Chennai: Chef Damu, a cook, restaurateur and television personality who became one of Tamil Nadu's most recognisable faces on the cooking show Cooku With Comali, died on Sunday. He was 72.
No cause of death and no hospital was disclosed.
His career ran on two tracks that rarely meet in India. He held a doctorate in hotel management, the first Indian chef to do so, and he was equally at home on a television set where the point was entertainment rather than instruction. That combination — a trained professional willing to be laughed at — is why he reached households that no cookbook could.
The record that travels with his name is a Guinness one: 617 dishes cooked in 24.5 hours, set in 2010. Read the number again. Six hundred and seventeen dishes in a day and half an hour. It is the kind of feat that says less about skill than about stamina and organisation, and it made him a known quantity well beyond Tamil Nadu.
Tributes came from Chef Sanjeev Kapoor and from actor Vijay, according to reports.
For a generation of Tamil viewers, Cooku With Comali was the show that made cooking watchable as comedy, and Damu was the straight man at its centre — the one who actually knew what he was doing while the comedians around him did not. That is a harder role than it looks.
Tamil Nadu's food culture has produced a long line of household names, but few who crossed from the kitchen into general entertainment without losing the kitchen. He managed it for years.
Details of the last rites were not immediately known.