Chef-patron Chet Sharma serves up seasonal flavours with a complex hit of spice. James Stagg pays a visit
Having been a development chef for several highly rated restaurants, Chet Sharma is used to agonising over ingredients and process to deliver stunning dishes. At BiBi, his first solo project in partnership with JKS Restaurants, he has had the opportunity to indulge his passion for maximising the impact of every element even further.
Sharma earned a reputation for refinement working on the launch of Mark Birchall's Moor Hall and at Simon Rogan's L'Enclume, so returning to the cuisine of his childhood at BiBi (Urdu for ‘lady of the house', in recognition of his grandmothers) took some retraining. "I needed to re-educate my Indian palate," he says. "My background has been very fine dining at two- and three-Michelin-star level and modern European, so I wasn't ready."
Sharma admits that when BiBi was first imagined, the concept was part of a pipeline, after JKS brands Brigadiers, Berenjak and Sabor. Time, and the pandemic, led to a revision. Initially destined to be "a kind of Indian version of James Knappett's Kitchen Table", BiBi was ultimately made more accessible, while retaining the produce and process focus.
On a corner site in London's Mayfair, BiBi seats 33 guests inside and 20 more on the terrace. The menu is split into bar snacks, small savoury plates presented as chaat (snacks), sigree (grills) and desserts. Sharma says: "We wanted a restaurant people would come back to over and over again without losing the point of the produce-led, high-technique seasonality that now makes the Bibi brand. The menu is flexible enough that someone can come in for lunch and spend £15 and be out of the door. We also have guests that spend big on wine and all the supplements."
The menu will change regularly and aims to be playful with plenty of spicing showmanship. Each small plate seems composed of a few simple ingredients, but the dishes pack layer upon layer of flavour thanks to Sharma's dedication to technique, sourcing and spicing.
Take the raw Belted Galloway beef pepper fry (£14). The menu lists it as including fermented Tellicherry peppercorns, but there are multiple types of pepper in the dish. The lacto-fermented peppercorns provide a freshness, bordering on menthol, that cuts through the fattiness of the diced sirloin.
"The guys in the kitchen call me Pepper Bae, because I go off on a tangent about pepper," Sharma explains. "We use nine types of peppercorns in the kitchen. For the beef dish I'd originally said that we needed to cut each peppercorn into four so that diners always get that bit of freshness in every bite, but the guys on the chaat section said, ‘we can't slice peppercorns!' I guess that was my Michelin background coming through."
Everything on the menu is considered in equal measure, says Sharma, "but some dishes have more technique behind them than others". With chukh masala tikka for example, "you're getting a chicken thigh with a fermented chilli base and a little coleslaw", but once again that simple explanation belies the process behind it. Sharma sources chamba chillies from Himachal Pradesh for their unique character, salting and cooking them off in mustard oil to form a paste. This is combined with a heavily reduced chicken stock and some lemon juice, in which the chicken is marinated and glazed before being cooked slowly, high over coals on the bespoke grill on which almost every dish is cooked.
"Sigree is an open grill like a robata, but with wheels on either side controlling platforms you can move up and down. We can cook tiny things like duck hearts or a single langoustine really well. The chicken thighs are a great example – we can slowly let it cook away by moving it high [away from the coals]," Sharma says. For khatti meethi cod (£18) the complexity comes in the spice mix. For this sweet and sour dish of cod served on a dosa with a coconut emulsion and crushed peanut podi, Sharma employs a Chettinad spice mix. The cod is brined and made into a ballotine before being hung in the fridge to keep it together before it is cooked on the grill. It is sliced before service and rubbed in a spice mix that includes tamarind, sugar, star anise, black peppercorns and dagad phool (an edible lichen).
"Some dishes are always going to look simple, like the cod and Swaledale lamb, which are just two or three components on plate," Sharma says. "But each component has layers of flavour. The idea is careful sourcing, smart cooking, and authenticity with a relatable flavour."
From the menu
- Wookey-hole cheese papad £5
- Oyster pachadi £8
Chaat
- Orkney scallop nimbu pani, with raw scallops, Indian lemonade £18
- Loch Duart salmon jhal muri, with raw salmon, Odia mustard oil emulsion £14
- Nashpati bhel, with heritage puffed grains, pear granita £9
Sigree
- Sharmaji's Lahori chicken, with cashew and yogurt whey £12
- Aged Swaledale lamb chop barra, with Kashmiri walnut doon chettin £22
- Achari British wagyu, with green chilli chutney, burnt onions £55
Desserts
- Rum and munnaka raisin kulfi £6
- Saffron and white chocolate kulfi £6
42 North Audley Street, London W1K 6ZP
www.bibirestaurants.com
