In a country filled with such talent in hospitality, there’s a lot of hard work hidden behind a veil. I was early for dinner the other night, as I always am. Sitting at a table not quite set yet, fiddling with a box of almond pralines I’d found in my bag. A waitress nodded with that polite “be right with you” smile. The chef, framed in the pass, was already mid-flurry—pans clanging, a flash of fire, quite dramatic before disappearing behind service.
The lights were still being adjusted—someone at the bar fidgeting with the dimmer, trying to get the right glow. The faceted marble counter glinted, with brass strips running through like veins. Classical music floated in from somewhere, and I couldn’t spot the speaker. I opened the thick, cardstock menu (thankfully, no QR code!) filled with someone’s historical stories threaded into dish names.
And I thought—do we ever stop to wonder how it all comes together?
My martini arrived, thick and cold in a Nick & Nora. One sip in, and a few names floated into my mind. People I’ve watched build, create, and obsess over the little things. They’ve come from boardrooms, blogs and back kitchens. Each of them is contributing to the greater good in the world of hospitality. This story is about them.
A new kind of tastemaker is reimagining what India eats—and why. Their tools range from handwritten family recipes and ingredient bibles to brand storytelling that goes beyond dinner tables. They aren’t always chefs in the traditional sense, but their imprint is everywhere—from the way heritage makes its way onto a restaurant menu to how a cherry in a cocktail recalls a 200-year-old orchard in Italy. Think of them as edible archivists.
For Delhi-based Vernika Awal, it began with introspection—why did the same dish taste different in every family home? What made one saag feel so authentic, while another a reinvention? A journalist by training, she turned to food as a form of archival collation. Her project, Delectable Punjab, began on Instagram in 2017 as a way to preserve culinary fragments of the northwest, which were scattered by Partition.
Feeding others through pop-ups, her documentation evolved into deeper work with the hospitality community. Today, as Head of Brand at Ikk Panjab, Vernika is helping reshape the restaurant from the inside out, alongside the entrepreneurial duo Deepika and Rajan Sethi of Bright Hospitality. Their outlets across Delhi and Chandigarh carry the same warmth. Through The Heritage Gathering, a cultural series she curated under the brand, food is layered with poetry, art, and intergenerational dialogue. “As Punjabis, our relationship with food is one of emotion, not excess,” her voice, a steady, warm coax, “There’s nostalgia, migration, resilience in every dish. My job is to help people feel that, not just taste it.”
That same belief in narrative integrity runs through Jasleen Marwah’s work. Although her origins are rooted in Kashmir, Jasleen brings nourishment to her culinary heritage through documentation. Through Namak by Jasleen, the home kitchen she founded, she reclaims Kashmiri food from reductive binaries of wazwan and wedding fare. She speaks of kashmiri home food, dishes and ingredients that don’t exist anymore, of cooking now on the brink of being forgotten.
When she revives a recipe, it is through memory and cooking to recreate what she remembers eating once, Whether it’s curating a kashmiri experience, consulting for a new restaurant or honouring India’s culinary diversity at folk, she reorients the gaze from exoticism to the essential.
But tradition also lives in the ingredients, and someone has to bring them in. While the conversation circles around local sourcing, there’s an equally pressing need for cosmopolitan access. Anmol Chandhok, second-generation steward of Chenab Impex, grew up listening to stories of chipotle chillies, cold-pressed oils and many global flavours.
Today, Anmol introduces chefs and consumers to ingredients that often serve as the starting point for menu ideation. From muscovado sugar to wasabi nuts to Luxardo cherries—the original finishing touch in a Manhattan—his approach to novelty is fully intentional. Geographical indications, sustainability and authenticity remain his north stars “India isn’t just price-sensitive,” he says. “It’s discerning.” His work has helped expand the way chefs think about provenance and how they redefine authenticity.
While the food is taken care of, there are some people who shape the way you experience a place beyond the plate. That moment before the order, and as you settle with a drink, something in the air tells you you’re in the right place. That’s the space makers.
Their work upgrades the setting, not just the vibe, but the way it captures a feeling. I chose these two: a designer and a bar consultant. One adjusts layouts, textures and light. The other, from behind the stick, through menus fuelled with alchemy, leaves behind something you can’t quite put your finger on. In truth, they’re doing the same thing: setting the tone.
