Even at £26 - or $53 - the tandoori black-spice chicken breast at Rasoi restaurant in Chelsea starts to look like a steal when it arrives at the table. Perched on a scoop of fragrant, chili-infused basmati rice, the grilled meat comes wrapped, as though by gastro-magi, in a blanket of gold foil.
Lest there be doubt, the waiter reassuringly declares that the gossamer metal is edible, even good for a litany of ailments should you be suffering from, say, rheumatoid arthritis.
Yet to the Indian-food devotee, the radical twist of the dish is not the 24-karat-schnitzel coating. It's the breast below, served whole and, more to the point, spared the usual Bollyfood blitzkrieg in which all manner of meat, fish and fowl is sliced into unidentifiable bits and drowned in brown curry sauce.
Rasoi, you might say, is anything but a typical Indian restaurant in London. In fact, it's not a typical Indian restaurant, period.
"You don't see the word curry on the menu," said chef-owner Vineet Bhatia on a recent evening before dinner service at his discreet, century-old townhouse location. "We try and stay clear of that altogether."
Mr. Bhatia, one of the world's first Indian chefs to receive a Michelin star, is on a mission: to save his homeland's noble cuisine from Western bastardization and, more boldly, liberate it from the straitjacket of its own traditions.
"When I came here in '93, the state of the Indian restaurants was absolutely diabolical," he said. "I saw things which were not Indian. You would see things on a menu like rainbow rice. Where do you get rainbow rice?"
Though Rasoi's tiny main dining room seats just 24 people (not including a private-dining space upstairs) and features a locked front door with a doorbell, it is the nerve centre of perhaps the most ambitious modern-Indian culinary crusade.
In recent years, Mr. Bhatia has added destinations in Dubai, Moscow, Miami and Mauritius.
Next month, he will launch a casual-chic chain whimsically called - wait for it - Urban Turban, to feature a Toronto location at some point.
Mr. Bhatia is by some accounts the unofficial leader of a movement to elevate Indian restaurant dining to the vaunted level of French haute cuisine. Its practitioners include at least three other Londoners: Vivek Singh of the Cinnamon Club, Alfred Prasad of Tamarind and Atul Kochhar of Benares, as well as Vancouver's Vikram Vij, celebrated chef-owner of Vij's."We've managed to stand up to the rest of the cuisines and said, 'We're serious,'" Mr. Vij said.
Not coincidentally, the prophets of the modern-Indian movement are mainly expatriates. "I wasn't very happy in India because you were never allowed to grow as a chef," said Mr. Bhatia, 40, who emigrated after training as a chef in Delhi. "Indians would not let you experiment, they would not let you be innovative. For them, it was, 'if it's not broken, don't fix it.'"
Until recently, Indian restaurant dining, even in the subcontinent, was almost indistinguishable from the family-style service of Indian homes. Typically it revolved around communal plates, often filled with fragrant stews known generically as curries.
"I probably was the first Indian chef in London, if not Europe, to actually start plating Indian food and trying to make it look nice," said Mr. Bhatia, echoing a principle of the French nouvelle cuisine revolution of the 1970s.
While still working at his first London job, at Star of India in the mid-1990s, Mr. Bhatia borrowed another defining principle of nouvelle cuisine, replacing coronary-courting cream-and-butter sauces with lighter flavour conduits such as stocks and yogurt.
"He was the first one to have actually started doing it, to even start pushing the perceived boundaries with Indian food in this country," said Mr. Singh, executive chef of the Cinnamon Club, which, as he proudly adds, features "absolutely no curry and no sharing at the table."
Taking another page from French service, Rasoi - literally "kitchen" - which Mr. Bhatia opened with business-partner and wife Rashima in 2004, features a £75, multi-course tasting menu with a succession of appetizers and main courses. The highlight is grilled chili lobster, served with spiced lobster jus and broccoli khichdi, the dish given a theatrical tableside dusting of cocoa powder from a cheesecloth sack by the waiter.
For the khichdi, a traditional rice-and-lentil dish steeped in butter, Mr. Bhatia calls on a northern Italian classic for inspiration. "The rice is like a risotto, but it's not made with arborio, it is basmati rice. And normally you add lentil and lots of butter, but we don't do that. Lentils make it heavy. And instead of adding ghee [clarified butter] we add yogurt, which gives it a smooth, luxurious feel."
Mr. Bhatia opened his second Rasoi in Mauritius in October, adding to a group that includes Indego in Dubai and Agni in Moscow. He also consults to British Airways' first-class in-flight service.
And in a move that will eventually bring the new contemporary-Indian aesthetic to the masses, next month he will launch the London flagship of Urban Turban, a tapas-style restaurant he hopes will blossom into a global chain. A proposed space in a Toronto hotel was rejected earlier this year after a site inspection by Mr. Bhatia. "We're still looking."
Born in Mumbai, Mr. Bhatia entered hotel school at 17 and later trained in French cuisine at India's top hospitality college, the Oberoi School of Hotel Management. In the evenings and on weekends, he would moonlight at a traditional charcoal-grill restaurant, becoming one of the first Oberoi alumni to graduate with Indian as well as French training.
Frustrated by the general Indian customers' unwillingness to move beyond family-style service, Mr. Bhatia moved to London, where he promptly grew aghast at the city's dining scene.
At Star of India, Mr. Bhatia introduced an alternative gourmet dining option alongside the traditional, shared-plate Indian menu. Modern Indian had taken its first baby step.
The contemporary concept was later embraced in full, with no "traditional" option, at the splashy Cinnamon Club by Mr. Singh, another Oberoi graduate. And Mr. Bhatia later launched an all-modern menu at his next restaurant, Zaika, where he earned his Michelin star in 2001.
Vancouver's Mr. Vij does serve communal platters and curries at Vij's, but he exemplifies the new movement in his use of top-quality local ingredients, such as B.C. spot prawns and beef tenderloin, and his artful presentations.
"What I did differently was to create sauces as delicious as the French, with their jus and their demi-glace, and I combined them with the style of cooking people like," he said. "I'll still marinate the lamb, but I'll do it in a way that it almost feels like it's done à la minute, not like a curry that's been sitting on a pot stewing for too long."
Another mission shared by Mr. Bhatia and Mr. Vij, the latter a certified sommelier, is to promote wine with Indian food. "In this country, in the British Isles, unfortunately they want to have beer," Mr. Bhatia said. "Beer is the worst thing you can have. The image of curry and lager - it is so wrong. It just fills you up."
Given his rising celebrity-chef status, will Mr. Bhatia embrace television like English compatriots Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver?
"It is not something I will go marching into," he said. "Mostly I've been called to do short programs and instant meals. I'm not about that. I am a serious chef."