Many things make Chef Devika Manjrekar stand out from a crowd of chefs and owners in the food industry. Her flaming red hair and an enthusiastic smile is what caught our eye on Instagram when we saw her profile for the first time. But as we scrolled further, we noticed her posts where she was openly talking about sexism and toxic work culture in the F&B industry. Chef Manjrekar turned out to be the kind of person who also works on these issues besides just talking about them on social media. Her achievements speak volume and makes her credible enough to be calling out everything that is wrong with the industry. The Mumbai-based chef is not only the owner of perhaps the only designated pasta bar in Mumbai – Toast Pasta Bar in Kamala Mills – and Toast Doughnut Shop, a quaint blue and whittle little doughnut shop in Bandra, but has also successfully run an all-women kitchen!
If you follow Chef Manjrekar on social media, you will know what we mean by her honesty about the industry. She isn’t the kind of people who names and shames but her honesty is refreshing and an eye-opener for the ones who are unaware of what happens behind the kitchen pass. Chef Manjrekar is a pastry chef – that explains Toast Doughnut Shop – but her true passion lies in savoury, especially pasta and Italian cuisine. The name’s story traces back to when she was in college. “I came up with this name when I was in college and I knew that if I ever open a restaurant, it will be ‘toast’,” she says. The name is inspired by UK-based food writer and journalist Nigel Slater’s book Toast, which was also made into a movie. “It is about his life and the premise of it is how you know when everything goes wrong, there’s nothing a slice of toast can’t fix,” explains Chef Manjrekar. “Comfort matters more than anything else.”
Chef Manjrekar realised that no one was putting all their attention only on pasta and it was always an afterthought amongst other things on a new menu. Through Toast Doughnut Shop, she started to believe that “if you do one thing and do it well, people will like it.”
Toast Pasta Bar opened in 2022 – an indoor space with a pass where you can get a front-row seat for their final plating and an al-fresco section as well. But would you believe us if we told you that Toast Pasta Bar was initially just an Instagram page and the love and support it received is what pushed Chef Manjrekar to make it into a brick-and-mortar restaurant?
Chef Manjrekar had a tiny studio kitchen. But, she wanted to open a restaurant one day and that led to a subconscious manifesting where she made an Instagram page to see how it looked. “We got a good response where people showed interest and asked us when we were opening – all with zero marketing,” she recalls. Soon after, she started looking for places and planning finer details because opening a restaurant isn’t a piece of cake. To nail the customer experience, she initially hosted a bunch of pop-up dinners and they were immediately sold out. It was these dinners that pushed Chef Manjrekar and her team to finally take the leap and start Toast Pasta Bar.
While Mumbai may not have a dedicated pasta bar as such, the city is not short of good Italian restaurants. As Chef Manjrekar mentioned, pasta is often the afterthought at most of these places, rather than being the hero of the restaurant. “I have always thought that the food has to be something you’re thinking about even after you have left,” she says. The menu at Toast Pasta Bar is a pretty no-nonsense one where the pasta dishes are not intimidating and pretty straightforward and authentic. Chef Manjrekar positions Toast Pasta Bar as the kind of place that would be the first option whenever she craves really good pasta, and not just Italian cuisine in general.
She admits that they use a lot of local produce. Apart from Italian lemons, all raw materials and ingredients are Indian. “Italian lemons is one thing I couldn’t think of replacing because the nimbu doesn’t have the same flavour as the Italian one. Even for the passata (a thick paste made from sieved tomatoes), they use tomatoes grown by the local farmers. Even the cheese is sourced by local cheesemakers who are making Italian cheeses. “I think that if you are opening anything but an Indian restaurant in India and importing everything then, in the long run, it is not sustainable.”
Her idea behind the cocktail programme was to make the diners feel like they were on an Italian summer vacation. “I want customers to order an Aperol Spritz like they have been doing it for years now as if it is a common thing,” she says. To make this happen, she ensured to price it in a way that it’s a normal drink.
Toast Pasta Bar is also known to change its menu almost every week. “I realised after two years that I have made my own life difficult with this decision because my team has to earn a whole new menu every couple of weeks,” she jokingly states. The change in the menu is not a drastic one. The team changes the dishes and adds to the existing one-page menu as and when the season changes. “I wanted it to be inspired by the restaurants in London who do these dishes with seasonal ingredients for small menus and I always wanted to do something like that.” Regarding the changes in the menu, think whipped ricotta with grilled peaches, or even roasted onions, or the use of seafood, depending on the season.
Chef Manjrekar has an active Instagram profile. From updates regarding her establishments, hiring posts, food pictures, and travel posts, to even calling out sexism and toxic culture in the industry – Chef Manjrekar’s Instagram feed has a balance of everything. Social media has been an integral part for her to put out her work or even her restaurants but she admits that she was always on Instagram so posting about her work came naturally to her.
Being the chef and owner gives her the kind of freedom to be as vocal as she wants on her social media profile. “I think it is quite important to share these things because there are so many people who have no idea about how things work and thanks to social media, I have been very vocal about work cultures and I also started to realise that it [the industry] is mainly male-dominated.”
Chef Manjrekar has been successful in running an all-women kitchen. However, now, they do have a few men working in the kitchen. She states that she has informed these men about the gender ratio at her establishments before hiring them. In one of her previous posts on Instagram, she mentioned how her preference for hiring was towards women. “We have to tick the scales a little bit, right?” she asks. “Everyone in the city has a majority boy kitchen, so if I’m looking at female CVs more, then that’s a good thing. Unless there is more equality, I will continue to do that,” she states.
This stems from the fact that she hates working in a male-dominated kitchen. She noted that when she worked under a female head chef in the UK, it changed her entire experience. After hearing incidents from fellow female chefs such as male chefs being inappropriate, people making comments on women not being able to work as hard when they are pregnant, women only being given face-to-face tasks, giving off a certain vibe when they put on make-up, and multiple other things made her continue with her women-first approach at the workplace.
Similar to a lot of professions, where late nights and no leaves are assumed, Chef Manjrekar says that it is the same in the hospitality industry. The hustle culture, no leaves, no breaks is almost assumed when taking up the profession of a chef. She is working towards changing this notion and improving the ways of working and culture in the industry. She does it by giving a five-day week to her employees. “It is a very physically taxing job where you are on your feet for eight to ten hours and it is not feasible in the long run if you don’t have any breaks or days off. I want people to love the job,” she states.
A lot of people avoid these conversations to steer away from a controversy or to maintain the dynamics with the head chef and owner of the restaurant. But Chef Manjrekar uses her position as an owner and chef of her place to her benefit by vocalising the issues on a public platform. She is talking about these issues because she has faced them. “I didn’t enjoy myself and the main thing is that I want to create a work environment where people enjoy themselves so I will talk about them. However, she concludes by saying that she has noticed a lot of her fellow head chefs trying to make things not how they used to be and admits that the situation is changing slowly.
