Indian food

Chet Sharma – physicist, DJ and award-winning chef – only needs to sleep for four hours a night. “I inherited [this gift] from my mother,” shrugs the Londoner when we talk one morning before lunchtime service at his restaurant, BiBi. “She has unlimited energy!” Raised in Berkshire, England, to parents with Indian heritage, Sharma has a master’s degree in clinical and experimental medicine from University College London, as well as a master’s in physics and a PhD in condensed-matter physics from the University of Oxford. It was during those seven years studying that he also moonlighted as a cook and a DJ. “I’d do university in the morning, dinner service at a restaurant [at night], and at 11 p.m.

Growing up in a “mixed” American household, of Indian, Puerto Rican and Italian descent, was deeply confusing during my formative years. I came of age in a mostly white suburb just outside New York City. In addition to my foreign-sounding name, I looked nothing like any of my classmates or the kids around the neighborhood. My olive skin, bushy eyebrows and curly hair were more reminiscent of children you’d find in the more ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Queens or the Bronx. My family spent most of our weekends visiting family and doing our grocery shopping in such areas. The array of ingredients that my Puerto Rican and Italian-American mother, Loretta, was searching for didn’t exist in our local Pathmark.