If you’ve ever felt like you belonged somewhere the moment you entered, there’s a good chance someone like Shweta Kaushik had a hand in it. As the founder of SKID, she has worked on over 50 hospitality projects. Her designs aren’t made for a magazine spread; they’re built for people. She calls it “the third place”—somewhere between home and work, evoking a sense of belonging.
“Hospitality design is often underestimated,” she says. “I don’t just want to create a beautiful room. I want to shape how you feel in it.”
Shweta’s journey wasn’t conventional. She came from a family of doctors. Design wasn’t the obvious path, but it was a calling. A master’s degree in Milan shaped her early years, and her first solo project in India set her pace. Her work is both emotional and functional: a bar seat at the right height, lighting that illuminates hidden nuances, whether in design, architectural highlights, or even the food.
And as you walk into this sensibility, often the first thing you reach for is a beverage, and Fay Barretto sets the tempo inside this very room. From Woodside Inn to BarChef Toronto, Fay’s moved from behind the bar to shaping some of the country’s most memorable beverage programs—from Maai and Jamjar to Praia and Whisky Samba, and now Scarlett House—creating a seamless culture around space-first experience amalgamation We’re not just drink makers,” he says. “We’re storytellers. The bar isn’t the background. It’s the pulse.”
In 2020, he founded Mr. Bartender & The Crew, India’s first bar training program for women and LGBTQ+ communities. What started in a rented space in Goa shifted who gets to be behind the bar. Fay’s menus are mischievous, wrecked with his personal foraging. Working with flavour and texture to create libations which thrill.
Some people look at the industry and see how it works. Others look at it and ask, ‘What if we start over?’ These are entrepreneurs who aren’t just building businesses, but reshaping the very landscape. They come armed with questions no one else is asking and launch ambitious, courageous projects that make people see things differently.
If you had to trace the roots of Vanaha, India’s first five-step ‘Forest to Bottle’ gin, by Vaniitha Jain and her brand new distillery in Sattari, Goa. Jaiin, a corporate leader-turned-wine educator who was never meant to be in the alcobev space, and yet somehow circled in here.
She was 13 when she began funding her own education. By the age of 19, she was a top-performing life insurance agent. But it was years later, after building an accomplished career in marketing and brand strategy, that she switched tracks—studying wines and spirits across Europe and the UK, judging international competitions, and laying the groundwork for what was to come.
“I always knew I wanted to build something that was global in spirit but rooted in who we are,” she says.” That vision took shape with Revelry Distillery. And with it, Vanaha, a gin inspired by India’s forests and distilled with 24 botanicals, emerged. “With Vanaha, we’re not just launching a gin,” she says. “We’re ushering a ritualistic repositioning of a delicious white spirit, in its purest form.”
Chaitanya Muppala from Hyderabad is doing something just as radical with chocolate. His journey began in his family’s kitchen, through Almond House, a popular South Indian sweets brand in Hyderabad, which he took over in his twenties. Scaling it with a new lens, it was his obsession with cacao that truly set him on his own path.
In 2018, he began asking: why wasn’t there an Indian craft chocolate with the depth and dignity of a single-origin bar from Ecuador or Madagascar? The answers led him to West Godavari district in AP, the largest cacao-growing region in India. Here, he created a network with over 150 farmers and built Asia’s largest fine-flavour cacao fermentary in Tadikalapudi, reclaiming India’s place in the cacao narrative.
From there came Manam Chocolate—a fully Indian bean-to-bar brand, now one of the most awarded in Asia, and the only chocolate brand to feature in Time’s list of the World’s Greatest Places. Recently, Manam Chocolate took its next leap by launching its first immersive retail and chocolatiering space in New Delhi, bringing its signature Indian craft chocolate experience to the capital. The space features over 350 confections, a live beverage bar, a café, and interactive chocolate stations. But for Chaitanya, accolades aren’t the finish line. “I wanted Manam Chocolate to become a brand that shows the world what India can do—through the lens of flavour, integrity, and design.”
These mavericks didn’t wait for the industry to make space. They made their own—and in doing so, are making it better for the rest of us.
