“Trekkers just smelled the food and walked up to our tent,” says Vineet Bhatia, on a crackled, broken WhatsApp call from somewhere in Nepal’s Himalayan region. His journey, which began on May 24 at Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu, has been a long one. He is now on his way home, after spending June 3, 4 and 5 cooking at Everest Base Camp.
The celebrity chef and his core team of six were at the camp to serve up some hearty soul food as part of a charity initiative with the Heart for India Foundation, to raise money for the girl child and Nepalese earthquake victims. His pop up restaurant has been months in planning, as has his fitness level, says the chef.
“My son and I did quite a bit of cardio regularly for two months, in preparation. But even then, the real experience was completely different: the rocks, the weather...” says the chef, “It’s a very physically challenging trek. At times, we were on a 60° incline.”
Photo courtesy: Instagram@chefvineet | Photo Credit: Instagram: @chefvineet
However, Bhatia has no regrets. “We didn’t want to chopper our way to the top, unlike other people who have gone and cooked there in the past. We wanted to experience the place, see the beauty, meet people,” he explains. Needless to say, these encounters and experiences had an impact on the chef’s mind, and further made their way to his ladle and pan. One of the things that struck Bhatia, for instance, was how often they had a simple meal of dal bhaat en route. “We were told that the salt level was deliberately kept low, in order to be careful about the heart rates of people onward.”
In contrast was the slew of German bakeries in Namche Bazar, where they stopped for two days to get acclimatised. “The bakeries and their products were very nice, and of course, the high sugar levels were good for burning energy,” he recounts. And then, there were the juniper berries that they found pretty much everywhere along the route. These found their way into the chef’s recipes at the base camp, as did plenty of potatoes, which, as Bhatia puts it, “are found in abundance in high altitudes”. So while the berries helped flavour his masala rice, the potatoes — sweeter than your regular ones — were sliced as finely as possible before being thrown into the pan, and for good reason. “We keep it thin, so it cooks faster. The cooking time is longer up there, because of the temperature and pressure. This despite the fact that water begins to boil faster here, at 80° Celsius.”
Photo courtesy: Instagram@chefvineet
That wasn’t the only challenge to Bhatia’s plan of serving up a mix of Indo-Nepalese cuisine. “We had to make do with just one wok, one pressure cooker and one pan,” he says. A separate team of sherpas had reached the camp earlier, in order to deliver the equipment and ingredients. Needless to say, there where limitations in terms of weight. “Carrying flour would have been way too difficult, so we stuck to rice. But we finished the meal with some nice sooji ka halwa, with saffron and gold leaf.” Besides that, there were simple stir-fried vegetables, including locally grown beans, and plenty of what the chef calls ‘Indo-Chinese’ innovations, with Schezuan sauce, garlic and chillies. “We needed to pack a punch,” he says.
But the thrill of clambering over rocks with platefuls of soul food to serve trekkers from around the world in their tents only came at the end of the road. Before that came blizzards, engine failures, and a terrifying take-off on the world’s shortest air strip. There were also new friends made along the way, an encounter with a sherpa who had scaled Everest several times, a chance meeting with a wandering lama (a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader), and what Bhatia describes as “the pure white mountains, clean air, clear skies”.
Photo courtesy: Instagram@chefvineet