Nothing Wasted, Everything Remembered: A Conversation with Chef Patron Chet Sharma, BiBi
At BiBi in Mayfair, a signature chicken dish owes its sauce to yoghurt whey that might otherwise have gone down the sink. For founder and Chef Patron Chet Sharma, that resourcefulness runs in the family. His grandmothers’ respect for ingredients shapes the contemporary Indian restaurant’s cooking, bringing childhood memories together with British produce, heritage grains and single-origin spices.
Following BiBi’s three-star rating in the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Food Made Good Standard, Chet talks to The Knife about the people and experiments behind his food. From the happy accident that created his Green Chilli Turbot to the family wheat he brought to London, he shares why rice deserves the spotlight, vanilla belongs over charcoal and the greatest luxury is feeling looked after.
BiBi’s latest sustainability awards recognise practices your grandmothers might simply have called good housekeeping. What would they make of you winning awards for using everything up?
We were honoured to recently achieve three stars – the highest possible rating – in The Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Food Made Good Standard, which was a brilliant achievement for the team.
My grandmother was a resourceful cook who understood the importance of making the most of every ingredient and avoiding food waste. We carry that same ethos into our approach to sustainability today, considering everything from sourcing – such as building longer-term relationships with suppliers – to the environment, creating a more plant-forward menu that champions biodiversity and reducing energy use.
It also means extending this care to our team, with things like stronger workplace support and even staff meals, trying different cuisine styles.
You remember eating your uncle’s malai kofta at two in the morning on your family’s farm in India. Have you ever managed to recreate that feeling in a dish at BiBi?
What stayed with me wasn’t just the dish itself, but the care behind it. The fact that someone would go to that effort, at that hour, purely to make you feel at home, is something that has never left me. I have tried to capture the essence of this in my own version of the Malai Kofta Kebab at BiBi.
One grandmother was a stickler for ingredients and process; the other was more inventive and adaptable. When you’re developing a dish, what would each of them have to say about it?
I like to think they'd both have plenty to say, and rarely the same thing. My nanima, Kamal, was quiet, studious and incredibly precise. She gave me my first lesson in why ingredients matter; I'll never forget her beaming smile the day a stone mill was installed in our home in Mumbai. She would want to know where everything came from, and whether I'd cut any corners getting there.
My dadima, Ranjana, learnt to cook through necessity, and could make something mundane taste delicious. She once turned butternut squash peels – yes, the peels – into something moreish, a skill I'm still yet to learn. She'd probably ask why I'd used five components when two would do, and what I was planning to do with the trim.
Every dish at BiBi is, in a way, an attempt to satisfy both of them: Kamal's discipline and respect for the ingredient, with Ranjana's instinct and refusal to waste anything. Mind you, they were both strict vegetarians, so half the menu would have been off the table before we'd even started.
You’ve studied physics to doctorate level and worked in some extraordinarily creative kitchens. Tell us about a time an ingredient refused to behave as you expected, yet something delicious came out of it.
Physics teaches you that a failed experiment is still data – you just have to be willing to listen to it. Before we opened, I'd come across chukh in India, a fermented red chilli paste, and planned to cook it into a heavily reduced chicken stock split with ghee. Keiran, our former head chef, asked whether we'd ever tried making it green. So we did, and it simply didn't behave the way the red version did; with grilled chicken it just didn't work.
At the end of the day, we had some Dover sole in the test kitchen, so we cooked it slowly over the dying embers of the grill and glazed it with what was left of the green chilli sauce. Just like that, a new dish was born. It's now our Green Chilli Turbot, and in fairness, it's as much Keiran's dish as it is mine.
Some of the best things at BiBi have come from an ingredient refusing to do what we asked of it.
At BiBi, even mango stones and skins have a job. What’s the best thing you’ve made from something that nearly ended up in the bin?
It has to be Sharmaji's Lahori Chicken, which is now our signature dish. To make the rich, yoghurt-y marinades so common in Indian cooking, we hang yoghurt overnight in muslin, which leaves behind a pool of sour yoghurt whey. Most Indian restaurants tip it down the sink every day, which, because it's so acidic, is actually harmful to waterways.
From my time in modern European kitchens, I knew that whey reduced down to a caramel is incredibly flavourful: nutty, sour, just a touch sweet. So we built a sauce around it, thinking we might run the dish at lunch a couple of days a fortnight. Little did I know. Nearly 75,000 chicken breasts later, it's the only dish that has survived every version of BiBi since we opened.
It's not the only one, either. Our sweetcorn shorba exists because we kept ending up with mountains of stripped corn cobs, and our cod shammi kebab started life as a way to use up the trim from filleting. 'Waste' is usually just an ingredient nobody has thought hard enough about yet.
