Delhiwale: The changing life of a chef

He can cook all of the Gunpowder khana. As for Gunpowder, that place was Delhi’s most talked about restaurant for a time (circa 2010). Ranjeet Chaudhary used to work in the kitchen. After it shut down in fashionable Hauz Khas Village and moved south to Goa, he too moved, staying with the restaurant.
Now Ranjeet is back in Hauz Khas Village. Last week, he started a new job — it is in an Airbnb guesthouse, where he is not a chef but a housekeeper required to clean the rooms.
“I’m grateful to get the work, but ultimately I want to get back to a restaurant kitchen,” he says, changing the bedsheets of a top-floor room. It overlooks Emperor Feroze Shah’s 14th century tomb.
While the soft-spoken Ranjeet could have continued with his long-time stint in Goa, he chose to return to the Capital two months ago to be with his wife and children, who have always lived in Hauz Khas Village. (He had returned in 2017 as well to work in a restaurant here, but was called back by his former employer in Goa following the Covid-era disruptions in Delhi, he says).
To establish himself again in the city, Ranjeet lately sent his resume to various restaurants. “They would ask for my skills in Chinese and Conti… I only know the dishes I made in Gunpowder.”
The Hauz Khas Village eatery was perhaps too unique. Its menu—stapled sheets really!—listed dishes from southern India that were too novel to most of us Delhiwale. Nevertheless, the place swiftly built a cult following. Time magazine recommended it to international readers as “New Delhi’s hottest new eatery.” It used to be impossible to get a table without prior booking. Ranjeet was intimately involved with this success story.
Arriving in Delhi 20 years ago from Bihar’s Madhubani, he had started as an “office peon” in Green Park, following it up as an attendant in the Hauz Khas Village parking. Soon afterwards, the Gunpowder co-founders hired him as a dishwasher, from where he gradually began his journey towards the coveted cooking range. “I learned how to extract milk from coconut, learned making imli paste, poriyal masala…” Eventually he started rustling out the main dishes.
Back in those days, Ranjeet would work from late morning to late afternoon, and then from evening to beyond midnight. These days, as a housekeeper, he works from 8am to 8pm. This clear blue noon, after thoroughly cleaning the guest house’s room, he walks out into its monument-facing balcony, and says, “One day my life will change.”