Within a few months of opening Restaurant Kavita was recognized by Canada’s 100 Best New Restaurants and the Vancouver Magazine Awards.
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Restaurant Kavita
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Where: 250 West Third Avenue, Vancouver
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When: Dinner, Tuesday to Saturday
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Info:restaurantkavita.com
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Dinner at Restaurant Kavita can be a walk on the wild side. Chef-owner Tushar Tondvalkar is the kind of guy who helicopters into B.C.’s wild for an episode of Hulu TV’s Chefs vs Wild. With an outdoors guide, he foraged, fished, hunted, survived for three wet nights and days and on the final day, he’s in a cooking throwdown against another wild chef. Open fire. Three courses using mostly foraged ingredients. Tondvalkar made deep-fried reindeer lichen in duck fat, black pepper clams, and duck momo dumplings using nettle leaves for dough. The duck was donated. He won.
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“We had a six-by-six tarp and an axe for chopping wood,” he says. “It was cold and miserable but beautiful.” They ate oysters and clams (no suffering there!) and warmed up with herbal teas at night.
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Sunrise
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So not a surprise when I sat down to his Indian tasting menu to find reindeer lichen in one of the starting snacks — cleaned, fried, and served with chickpeas and mint and tamarind chutneys.
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“Foraging is time consuming but I love it. For me, it’s therapy,” Tondvalkar says. “I’ve picked a lot of morels, nettles, rose petals, and they all make it onto the menu.”
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Kavita opened last October and soon was named one of Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants (No. 96) and Vancouver Magazine’s Best Indian restaurant.
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Tondvalkar has cooked in Vancouver (Bauhaus, Blue Water Cafe, Mumbai Local, Fish House) and done stages at the glittery two-Michelin star Indian restaurants Gaggan and Gaa, both in Bangkok.
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After those stages, he had a duh! moment. “Indian food has so much depth and history, why am I cooking Canadian food?” he asked himself.
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“In India, farm-to-table is not a concept. We only ate that way. We never bought frozen meat or seafood. I grew up in Mumbai, surrounded by food from all over India. I’d be sharing lunch box food at school, eating different Indian cuisines. There are 28 states in India, all with their own identity.”
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On travels to India, he prowls the regions and streets, learning from street vendors.
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“Inspiration doesn’t come from videos of Michelin chefs for me. It’s the moms and grandmothers, their flavours and techniques. I’d stand at these street vendors all day, learning by watching.
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The restaurant name pays homage to Tondvalkar’s mother, Kavita, which means poetry.
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“We lost her in 2012, just after I’d moved to Canada,” he says. With her in mind, he calls the tasting menu Ammakase, a play on the Marathi word for mother. And his dishes, which change seasonally, tell stories, in poetry, he hopes. Dishes are inventive but never leave their Indian roots.
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The Ammakase is an artful progression, layered and abundantly flavoured. There are four snacks, five savoury courses, a palate cleanser, and desserts. Like Tondvalkar, they travel the vast Indian continent. Sitting at the counter in front of the open kitchen, guests start with snacks that spotlight four corners of India — a reindeer lichen chaat, a multi-layered Swiss chard and taro paté, lamb belly roasted in mustard oil, and mushroom shorba with spruce oil, an intensely flavoured broth.
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A scallop dish, lightly cured in kombu, came with a cold curry sauce, a technique he learned at Gaggan.
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“It was mind-blowing and one of the favourite dishes,” he says. A kofta made with foraged chanterelles and pine mushrooms in korma sauce.
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Momo, or Tibetan dumplings, had a veg filling and served with jhol sauce (roasted sesame, peanuts, charred tomatoes, garlic and warming spices) and lemon grass and makrut lime roll. “There are a lot of Tibetan influences in India. These dumplings have become popular all across India,” says Tondvalkar.
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Icelandic cod fish was paired with South Indian curry, garlic koji glaze, and prawn mousse. Quebec pork came lightly grilled over charcoal and finished with a Mangalorean sauce, cauliflower purée, and a crispy uttapam.
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The palate cleanser, kokum sorbet, was made with a wild citrus from the mangosteen family. The skin is dried and used as a souring flavour. “It looks like mangosteen but different,” says Tondvalkar.
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For dessert, shrikhand, or strained yogurt is redolently Indian, with cardamom and saffron.
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“It’s a traditional dessert at festivals. My grandma used to make it all the time,” he says. Here, it’s paired with sesame cake and compressed Hidden Rose apple (local, pink-fleshed). Another Indian sweet, peda, milk-based and molded, is often flavoured with cardamom or saffron.
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“It’s a classic Indian sweet made with leftover whey from making paneer. “We reduce 20 litres into one litre to make caramelized whey. It’s flattened and coated in pine sugar.”
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The last bite is paan, a mouth freshener, usually made with betel leaf. At Kavita, it’s a nasturtium leaf with foraged rose jam, desiccated coconut, and fennel seeds.
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“You wrap it and have it in one bite.
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After dinner, Indians like to go on a stroll and have a paan and a cigarette. A guy sells them together. Everyone wants it as a mouth freshener and for digestion,” says Tondvalkar.
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The tasting menu is $145, but there’s an à la carte option if you don’t wish to go all in.
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If dining à la carte, the Kerala style dry-aged duck curry is lovely. The duck is aged two weeks to deepen in flavour and cooked in a “gently spiced coconut and curry leaf curry, finished with aromatic lime leaf oil.” Malvani prawn pulao, with fluffed, aromatic rice and large prawns, is served with koshimbir, a Maharashtrian cucumber salad.
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Bar manager Kabir Sehgal, who previously worked at Good Thief, Zarak, and Chupitos, is on fire with seemingly outrageous cocktails that submit to his playful mind. Taking inspiration from all corners of India, he leans into ingredients like ghee, cumin, saffron, tamarind, betel, kokum berry and a dry spice blend known as podi. Maybe a bit unorthodox, but they are well-made and delicious. His Lamb Fat Whisky Sour is inspired by a traditional Rajasthani lamb dish. “It’s cooked in fat, mustard oil and spices over charcoal and I wanted a drink based on those flavour profiles,” says Sehgal. The drink is made with spiced, lamb-fat washed bourbon, acid-adjusted bell pepper juice, charcoal smoked honey, yellow chartreuse, Benedictine and orange blossom. It’s sour, herbaceous and savoury.
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“The lamb is the superhero inside the drink.”
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The Rice Pudding cocktail is a riff on a Manhattan, but based on a well-loved dessert called kheer made with milk, rice, saffron and cardamom.
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“For this drink I use Canadian Club Rye, creme de cacao, peanut butter, cream sherry, vermouth and a full-fat milk wash infused with jasmine rice, saffron and cardamom.”
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There’s also a modest but well-priced wine list, all from B.C. and everything available by the glass.
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