A red rice congee spiked with sambar spices and topped with avial vegetables. An olan, traditionally a ash gourd curry, reimagined as a consommé with grilled pineapple. A pradhaman recast as a toasted coconut cake drizzled with salted jaggery caramel. This was chef Arthi Rathore’s sadya at Indica, a pop up venue in Ghitorni near Gurugram, last year.While on paper it barely resembles the meal it claims to have descended from, taste it, though, and the flavours are unmistakably unfamiliar, just rearranged into a shape the feast has never taken before.
Nair on Fire onasadya
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For generations, the Onasadya has followed the same rules, 25 dishes, give or take, arranged in a fixed order on a banana leaf, cooked more or less the same way for years. It’s one of the few Indian feasts where the sequence matters as much as the food itself. That fixity is starting to crack with a handful of chefs now treating the sadya less as a ritual to preserve and more as a format to work with.“We wanted to innovate while staying true to the ethics of the sadya. There’s been a lot of innovation globally around food from the north of India, and almost none from the south. I wanted to show that southern food can be reimagined too, because of the sheer power of flavour we have here,” says Arthi a MasterChef India Tamil participant.The most radical version comes from co-founder and executive chef Sara Jacob Nair of Nair On Fire a chain of delivery kitchens in Mumbai, specialising in home-style Kerala cuisine.Her onsadya keeps the traditional vegetarian spread intact and adds one non-vegetarian curry alongside a celebratory roast of either prawn, fish, chicken, mutton or buff, a nod to how Syrian Christian households in Kerala have always folded meat and seafood into their celebrations. It’s proved more popular than the original with over 60 percent of the her customers now choosing the non-vegetarian version.Her superfood sadya is built around black rice, palm jaggery, jackfruit and moringa, ingredients Jacob sees not as trendy additions but as things Kerala cooking always relied on.Her sadya on a thali turns the usual 20-30 dishes on a leaf into a course wise experience. “A Malayali doesn’t need instruction, you just mix everything on the leaf and eat. But for someone unfamiliar with the cuisine 25-30 dishes can be over whelming. This gives them an entry point,” says Sara . She’s firm this isn’t dilution. “I see it as creating more doors into tradition,” she adds.Payasam made with Kashmiri plumsAt OMO in Gurugram, the approach is far more conservative. Culinary director Chetna Chopra keeps the classic dishes intact, changing only a handful of ingredients such as a toran made with fiddlehead fern instead of beans, a pineapple pulissery and a payasam built around Kashmiri plums from a partner farm. Chetna says, “The idea is to create an unmistakably traditional sadya seen through our sourcing philosophy, rather than a contemporary reinterpretation.”Sarada Krishnan, founder of South Side Mumbai a catering company in Mumbai and now also a supper club in Dubai, has cooked a traditional Onasadya every year for the past six years. This year she’s giving a modern spin to the dishes and presenting each dish as a tasting portion. The menu includes parippu vada with puli inji and chammandi, mooru curry balls and a pothichoru of Kerala red rice with sambar, avial, kalan, olan, thoran and manga curry, wrapped in banana leaf. For Sarada , the format is changing, not the food.
