Cannes: Celebrity chef Vikas Khanna is headed for Cannes where he will be unveiling Utsav, an Indian festival compendium and the world’s costliest cookbook at Rs 2 lakh. We’re not surprised, since the tome weighs a bicep-busting 16 kg. This is the first cookbook in 68 years of Cannes Film Festival that a cookbook is being launched here.
Sonam Kapoor, who made her red carpet appearance at the 68th Cannes Film Festival, also launched four times Michelin starred Chef Vikas Khanna’s most awaited book ‘Utsav – A Culinary Epic’ at the French Riviera yesterday. Interestingly, India’s Chef Vikas Khanna is the first chef to walk the red carpet at the festival to launch his book ‘Utsav’, which is the most costly cookbook and weighs over 15 kilos.
The book will be put on auction at Sotheby’s, with the funds going to charity. Khanna, who cunts the Godrejs and the Rahejas among his corporate clients, has included recipes that are celebrity favourites.
Another Khanna fan is Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise. “He came to Junoon (Manhattan restaurant) for a meal,” remembers Khanna, “His favourite is Vikas’s Vegetarian Ultra Creative Tree of Life. It’s my version of Gobi ka pakoda with lasun ki chutney.”
“The journey of anything auspicious begins with transgender community singing and clapping at the doors of our homes, their blessings are like Mother’s love. It may be a wedding, child births, first Diwali, Holi or Lohri, it’s their voices that bring the celebration in the occasion. So, I dedicate this book to them to them and applaud for their love and compassion in our Nation,” he said at the launch.
The 1,000-page coffee table book has been written with pure gold ink and contains 1,000 recipes from 70 Indian festivals.
The price of the book will start from eight lakh. You cannot go to any book store or Amazon store to purchase it initially, because it’s an aspirational project. The first few copies have gold used in them… pure gold inks have been used for writing,” Khanna had said.
“It’s a coffee table book…It comes in a large box which I call the ‘cradle’. The book is approximately 1,200 large pages…so, if you talk about regular pages, it would be approximately 3,000 pages.”
Khanna is a celebrity chef and has hosted TV show MasterChef India (season 2), Season 3, Season 4 and Masterchef Junior. Khanna, who is based in New York, was named in list of “Sexiest Man Alive” in 2011 by People magazine.
Bureau Report
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