Takara’s Executive Chef, Rajesh Thapa, is often cool-headed and soft-spoken but without a doubt, he is a culinary superstar just waiting for his stars to align.
We amazingly discovered this in the recent experiential dinner called Kaiseki held last week.
We knew Chef Rajesh for nearly four years now enough to understand that as a small boy growing up in Nepal, it was through its rough streets that he discovered his passion for food.
When he moved to Dubai nearly a decade ago, his path to specialise in Japanese cuisine got cemented when he trained and worked under one of the top Japanese chefs of that period.
Chef Rajesh diligently did his part going through the cycle and enhancing his skills as a chef moving not just within the luxury cuisine circle but to iconic hospitality properties like Jumeirah.
When he moved to Oman, he would eventually use what he has learned to establish Takara as the place to be for Japanese cuisine in Muscat and without a doubt, we’d give him the distinction at any time.
Kaiseki is a five-course set menu that mixed traditional Japanese cuisine with something modern. The name of the event is taken from a Japanese word that refers to a collection of skills and techniques used in dishes preparation evolving to eventually mean “a little something of everything.”
True to his words, the dishes were a journey through Japan, from the peaks of the mountains to the scenic plains, into rivers and oceans of this archipelago known for its restraint and discipline.
From the amuse-bouche that started the dinner to the dessert, they were dishes not often seen served in Oman.
For our team, all the dishes definitely stood out. The soup, while dashi-based and very simple has all the luxury of umami combined with very minimal yet truly flavourful ingredients. The banana-leaf-covered seabass paired with white rice was gobbled in just a few minutes. The star of the show however is the scallop ceviche. To us, it looked like art on a plate reminiscent of the shores of Japan where the foams create the perfect background to a beautifully carved, melt-in-your-mouth white meat of scallops.
If Chef Rajesh continues on this path of amazing creation, we would gladly attend all his future experiential dinners in a heartbeat.
