Sanjeev Kapoor: the hotel chef who made home cooking feel easy

An accidental chef

Sanjeev Kapoor was born in Ambala, Haryana. His father worked for the State Bank of India, and regular transfers meant the family lived in different parts of the country. He told The Better India that in his youth he did not even know what a chef did, and that cooking was never part of his plan.

Food was still part of daily life. He grew up watching both his mother and father cook at home, and his older brother Rajeev often helped them in the kitchen.

“The idea is to create recipes that my viewers can succeed in preparing.”

— Sanjeev Kapoor, via Gulf News

Hotel school and hotel kitchens

Kapoor joined the Institute of Hotel Management at Pusa in Delhi and graduated in 1984. He then joined the India Tourism Development Corporation, ITDC, as a management trainee. While many of his peers wanted to work at the front desk, he chose kitchen duty.

He rose fast. Two years later he was an executive chef at an ITDC posting in Varanasi, then worked at ITDC's Hotel Samrat in Delhi before moving to Mumbai to work for the Centaur group for five years. At twenty-seven he became executive chef of the Centaur Hotel in Mumbai. A mentor from his ITDC days, chef Sudhir Sibal, recalled that if a shift needed ten hours, Kapoor would work sixteen.

Reaching the top kitchen job so early worried him; he has said he felt he had peaked too soon. He began a master's course in marketing management at NMIMS, and then television came along.

Khana Khazana

In 1993, according to Gulf News, a TV channel planning a cookery show approached Kapoor to host it. The show began on Zee as an experiment called Shriman Bawarchi, and it was first meant to feature a different chef in every episode. Swarajya reports that the pilots were not popular and the project nearly ended, until Kapoor persuaded the management to continue and agreed to do the coming episodes without being paid by the production house.

The director tried the episode several ways, with an anchor, without one, and with other chefs, before trying Kapoor himself as host. Because of a delay in sending the remaining tapes, that episode was shown as the opening episode nine times in the following weeks, and viewership kept rising. A television writer who worked with him put the show's appeal down to his easy charm and his knack for keeping things simple.

Renamed Khana Khazana, the weekly show ran for about eighteen years and was broadcast in some 120 countries. The Better India describes families waiting in front of the television with pen and paper to note down each recipe, as he simplified elaborate hotel dishes for home kitchens.

Cooking for the viewer

Kapoor has said his shows were never about showing off. At one point he even stopped wearing chef's whites on screen because he felt they created a barrier between him and the people watching. He believes that understanding the science behind cooking makes it easier, and that a cook should think first about the person who will eat the food.

He went on to write more than 150 cookbooks, build a large online recipe collection and judge cooking competitions. In 2017 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was choosing the hard station. He picked the kitchen over the front desk and put in long shifts, and that hands-on work built the skill everything else rested on.

The second was simplifying. His television success came from turning hotel recipes into steps a home cook could follow.

The third was thinking about the eater. He cooks for the likes and needs of the people at the table, not to impress.

The fourth was persistence. When the show nearly stopped, he argued for it and worked without pay to give it a chance.