Veteran chef's brand new Dey

Ragini Dey is not what you'd expect. Articulate, energetic and diminutive, her lighthouse smile, big personality and enthusiasm are undiminished by years of hard slog in the kitchen of her simple Adelaide restaurant.

Her food at the Dhaba at Spice Kitchen, in the east Adelaide suburb of Leabrook, also defies expectation. In her own rather headstrong manner, this chef has developed a take on Indian cuisine you won't see elsewhere in this country.

Ragini Dey in her Indian restaurant in Adelaide.

As a trained Indian chef, she presents Indian food in a manner that emphasises visual appeal and drama: witness her signature Rajasthani lamb which comes to the table under a cloche of clove smoke with leaves of unleavened handkerchief bread - this dish alone is worth a trip to Adelaide.

But more than anything else, as a chef of experience, Dey's food has the balance of spices, and nuance of flavour, only years of experimentation, an unwillingness to compromise and a refined palate can achieve. The Spice Kitchen is a simple home to some of, if not the best, Indian food in Australia.

But don't come asking for a mild vindaloo or a fiery korma.

"That is destroying everything and we will not do that, and I tell everyone when they come in," Dey says. "We have dishes that fall into the different categories of heat, and that's how we operate, but do not ask for change because with traditional dishes in particular, they have been put together with love and spice nuance and, well, we won't alter that."

She says Indians, with their accommodating nature, are "the original hospitality industry" but with her there is a line. It's a refreshing bluntness.

Born into a middle-class family in Mirzapur, India, Dey grew up largely in Delhi. Her parents were, she says, well-travelled, adventurous and by the standards of the day, open-minded. The seeds of a family that encouraged travel both abroad and within the sub-continent, and which mixed and matched the culinary styles and techniques of many Indian cookery cultures (counter to the parochial nature of that vast society's traditions) had been sown.

Dey grew up with little sense of regional food boundaries, thanks in part due to her middle-class parents, her mother was from the north, and her father a Bengali. She says this past informs her food every day. As an Indian chef, she likes to mix and match regional styles in much the same manner she grew up with at her parents' table.

More surprises: Dey graduated in political science at 19, but having done the right thing by her parents succumbed to a more pragmatic urge. Food. "They might have been slightly disappointed, but not hugely," she says now from the office of her modest Leabrook restaurant and cooking school. "Food was always very, very important in my life but I never thought about doing it professionally. Girls just didn't do that (in India in the 70s)."

It was fortunate that her parents allowed her to go off to study at a prestigious hotel management school , because this chef, restaurateur, wife and mum has, in her 50s, authored her first book after more than 30 years in the food game and makes her debut at a national food festival ( at Noosa) this weekend.

Dey's story is true of many a migrant.

After graduation, in 1982, she visited a family contact in Sydney for six months and it made an impact. She went back to India, worked in hotels, met her future husband Sujar (also a chef, now in convention centre management) and when he was offered a job at Adelaide's then new Hilton, they thought: why not?

Along the way, Dey taught Indian cookery for the South Australian Gas Company, made roast dinners at Government House and jam roly-poly in retirement homes, a job she rather liked ("we had very good budgets to do things properly"). Still, there was an urge to do something for herself: she saw a shop to lease in 1989 and The Spice Kitchen was the result, selling spices, Indian condiments, that sort of thing. "In my life, everything is not really thought over, as such, particularly deeply ... I didn't want a restaurant, I just wanted a little shop where I could put up a blackboard menu (for takeaway) and recipes of the week and make our pastes and things like that.

"I called it The Spice Kitchen because I wanted to be open to other cuisines and their spices, like Cajun, but the first day we opened we were swamped and everyone was saying 'where's your menu, where's your butter chicken, you're Indian, why don't you run an Indian?'. So we sort of got thrown into being Indian, I suppose."

In 1992, Dhaba at The Spice Kitchen, the dining room, was born. And of her cuisine, she says, "I've never been conservative," but credits a family live-in cook for bringing her up with quality food and her father for the creative spark. "I get my inspiration from my father."

She includes Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria as "heroes" but says possibly the most influential book in her life was a childhood copy of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. But she is quick to bemoan the narrow scope of Indian food in Australia, the formulaic approach. "A lot of the people who have restaurants - first had restaurants in Australia - they weren't really trained. They didn't want to experiment."

Purely by chance, she says, the Leabrook location just happened to be a cosmopolitan part of town where people had travelled and were interested in something beyond rogan josh. "It helped us a lot."

And Dey became something of an unlikely food celebrity in her adopted home town, a big fish in a small pond. Just kept plugging away; known to loyal customers, food event goers, and not much more. Her lovely Australian/Indian book may be about to change that. On the verge of becoming an overnight sensation after 30 years in her adopted country? Not what you might have expected.

Spice Kitchen, Hardie Grant, $49.95, out now.

Ragini Dey will give a cooking demonstration at the Noosa Food & Wine Festival tomorrow (May 19) at 2pm at Festival Village. noosafoodandwine.com.au

Novelle Indian

IF Ragini Dey's suburban Adelaide restaurant Spice Kitchen represents the quality end of old-school Indian in this country, one of Melbourne's hottest new openings this year, Tonka, signals something entirely new. In Australia anyway.

With its significant subcontinental population, Britain has long enjoyed thoroughly modern, ambitious young restaurants with an Indian pulse. Tamarind was the first such to gain a Michelin star, more than a decade ago, and when I visited the spectacular space perhaps 12 years ago, I remember asking myself: how long before savvy Australian operators and chefs take this great cuisine and give it a contemporary forum?

It's taken a while.

Significantly, Tonka (pictured) is not run by Indian Australians but the trio behind the CBD's modern look at Vietnamese food, Coda. Just as significant, however, is that while exec chef and partner Adam D'Sylva's first passion is modern Asian food, his father was born in Madras. He has genuine Indian DNA, and it shows in this very contemporary restaurant, in the bowels of Melbourne's hottest restaurant district, Flinders Lane.

Where most chefs scramble to install charcoal burners or water-baths these days, D'Sylva has tandoor ovens. Instead of the ubiquitous, on-trend salsa or tortilla, Tonka serves pomegranate raita and naan. And soft-shell crab is used in a pakora, with pickled cucumber, lemon, chilli and mint instead of being stuffed into a slider, or taco.

The mentality is thoroughly modern, the approach lighter and more refined than you might expect, but the flavour and spice palate is entirely Indian.

It all goes with a froufrou industrial fit-out, switched-on service and a wine and cocktail list developed to work with the flavours and textures of the food.

We've had upmarket Indian restaurants before, but never anything like this. An obvious gap in the market? I think that question's already been answered.

Source: The Australian, 18 May 2013