La Ventura: A night to remember

Paris? London? New York? Wrong. This is Bharat Nivas, Auroville. ‘La Ventura’ (The Adventure) is Auroville’s first high-class restaurant in twenty years. And it’s been worth waiting for. Among the other items on the menu this evening are chicken liver pate, roast beef, vegetable lasagna and Meringue Swiss, truly a feast for jaded taste buds.

So what happened? Sacha is the moving force behind this gastronomic phenomenon. After training in Stockholm as a chef and working in restaurants there, he returned to Auroville a few years ago to see what he could achieve here. Maison d’Auroville, the Auroville restaurant in Pondicherry, had just closed down, so his first idea was to open another one in town. But... rents in Pondicherry are expensive and he had little money. And anyway, nothing suitable was available. Then somebody made a revolutionary proposal. Why not start a restaurant in Auroville? Sacha gulped, then agreed.

Why not? And so began the battle. Money was the first problem. How to raise it? A friend suggested he raise finance by issuing loan cards – the famous ‘Golden Cards’ – which allowed the donor to draw up to a certain number of free meals from the new restaurant which in turn agreed to buy the card back at cost price after one year. High finance, Auroville style! But it worked.

But then... Sacha fell ill. “I goofed”, he admitted later. “Every time I felt a bit better, I’d go to sports. Then people would see me and wonder why isn’t he getting on with this restaurant? They didn’t know that next day I’d be ill again. I should really have explained to people what was happening. It was a difficult time.”

When he began to recover, the question remained, where? After some typical frustrations and dead ends, he began to work at Bharat Nivas kitchen, helping with the lunches. Eventually the management agreed. He could use the facilities to start a restaurant on condition that he only opened in the evenings.

Fine... but Sacha had never managed a restaurant before, and who was going to help him? After all, even a tiny restaurant requires a small army of helpers. And in Auroville everybody is so busy. “I decided”, he said, “to make it a fun thing to get the young people involved.” Once more, it worked. He is happy with his team. “They are giving a big push. There’s a serious feeling. They’d rather buy a new table for the restaurant than take anything for themselves”. But he also knows that it’s still early days. “Generally, Aurovilians are so laid-back. They would rather do five different things in their own time than stick at something. It’s important that in the future everybody in the team should take up responsibilities so it’s not all on my head.”

And for the future, as for now, the key word is quality. “One of the reasons it took me so long to get it together”, he said, “is that everybody had such high expectations of me. I couldn’t afford to get it wrong.” But to maintain quality in this environment is, to put it mildly, quite a challenge. It’s not just having to get people to commit themselves, it’s also the problem of inadequate equipment, of unreliable transport and of the irregular availability of certain foods. “In the west, you plan your menu, and then pick up the telephone. Within half an hour you have everything you need. Here, you never know what to expect, and frequently we have to improvise because one or two key ingredients are not available.” And on top of all this, he is well aware that many people are expecting him to fail, just as have so many promising projects in the past. Quite a formation to deal with!

But for the moment, the birth was healthy and La Ventura is alive and kicking. Opening three nights a week, it is already averaging fifty customers a night, and the Sunday buffet lunch is attracting more and more people.

The meal ends with coffee. I step out into the cool night air, savouring the taste of Meringue Swiss and the touch of quality and class that La Ventura has brought to Auroville. May La Ventura, may all the promising Auroville adventures continue!