower to be impressed, more specific about what matters. In Italy, she did private chef stints at ski chalets in France, cooking for wealthy British guests during the season, which paid well but involved a particular kind of invisibility she found difficult. “You might have way more money than a chef earns in Delhi, but you don’t have the kind of recognition you get here.” She ran pop-ups instead, mostly Indian food, neharis and palak patta chaat, paired with natural wine, because her husband has a natural wine bar and they make their own from a small vineyard at their house in the Dolomites. Their first wine is called Parvat, after the mountains.

The same instinct that sent her to Honduras, the need to know the source before she builds anything from it, shows up in how she organises a kitchen and a week. When she was living alone in Italy, with a demanding schedule, no house help, she built a system of components rather than meals: boiled quinoa in Tetra packs, basil, oven-roasted sweet potato or pumpkin portioned and boxed, crispy kale done in seven minutes with olive oil and salt. “Having the pantry ready is very important. It’s assembling.” A salad with pickled onions and crispy kale takes 4 minutes once the pieces are ready. The logic is the same whether she’s feeding herself on a Tuesday or running a kitchen: know your materials, understand them completely, and cook from that position.

She applies it at OMO, a vegetarian farm-to-table kitchen in Gurgaon’s DLF Galleria built around the idea that ingredient-forward cooking doesn’t need meat to be interesting, with an open kitchen, a juice bar, and a menu sourced as close to the farm as possible. There she runs a programme called Know Your Farmer, visiting farms monthly and building dishes from what she finds, which is the Honduras thesis in daily practice, the farm not as a romantic abstraction but as the actual starting point.

For us, she’s making two things, and both are expressions of that same principle. The first is a Green Goddess pasta, a sauce built from a careful sofrito of onion and garlic, spinach added in handfuls, then blended smooth with basil, cashew, avocado, and lemon, tossed with Mille’s gluten-free pasta and loosened with pasta water. She is particular about the order in the pan: onion first, then garlic added later because chopped garlic burns fast, and she will not have that. “I prefer to take care and stand there,” she says. About the pasta: “Gluten-free pasta tends to require slightly more cooking time.” She’s cooked with a lot of them over the years, and this one, she says, holds up.

The second is the Boost and Restore smoothie bowl from OMO’s menu, reworked here with Mille’s coffee hazelnut protein, a bio-fermented yeast-based protein that folds into the base without fighting it. The bowl is built around 70% Idukki cacao blended to something close to chocolate mousse, finished with almond butter, homemade granola, toasted nuts, pomegranate, coconut chips, and cacao nibs, and it works as a bowl, thinned as a smoothie, or after dinner as dessert. Simple ingredients, understood completely, assembled with intention.

In Italy, Chetna tells us, when someone thanks you, the response isn’t ‘you’re welcome.’ It’s grazie mille. ‘A thousand thanks.’ Chetna lived there long enough that this is now just how gratitude works in her head, layered, compounding, more than the occasion seems to call for. It’s also, she’d probably say, how good ingredients work. Each one does something small, and the total adds up to more than you expected.

Find the Green Goddess Pasta recipe here.
Find the Boost and Restore Smoothie Bowl recipe here.

Chetna Chopra is the Culinary Director at OMO Gurgaon. Find her on Instagram here.

1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com