Gaggan Anand is always dreaming up his next culinary masterpiece. When we met him for coffee in July 2023, at his Indian-Mexican restaurant Ms Maria and Mr Singh in Singapore, he told us about a “secret project” that he was developing in partnership with a global luxury brand. And while the celebrated Indian chef wouldn’t tell us who that partner was, he did let slip that the “massive project” was in Bangkok, the city the innovative chef has called home for the past 17 years. At the time, the most we could extract from him was this promise: “It’s something you haven’t seen before.”
The mystery was finally revealed at the end of February this year when Louis Vuitton opened LV The Place Bangkok at Gaysorn Amarin. The two-storey, multi-concept space comprises an immersive exhibition, store, café and Anand’s new restaurant, simply named Gaggan at Louis Vuitton. Catching up nearly three months after the restaurant opened, Anand proudly tells Tatler that, as the name implies, Gaggan at Louis Vuitton is a meeting of two creative cultures: food and fashion.
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The main dining area of Gaggan at Louis Vuitton
The award-winning chef admits that it might seem like an unlikely partnership for patrons familiar with his other restaurants, especially for those who have dined at contemporary Indian establishment Gaggan Anand in the Thai capital, which earned the No. 4 spot on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2024 list. After all, Anand is known for having “no culinary boundaries” while Louis Vuitton boasts a storied 170-year-old history guided by heritage and its founder’s brand philosophy. Surprisingly though, as Anand explains, the Maison has given him complete flexibility to run this new restaurant the way he wants, which means that the elements integral to how he orchestrates the dining experience—such as licking food off plates or using hands instead of cutlery to eat—were retained. “They didn’t let me lose my heart and identity in the way I am playful [with my food].”
Playful is, indeed, a word that aptly describes Anand’s avant-garde cooking. Originally from Kolkata, the hotel management graduate rose to culinary fame when he opened Gaggan, his first namesake restaurant in Bangkok in 2010 and introduced the world to his brand of progressive Indian cuisine.
Dishes on the menu at Gaggan at Louis Vuitton
He prepared Indian staples like curry and yoghurt by incorporating molecular gastronomy techniques he mastered during a two-month stint with the research team at Ferran Adrià’s Alícia Foundation in Spain. One of his most famous dishes, inspired by Adrià’s “spherical olives”, is the “yoghurt explosion”: a sphere of yoghurt, served on a metal spoon, that bursts in the mouth. Curry, which is an essential part of Indian cuisine, was also reimagined as a cold dish without sacrificing traditional flavours.
Such an approach to Indian cooking was unheard of at that time, and Anand quickly gained recognition and racked up accolades along the way—most notable being that his first outlet was declared the Best Restaurant in Asia four years in a row, from 2015 to 2018, before it permanently shuttered in 2019. Despite that setback, Anand has never been busier, as he continues to helm his current Gaggan Anand restaurant, which opened in 2021, and collaborate with culinary luminaries to host various pop-ups and collaborations around the world.
A dish served at Gaggan at Louis Vuitton
As we chat, Anand shares that he has been a fan of Louis Vuitton since 2018, when the late creative director Virgil Abloh took charge of its fashion lines and started adding streetwear and oversized shirts to its collections. And while it was an easy decision to say yes to a collaboration, Anand felt that to create a restaurant for the famous luxury Maison, he needed to understand the brand in a deeper, richer way. That led to him visiting the Vuitton family home and ateliers in Asnières-sur-Seine and discovering the founder’s story, which began when Vuitton, who was barely 14 years old at the time, left his hometown of Anchay in the Jura region and travelled to the French capital alone to become an apprentice for an esteemed trunk-maker and packer. For 17 years, Vuitton sharpened his skills by crafting bespoke luggage, eventually launching his eponymous atelier in Paris in 1854.
Vuitton’s life journey became the inspiration behind Anand’s menus, guided by what he calls the five Ss: sweet, sour, salty, spicy and surprise. These take diners on a journey from Europe to Asia, with a few surprises along the way. “The storytelling starts from the first bite,” explains Anand, which is why the first course of pink guava yoghurt with chilli comes with a Louis Vuitton monogram “The moment you put [it] in your mouth, you have explosions [of flavours] to signify the merging of the two brands,” he declares.
‘Lobster’ dish made with carrots and topped with lobster meat
The succeeding dishes, he tells us, include a tomato nectar dish served with burrata ice cream in a hand-carved ice bowl, sprinkled with chilli salt; and a “lobster” dish made from Japanese heirloom kintoki carrot, shaped like the titular crustacean. It is topped with lobster meat, which is cooked sous vide and served with popcorn kimchi foam rice and a sprinkling of Thai seafood salt. Anand’s characteristic playfulness is present in all the dishes, especially his latest iteration of “Lick It Up”, a concoction of sweet potato, Japanese yellow potato and herbal potato that features the Louis Vuitton monogram.
Calling Thailand home for almost two decades, Anand champions Thai produce and ingredients in his ever-evolving menus. “80 to 90 per cent of the ingredients we use are locally sourced,” he says, adding that his team works closely with people who believe in ethical farming and fishing.
Barbecue pork
Moreover, they practise sustainability and minimal food wastage in the kitchen: “We want to go farther than nose-to-tail for an animal, [and do] nose-to-tail for everything that we use, like tomatoes or eggplants or even water, converting it into edible art. I can’t change plastic culture but what I can do as a chef is make sure we generate as little waste as possible.”
Unlike the original Gaggan Anand restaurant where he challenged the norms of fine dining with an experimental concept that he felt was “beyond most people’s imagination”, Anand feels that Gaggan at Louis Vuitton is where diners will feel “more comfortable with my cooking”. For a start, they won’t be dining at one social table, but in an elegant 30-seater space; there is also a six-seater private dining room.
The elegant main dining room
Exquisite tableware
The experience begins as soon as guests step inside the entrance foyer, which is decorated with bespoke Louis Vuitton trunks stacked one on top of the other, and are met by the affable front-of-house staff, dressed in elegant Louis Vuitton uniforms, who lead diners to their seats at one of the ten marble tables in the main dining room. The room’s undulating walls featuring resin structures were created by Italian multi-disciplinary studio Draga & Aurel, and are furnished with flower lamps decorated with the brand’s signature LV monogram; fringed curtains add a touch of opulence. The six-seater private dining room, adds Anand, gives a “cool and special” vibe of being inside an LV trunk and allows for a peek into the kitchen with the simple press of a button.
While the seasonal menus will personally come from Anand, he may not be at the restaurant every day—he assures us, though, that his team of chefs will be executing them to his high standards. “This is a joint venture [between me and Louis Vuitton], so I made sure that the food is good and we have an excellent team.” In Anand’s words, he is the conductor and his culinary team is his orchestra. But his absence from the kitchen doesn’t mean diners are unlikely to catch sight of the chef—he’ll be there often, as the “restaurant is two kilometres away from my house”.
The elegant main dining room
Before our conversation ends, Anand tells us just how important Gaggan at Louis Vuitton is to him. It is the first time he’s partnered with a fashion house in imagining a novel concept, and the first time that Louis Vuitton has opened a restaurant in Southeast Asia, let alone one headlined by a Bangkok-based Indian chef who “isn’t renowned for French cuisine but Asian cuisine”. A music lover, Anand likens their venture to hip hop group Run DMC doing a video for rock band Aerosmith’s mega hit Walk This Way. “It is putting two names and genres that you would never imagine together and making history,” he says. He adds that the influence of that song is still felt today—wouldn’t it be something if Gaggan at Louis Vuitton was perceived in a similar way by gourmands in Asia and beyond?
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