YOU don’t tend to go to Indian restaurants for fried chicken, and Will Bowlby did not go and set up his own Indian joint, Kricket, to serve it, but some things just happen.

His Keralan-influenced version, laced with turmeric and Kashmiri red chilli powder, is one of his menu regulars – but was a total accident, thanks to a tandoor-free kitchen and a small, convenient deep-fat fryer.

You’ll find the fried chicken in Bowlby’s debut recipe collection, Kricket: An Indian-inspired Cookbook, alongside his other signature dishes; samphire pakoras – the salty seaweed-like strands are deep-fried then dredged through a tamarind and date chutney; and bhel puri – a raw crunchy mix of deep-fried chickpea noodles, puffed rice, coriander fronds and zingy chutneys – which he’s layering up on the pass as we talk.

Now 29, Bowlby started cooking aged 10 (“In a very amateurish way, obviously”), and was largely inspired by his grandmother and Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef. So keen on the chef life, he helped pay his way through university at Newcastle by setting up his own private catering company, Will2Cook, as a 16-year-old, cooking for family and friends’ events. “It was good practice and people seemed to like it – although I was young, so they had to say that,” he adds wryly.

The plan was always to get through school and uni, then wrangle his way into a professional kitchen as quickly as possible (which ended up including working for chef Rowley Leigh at London restaurant Le Cafe Anglais). What had not been part of the agenda, incredibly, considering how his career’s panned out, was Indian food. “I never really ate Indian food,” he admits. “If I was to have a takeaway, I’d have a Chinese.”

Even when he landed a job at prestigious, old-school Mumbai restaurant Khyber, it was to run a European-style kitchen. “I didn’t go to India with the idea of doing something with Indian food,” he says – but during the two years he spent there, he got sucked into the country’s kaleidoscopic food scene. “It’s hard not to, it’s everywhere you go, you can smell it, you can see it in the street.”

Bowlby started taking Indian cooking classes with the private chef of a Mumbai art dealer, and supplemented staff meals with hot and sour street food and kebabs eaten outside at ramshackle rooftop restaurants. Although, “I’m not going to lie,” he adds with a laugh, “some days I’d just go to Pizza Express because I wanted to sit in an air-conditioned room and have a Diet Coke and a pizza.”

He spent his last three months in India travelling, ostensibly to eat, and scribbling down his thoughts, ideas and the dishes he’d tasted as he trailed through Goa and Calcutta, scoffing handfuls of chaat in old Delhi, and shami kebabs in Lucknow “that were just meltingly soft, beautiful, wrapped in rumali roti [thin flatbreads]”.

Does he find it daunting, playing with traditional Indian flavours and foods? “And daunting in the respect that I’m also not Indian?” he says. “Yeah, I never really thought about that. I’m very, very much aware of India being a nation that’s passionate about their food, and that also means that for some people, dishes have to be done in a certain way. I’m not saying that’s not right, but in reality, every household you go to, every 100m you go, things are done in a different way – and everyone’s ‘right’, so who’s right?!

“Why shouldn’t I do my own thing?” he adds, handing me a spoon and a bowl of that crisp bhel puri, traditionally made except for the slick of yoghurt draped across the top. “Everyone else is.”

Kricket: An Indian-Inspired Cookbook by Will Bowlby, photography by Hugh Johnson, is published by Hardie Grant, priced £26. Available now.