As the plate is set in front of diners, Chef Rachit Keertiman comes out of the kitchen to speak about the food. It is chaula, paddy field shrimp on native rice crackers in mustard paste, a refined version of a dish from Odisha. The venue is The Glenburn Penthouse, a boutique hotel situated atop Kanak Towers which commands magnificent views across central Kolkata, with the famed Victoria Memorial framed in the windows as a shining beacon in the night.
This is the scene at The Odisha Table, a food pop-up organised by Gormei, a culinary experience company that arranges intimate and immersive dining experiences across India and Southeast Asia. Founded in 2017 by entrepreneur Argha Sen, it was one of the early adopters of a fast-rising preference for smaller, well-rounded dining experiences in India. “We’re focusing on Indian regional cuisines, working with master professional and home chefs to tell their stories,” says Sen.
Similar to Gormei is The Soul Company, which functions across India, Singapore and Hong Kong, curating experiences across art, food and heritage, with experts such as Prateek Bakhtiani and Naren Thimmaiah participating in their food pop-ups. “During the pandemic, we realised that people were becoming more informed about food and wanting to try new things,” says co-founder and Head of Brands Diganta Chakraborty. One of the food experiences offered by The Soul Company was A Chocolaty Affair with chocolatier Prateek Bakhtiani in Mumbai. It involved traipsing across the city on a personalised tour, at the end of which you got to make and, of course, devour your own chocolate. “Diners are happy to splurge on niche, all-round experiences,” Chakraborty further explains.
Gormei and The Soul Company aren’t the first on the block to offer these custom-made dining experiences. In 2015, food researcher Tanushree Bhowmik, and her husband, Om, founded Forktales, a supper club that curated immersive and intensive meals for smaller groups of people. “At the time that we started, no one was doing this,” says Bhowmik. “I was a food researcher and historian and one day, Om said, ‘You know all the recipes and write about them all the time—why not cook them and invite people to join us?’”
With that suggestion, they set up a practice in which a small set of guests would come over to Bhowmik’s house for themed dinner parties. She would send them reading material about the cuisines and explain each course to them, all of which she cooked herself. There were also events held on-location, such as a winery in Bengaluru and a tea garden in Assam, which included an overnight stay, tea-tasting and tea-making.
This model of intensive, themed, intimate dining experiences is now being taken on by restaurants as well. “Our first restaurant, Sage and Saffron, started with curating experiences,” says Chef Varun Totlani of Mumbai’s award-winning Masque. “Our present-day Lab was founded as an R&D space, but we soon realised we could tailor different ingredient-based menus for private dining there, especially when other chefs take over.”
One of the people who took over the Lab kitchen in this manner was Katherine Lim, a home chef-turned-professional discovered by Gormei. Masque also takes the Lab to other places for immersive dining—one of their most recent events was an exclusive ten-course meal at Nahargarh Fort that also included a multi-day stay and tiger safaris.
So why are diners pivoting to this trend? Shalini Burman, senior lecturer at the International Institute of Hotel Management in Kolkata, says she likes it because it allows her to try unusual cuisines that may not always be available at full-fledged restaurants and interact with the chef. “At small arrangements like this, the chef is less stressed and can come and talk to us,” she says. “That connection is lost at bigger venues.”
The enjoyment goes both ways, as home cooks Renjie Wong, Prachi Gupta and Saloni Gupta demonstrate. Renjie runs a private salon called Salon Colaba, and Prachi and Saloni set up House of Málà, a Sichuan food supper club held at their Khar residence in Mumbai. Both initiatives usually keep their seating to below ten; both cook all the food themselves; and both say they do it to create a community of like-minded people who all love to experience new cuisines and bond over food. “I set up Salon Colaba because I was looking for a community after I moved to India,” says civil servant Wong, who is originally from Singapore. “I always loved cooking and hosting, and after doing my day job, I wanted to cook my favourite foods and meet new people while at it.”
For Prachi and Saloni, it was the other way round. The sisters have a hankering for travel and new cuisines, and while on a trip to Hong Kong, they fell in love with Sichuan food. “We couldn’t find authentic Sichuan cuisine as we had experienced it in Hong Kong anywhere in Mumbai, so we decided to set up a supper club ourselves,” says Gupta.
Putting home cooks such as them on the map—quite literally—is Chef Pin, an app that works as a Zomato for home chefs. The app currently functions in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore and connects consumers with over 5,000 home chefs, providing them with a technology platform as well as delivery and packaging logistics. “My father, Rocky Mohan, initially started the Delhi Gourmet Club as a Facebook group for people interested in trying out new and special menus by restaurants and hotels,” says founder and CEO Siddharth Mohan. “Now, apart from delivering food, we also do pop-ups with home chefs, which are preceded by smaller, intimate gatherings to celebrate their food.” Chef Pin’s pop-ups are often done in conjunction with bigger hotel buffets, such as a recent parsi cuisine pop-up conducted by home chef Daugdo Ragina at Novotel Mumbai International Airport. “The popularity has been such that some hotel partners are now incorporating these dishes into their own menus,” says Mohan.
As post-pandemic trends continue to reveal themselves, what had once been a necessity—smaller groups in intimate dining settings—seems to have become a conscious, widespread and beloved choice for diners. With chefs and restaurants throwing their weight behind it as well, it seems this shift will only continue to expand.
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