For a guy who hadn’t fed more than three people on an average day, or pictured 10,000 fans rooting for him on Facebook up until June last year, Rishi Desai seems surprisingly unflappable. Sure he’s had a bit of practise — emerging unscathed from the journalistic woods on at least two continents after he made it to the top five on MasterChef Australia 2013. But anyone who followed his rise on the popular cooking competition will also tell you that this is hardly out of character for the 35-year-old, his poise palpable even in the early episodes of the show. No screaming matches, no tears shed when he was finally evicted from the Masterchef kitchen within days of the Champagne-popping finale.

Back in the real world now, Rishi teaches his six-year-old son to use a real knife in the kitchen. And juggles his day job at IP Australia — he is a chemical engineer who moved from Kolhapur to Queanbeyan, near Canberra, in 2008 — with his dreams of opening a restaurant someday. Until then he is writing a cookbook after hours, drawing up menus for pop-up dinners and toying with the idea of hosting his own TV show.

This is a crucial time for Rishi; one that will determine the course of his life in the next few years. Contestants of reality TV shows, no matter how popular, tend to be forgotten when the next season brings with it a fresh batch of people, a fresh batch of ideas. And Masterchef Australia is already in its fifth season — struggling to keep the interest of audiences alive; focusing more and more on the competition and less on the cooking. So has Rishi not considered making the most of this ephemeral celebrity by finding a patron to fund his restaurant?

“Someone had wanted me to start one right away. But I didn’t want to rush in,” says Rishi. So he chose to host a string of pop-up, invitation-only dinners instead at the Burbury Hotel in Canberra. “Think 16 hours of preparation, 300 plates, three hours, 48 diners, live demos — all this with one other person to help,” he says. It’s a model as demanding as any other. But Rishi seems to have made a success of it. Requests are pouring in for the next round of pop-ups in Sydney and Melbourne, and he recently hosted a lunch in a similar format at Adelaide.

Far too early to depart from his signature-style on the telly, the menu includes some of Rishi’s Masterchef specials: a coconut milk poached salmon, coconut and coriander rolls (suralichi wadi), slow-cooked Kolhapuri goat and the curried mussel soup that proved to be his undoing in the semi-finals.

Combining two very different universes of food, Rishi borrows from traditional Indian kitchens and from his food hero Heston Blumenthal’s scientific multi-sensory approach. But is the idea of nouvelle Indian cuisine nouvelle anymore? Aren’t the likes of Vineet Bhatia, Gaggan Anand, Atul Kochhar and Manish Mehrotra already a long way down that road?

“The idea is not to trump them but to join them,” says Rishi, who would like to shift the focus away from north Indian fare to cuisines from the west, south and east. “Diners who love food don’t care if it’s chicken cafreal from Goa or balti-house chicken tikka as long as it looks and tastes good.” Hardly a new argument, but certainly a compelling one.

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