Piramal Museum of Art.
What do we mean when we say something is cool? Like abstractions such as ‘fine taste’ and ‘good art’, the idea of coolness is hard to pin down. An event titled ‘That’s Mumbai Cool’ at the Piramal Museum of Art on Saturday, August 6 will attempt to unpack the notion of cool in terms of contemporary culture in the city. The day-long series of panel discussions, which has been put together by arts organisation Art-X and the Piramal Art Foundation, will focus mainly on new food and cultural initiatives in the city.
The editors of this site will kick off the proceedings by attempting to commit the idea of cool into words by discussing our experience of covering Mumbai’s F&B and culture scenes. In the talk titled ‘The Classic Cool – Archetypal Foods in New Avatars’, the founders of three small-scale food businesses, Munaf Kapadia of The Bohri Kitchen, Perzen Patel of catering service The Bawi Bride and Rohan Mangalorkar, who runs the sandwich takeaway Pack-A-Pav, will speak about how home chefs have transformed eating out in the city. Journalist and The Daily Pao columnist Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi will moderate a session titled ‘The Urban Cool – A Restaurant, a Hangout Joint and a Workspace Walk into a Bar’ in which Jeremie Horowitz, partner at Café Zoe; Suketu Talekar, the owner of brewpub Doolally Taproom and Pankil Shah of Woodside Inn will discuss the new challenges of wooing consumers. Should some of this talk make you hungry, you can step outside to grab a bite at one of the food trucks.
Finally, in ‘The Experimental Cool – New Cultural Spaces by Cultural Entrepreneurs’, Shreyas Srinivasan, the co-founder of NH7, the organisers of the annual of the Weekender festival will moderate a chat featuring Sharin Bhatti and Nikhil Hemrajani, the respective co-owners of performance venues The Hive in Khar and Sitara Studio in Elphinstone Road; and Marlies Bloemendaal, who runs the co-working space Ministry of New in Fort.
‘That’s Mumbai Cool’ will be held on Saturday, August 6 from 11am to 6pm at the Piramal Ballroom, Piramal Museum of Art, Ground Floor, Piramal Tower, Peninsula Corporate Park, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel. The event is free. To register, email sayali.mundye@piramal.com. For more information and the schedule, visit the Facebook event page and Art-X.co.