Chef Sunil Ghai: ‘We never toned down any spice level or any recipes just because we are serving Irish people’

Move over Madhur Jaffrey, there is a new food writer who is making authentic Indian food accessible to home cooks and demystifying the magic of that country’s multilayered spice and seasoning. Sunil Ghai has been in Ireland since 2000 and is best known as a chef and restaurateur with three businesses, Pickle and Street in Dublin and Tiffin in his adopted hometown of Greystones, Co Wicklow. He is an author now too, with the publication of his first book, Spice Box: Easy, Everyday Indian Food.

It is one of the most useful books to come across my desk in quite a while, and a great read, with an engaging narrative that brings context and authority to the more than 100 recipes it contains. Ghai’s inspiration is his mother, Mohini, who cooked every day for 17 extended family members at their home in Gwalior in northern India.

“She was the first chef I encountered,” he says. “I used to help her out in the kitchen.” Ghai’s late father, Shri Guru Dutt Ghai, who died in 2020 and to whom the book is dedicated, was a local government official, and Sunil and his two brothers and two sisters grew up alongside his father’s brother and his family.

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“I am a Punjabi guy,” says Ghai proudly. But his career was to take him away from home, as it did his younger brother Rohit, the only other family member to follow a career in food, who has restaurants in London and the Middle East.

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He was working with the five-star Oberoi hotel group in 2000 when he encountered Asheesh Dewan, who invited him to come to work with him in Ireland. Their business partnership spanned 15 years, with the launch and expansion of the Jaipur group and Ananda, a modern Indian restaurant in Dundrum.

Ghai was crowned best chef in Ireland by Food & Wine magazine in 2009 and again in 2013, accolades that steered his career direction, prompting him to abandon a planned move to Melbourne. “I said, ‘I cannot leave this country, which is giving me so much recognition, just like that’.”

Instead, he branched out on his own in Ireland, opening Pickle, serving north Indian food, on Camden Street in 2015. The restaurant was an immediate success, and was followed by Tiffin in Greystones and Street in Clonskeagh. “We never toned down any spice level or any recipes just because we are serving Irish people. Let me give you what it tastes like,” he says of his efforts to remain authentic in his cooking.

Sunil Ghai's book, Spice Box. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

He brings the same energy to the cookbook, the premise for which was to show how great Indian dishes can be cooked using spices and ingredients easily available from supermarkets. That is why, for instance, the recipes specify paprika rather than Kashmiri chilli (though, of course, if you can get the real deal, do so; Ghai recommends the brand Deggi Mirch, available at Asian shops).

Within hours of first opening this book, I am in my kitchen, making the recipe for fishcakes with masala mayo, to use up some leftover organic salmon. I don’t have any fresh mint, or dill for the pickle, but everything else is to hand in my fridge and larder, and they work out beautifully. That’s part of the joy of this recipe collection: although the ingredients lists may seem long, they are mostly things you might already have in your cupboard, or can buy locally.

I almost always add a splash of water when I add the ground spices, so that the spices don’t burn
— Top tip from Sunil Ghai

There is a rhythm to the recipes, which is why Ghai’s instructions to measure and prepare the ingredients in advance is worth following, to take the stress out of the process, where things sometimes need to happen quickly. Above all, you don’t want those spices to burn, Ghai says. “I almost always add a splash of water when I add the ground spices, so that the spices don’t burn.”

At home in Greystones, you won’t find butter chicken or lamb korma on the Ghai family table. “We are a vegetarian family, nobody ate meat in our family, not even eggs. Now, I do eat meat, because of my profession, but at home we don’t.” Ghai met his wife, Leena, who also works in their business, when she was a hotel management graduate trainee at the hotel where he was working.

“We fell in love and I decided to marry her. I was only 21 years of age and we got married.” The couple have a 20-year-old son, Ishan, who was born in Ireland and is studying computer science. There is another family member too. “Junior, my boy,” Ghai says fondly, referring to the family’s much loved black Labrador.