You source everything from Lancashire buffalo milk to heritage rice from India. Which producer has most changed the way you cook with their ingredients?
It would be difficult to pick just one, but if I had to choose, I’d say the spices. We work with single-origin, pesticide-free spices from India, often from heritage varietals. For me, they’re not just flavouring agents – they’re carriers of geography, history, and culture.
What’s important is how those spices interact with British produce. That’s where BiBi really exists – in that intersection. So whether it’s Kentish fruit, Yorkshire lamb, or Devon scallops, the spices act as a bridge between my memories of India and my reality in the UK.
The paigambari wheat your uncle grew now appears in BiBi’s rotis. What did it take to bring that childhood ingredient to a Mayfair table?
Yes, the Paigambari wheat we use for rotis is the same variety that was on the family's farm. It was my nanima Kamal's beloved wheat; nutty, slightly sweet, with a depth you just don't get from modern, commercial flour.
Bringing it to Mayfair meant finding the right farmers in India who still grow these heritage varieties without chemical intervention, and then being stubborn enough to build our roomali roti around the grain, rather than the other way round. It's a little less forgiving to work with, but that's the point. Whenever I smell that dough toasting on the cast-iron ulta tawa, I'm eight years old again, sitting in front of the Doordarshan news while dinner was being finished in the kitchen next door.
You use several heritage rice varieties. If you wanted to convince someone that rice deserves as much attention as whatever sits beside it, what would you cook them?
In India, rice is never just the thing next to the curry, and I'd want to prove that with a yahkni pulao. We make it with kaima or jeerakasala rice, a short-grain, incredibly fragrant variety from the south, cooked in a stock that's been infused for hours with fennel, black cardamom, mace and cloves. There's nothing to hide behind; every grain has to be cooked perfectly and carry all that flavour on its own.
Then, to really make the point, I'd finish with our toasted rice ice cream, where the rice is roasted until golden and infused overnight in milk. If someone still thinks rice is a side dish after that, I'm not sure there's much more I can do for them.
Mayfair diners arrive with certain expectations of luxury. Have you ever served a relatively humble ingredient or dish that stole the show?
At BiBi, we once served a millet, smoked mushroom and truffle khichdi – a dish traditionally made with rice or grains and lentils. It’s the kind of food you eat when you’re ill, tired or simply need looking after. While our version was more elevated, at its core the ingredients are simple, yet deeply nourishing, and is a reminder that the most memorable dishes are the ones that make you feel cared for.
While Mayfair diners expect refinement, I do believe luxury is mostly about care.
So regardless of whether a dish is humble or highly complex, when every detail is considered – whether it’s hand-dived Scottish scallops or single-sourced spices, alongside warm, precise service – it is the feeling of care behind the dish that a guest will remember.
You shared a home with Santiago Lastra while working at Mugaritz. What did two future restaurant founders actually cook for dinner, and who was doing the washing-up?
What I can say is that after a shift at Mugaritz, nobody had the energy to cook anything ambitious. The team favourite was buñuelos de bacalao with an ice-cold beer; so much so that our cod shammi kebab at BiBi is really a reimagined version of those late-night snacks. It's funny, you spend all day cooking some of the most creative food in the world, and what you actually crave at midnight is something fried and comforting.
Your sigree grill brings smoke and char into the menu. Which ingredient surprised you most when you first put it over the coals?
Vanilla. Most people wouldn't think of putting a vanilla pod anywhere near a grill, but toasting it over the charcoal embers changes it completely; it takes on this smoky, almost caramelised warmth that makes it taste far more interesting. We use it in the Chantilly for our BiBi babas, and smoke it for the coconut tapioca in our mango lassi dessert.
Our sigree was custom-made, with levels and pulleys so we can control the heat really carefully, and it's taught us that the coals aren't just for meat. Over time, almost everything has ended up there: aubergines, Tokyo turnips, and now vanilla. In my experience, the more delicate the ingredient, the more interesting the result.
You’ve now put your family stories into BiBi: The Cookbook. Which recipe would you most like a reader to cook until it becomes a tradition in their own family?
Most of the recipes in BiBi: The Cookbook are quite time-consuming and require lots of spices, so I would be surprised if anyone bothered to make a recipe more than once! However, if you survived the first attempt and want some more inspiration, some of my personal favourite dishes in the book include the Achari Middlewhite Pork Belly (pork is my favourite meat for its versatility, whether it’s cured, slow-smoked or braised) and the Okra Salan, one of my favourite exotic ingredients. Of course there are some very personal ones, such as Sharmaji's Lahori Chicken, which was inspired by a dish my grandfather loved growing up. Many of my dishes start with a memory from childhood, an experience travelling in India, or even a single ingredient that sparks something, and I build from there.
