PREETI BHARDWAJ is very different from the other ladies driving We The Chefs (WTC). She is a trained hotelier (an IHM-Pusa graduate, she counts well-known names in the industry, such as Mandeep Lamba, Saeed Sherwani and Sanjay Raina, among her college mates); her parents, too, were hospitality professionals. And like so many other hotel management graduates of her generation, she started her short career in hotels at The Ashok in New Delhi, which in the mid-80s was a force to reckon with, unlike its present self.
She wasn’t destined, however, to remain in the hospitality sector for long. Speaking about her career track on ‘Food Talk with Sourish Bhattacharyya’, Preeti narrated how she moved from one job to another, brought up three children, including one who hasn’t quite recovered from a car crash, and was even hired for a couple of years by TajSATS to roll out its Covid lockdown plan to open quick service restaurants in condominiums. Covid retreated and the plan got shelved, but Preeti’s grown-up children insisted that she shouldn’t give up cooking on a commercial scale. They were convinced that she’d make a very good home chef because she cooks so well.
It was a tempting idea and Preeti took it up, and today, her Hyderabadi cuisine menu is hugely popular among her customers, although she got to know about the cuisine only because of a cookbook a neighbour who was moving out of her apartment building, gave her as a parting gift. Preeti, who grew up in Delhi, spent a couple of years of her childhood in Kolkata, and later, a couple more in New York, where she worked as a hostess at the then-famous Akbar restaurant on Park Avenue, could never have imagined that she would one day become well-known for her Hyderabadi cuisine. And it is an organic following, for she has no presence on social media.
Preeti must be a good learner, for her Haleem (the thick stew made with mutton, lentils and pounded wheat), Shikampuri Kabab (mutton mince patties with hung curd packed into their ‘shikam’ or stomach) and Qabooli (often described for the sake of simplicity as a ‘chana dal biryani’) have quite a number of fans. And of course, her other in-demand dish is the Hyderabadi biryani – she makes the ‘pakki’ variety with cooked pieces of mutton or chicken – which she serves with ‘mirchi ka salan’ (curried chilli peppers), ‘baghaare baigan’ (tempered eggplant) and ‘dahi chutney’ (strained yoghurt folded into a mint and onion chutney). Another fan favourite is Preeti’s Khatti Dal, which is prepared with ‘toor dal’ and owes its sourness to the tamarind that is used liberally to make it (this is the Telangana influence expressing itself).
Explaining her choice of cuisine, Preeti said she perceived a gap in the market – there was an unmet demand for Hyderabadi food because it was not easily available in Delhi-NCR. And Hyderabadi dishes, even those that are very much similar (such as the ‘koftas’ and ‘qormas’), taste very different from what you’d be served on the Mughlai or Awadhi ‘dastarkhwan’. Moreover, as Preeti explained, Hyderabadi cuisine fitted into “the capacity, the resources and the bandwidth” she had. She does not need a tandoor, for instance, to prepare her favourite Shikampuri Kababs; these can easily be made in her kitchen.
Her secret sauce, though, consists of equal parts of joy (provided by the Sufi music she plays in the kitchen when she’s cooking) and the love with which she prepares food. “If people say my food tastes good, it is because I make it with a sense of joy. And it comes to you with my love and prayers,” Preeti said. And the three Hyderabadi dishes she had brought along with her to the We The Chefs Experience Centre in Gurgaon convinced us that she could only have made them with love and joy. She may have learnt to make Hyderabad famous dishes from a handed-down cookbook, but today, she lives and breathes the Hyderabadi cuisine.