‘Up until now I’ve always been the guy behind the guy.’ For the past four years, Chet Sharma – a chef who started his career whilst completing a PhD in physics from the University of Oxford – has been working as the development chef for London restaurant giants JKS. Prior to that he worked alongside prestigious chefs including Simon Rogan and Mark Birchall, helping them launch their multi-Michelin-starred restaurants and develop their menus. Now, however, it’s his turn. ‘It feels amazing because this time I’m not held to anyone else’s vision – it’s entirely my own.’
His debut restaurant Bibi has been in the works for a while now, as Chet explains. ‘In all honesty it's something I've been thinking about for the last fifteen years, but it’s been much closer to happening since I joined JKS four or five years ago. The ambition was always to have my own place.’ As with everything since March 2020, Covid intervened, pushing the opening back by over a year. However, with a swanky Mayfair site now ready to go and restaurants once again open, Bibi is set to launch later this summer.
Despite spending years working in fine dining restaurants where the focus was on modern British and French cuisine, Chet is moving away from this style with his own restaurant and going back to his Indian roots. Entering a marketplace as crowded as the London Indian restaurant scene is a brave decision, but the chef has his reasons. ‘I think London has, over the past five years or so, become the best food city in the world, and has the most developed Indian food scene outside of India,’ he says. ‘Many of the restaurants in the city aren't tied down to one region of India specifically — Gymkhana, for example, roughly translates to Northern styles, Trishna looks to the West Coast, and then Sri Lankan places like Paradise and Kolamba have come along too. Now that we have this great base level understanding of Indian food, I think it’s time to do something a bit more progressive and dynamic in style.’
The food at Bibi is set to be ultra-contemporary but what’s important for Chet is that traditional Indian flavours remain at the soul of the restaurant’s offering (‘I hate this idea of authenticity, but we do want to remain true to the 'authentic' flavour profiles of India’). This is illustrated by the name of the restaurant, an Urdu word literally meaning ‘lady of the house’, which was used as an endearing term for grandmother in the part of India where the chef grew up. Chet credits his two grandmothers as being the women who taught him both how to cook and to respect produce, and he wants to pay homage to them with this restaurant.
‘Our food doesn’t necessarily look Indian on the plate,’ he says. ‘It’s modern and progressive, but if an Indian grandmother walked into the dining room and tasted a dish, she would still understand its roots, whether that be the story behind it, the provenance of the spices, or the flavours themselves. That’s always been a really important thing for me with this restaurant.’ He gives the example of his take on nimbu pani, India's own lemonade; the flavours of the classic drink reminded Chet of ceviches, so he decided to create a raw scallop dish which comes dressed with nimbu pani: ‘Sure there’s an emulsion and a fluid gel on there, but going back to the idea of an Indian grandmother, they would still definitely recognise it as nimbu pani. That’s the key.’