Chef Vikas Khanna likes eggplant pilaf for Thanksgiving meal
Vikas Khanna with his grandmother
November 19, 2021
This week’s talk among Americans turns to the various dishes and the number of guests joining the celebratory Thanksgiving meal on Thursday. An Indian inspired Thanksgiving menu on the cooking site Epicurious includes rice pilaf with almonds and raisins, potatoes with coconut milk and chilies, and sweet-and-sour chutney.
Vikas Khanna’s choices for Thanksgiving, “the best time of the year”, is a meal of slow cooked yams with apples, roasted eggplant and basil pilaf and persimmon vanilla cobbler, he told SplendidTable and described his recipes. Khanna, 50-years-old and based in New York City, has cooked for the Pope, the Dalai Lama and President Barack Obama, among others.
Indian cuisine is not all about curries, notes Khanna. The blend of spices used in India differs by family, culture or region. In the north of India, cooks like his mother know nothing about curry leaves and never use mustard seeds or coconut. But South Indian meals are cooked with curry leaves and mustard seeds and almost all dishes require coconut.
While learning to cook, as a kitchen helper for his grandmother, (in photo with Khanna), Khanna grasped an important lesson from her: simplicity. “The greatest cuisine or the greatest dishes you ever taste in your life are never the complicated dishes,” he says in a Williams Sonoma blog.
Khanna’s flagship restaurant Kinara (edge) is based in Dubai. It has gotten an overall five star rating from 300 customers who reviewed it on TripAdvisor. His plans to open one in New York was delayed by the pandemic.
Several videos in English and Hindi, showing Khanna cooking various dishes, are on YouTube. One of them, where he prepares stuffed spinach and paneer (cheese) roll, has gotten 630,000 views. He is the author of more than 25 cookbooks, including Everyone Can Cook; Khanna Sutra; My Great Indian Cookbook; The Spice Story of India; and Daastan-e-Dastarkhan: Stories and Recipes from Muslim Kitchens, co-authored with Sadaf Hussain.
The single handmade copy of his $45,000 cookbook UTSAV- A Culinary Epic of Indian Festivals, which includes his photographs, was published on rice paper with gold trim. He also published an additional twelve copies of the book, without the gold, which he has gifted to President Obama, the Dalai Lama and Queen Elizabeth of England.
Khanna’s MasterChef India, Twist of Taste, and Mega Kitchens have been featured on National Geographic India’s TV channel. The channel also showed his documentaries Holy Kitchens and Kitchens Series of Gratitude. He has 2.2 million followers on Twitter, 1.6 million on Facebook and 1.3 million on Instagram. His video interviews show he has an infectious laugh and a sense of humor, including an ability to make fun of his errors.
Earlier, Khanna was the executive chef at Junoon (passion) in New York. A video, featuring Khanna working there has gotten nearly a million views. While he was at Junoon, the restaurant received a Michelin star seven years in a row. A Michelin star is a rarity for Indian restaurants around the globe. This year, under a different executive chef, Junoon was not among the 68 restaurants in New York to be awarded a Michelin star.
Khanna is not eager to win a Michelin star for Kinara. Cooking for restaurants “is a job with long hours on your feet…chefs…are supposed to be energetic and hustling. Many of us have mental breakdowns all the time,” he told The Hindu.
Khanna owns a townhouse in New York City, filled with thousands of cookbooks, and likes Mercedes cars.
During Thanksgiving, Americans also give thanks, including through serving food to the needy and other charitable acts, for the good things that happened during the past year.
In April 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic’s rapid spread in India, Khanna, remotely from New York, helped establish kitchens in Delhi which offered free food to those in need. Soon, similar kitchens, under the name Feed India, were set up in 135 Indian cities and towns, with support from local volunteers, government agencies and donors.
Khanna was motivated by his mom who told him, “I don’t want to hear about new restaurants, books or shows. I just want my son” to help Indians because every part of his success is due to India. Khanna’s free pandemic kitchens got wide media attention in India, the U.S. and elsewhere.
A Hindu, Khanna got the idea for the kitchens from the free community kitchen at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. “I spent a lot of my childhood in that kitchen,” he says in a Williams Sonoma blog interview. His grandmother would take him to the temple, where they both prepared and served food as volunteers. “My understanding of the power of food came from there, where everybody helped as a community to feed the hungry.”
In August this year, Buried Seeds, a documentary about Khanna’s life story premiered on National Geographic India.
A son of Davinder and Bindu Khanna, Vikas Khanna was teased as a child for his clubfoot. He could not run till he was 13. He has a scar on his face from being beaten by bullies in school.
Khanna never participated in any sports. “My shoes were very big and extremely heavy with the braces,” he told SplendidTable. “I’d just sit at the back of the class and not move until the end of school because when I walked, it gave everyone a chance to laugh.” Learning to cook as his grandmother’s kitchen helper, he could laugh at the other boys since it “filled that gap of not being equal physically in some way.”
When he was 12 and 13, he saw dead bodies being dragged on the streets of Amritsar, during Hindu-Sikh riots. The experience “has killed me somewhere,” he said at The Asia Society in New York.
At 16, he founded a catering company with his grandmother, serving food at weddings and events. In 1991, he graduated from the WelcomGroup School of Hotel Administration at Manipal Academy, South India. He then worked at the Taj, Oberoi, Welcome Group and Leela hotels in India. In 2018, he opened the Museum of Culinary Arts at the Manipal campus, dedicating it to his late father.
Khanna is a fan of Lata Mangeshkar, the late Indian singer, as well as Pink Floyd and Simon and Garfunkel.
In 2000, Khanna emigrated to New York, inspired by Richard Bach's 70-page book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, about a seagull who wants to fly higher. Like the bird, Khanna was eager to see if he could soar to success in New York.
He began by working as a dishwasher, delivery man and waiter. One Christmas in the early 2000s, with no job and only $3, he ate and slept at the New York City Rescue mission, a city-run shelter for the homeless. The staff said, "Welcome, and merry Christmas," offering him space to sit, rest and breathe. As a reminder, Khanna continues to celebrate Christmas at the Rescue Mission.
“New York City gives you energy and also drains you,” he said at the Asia Society. “Waking up every day is a gift.”