An Assamese meal by home cook Gitika Saikia.
This weekend, Gitika Saikia and Tejal Choksi will raise their spatulas and usher in the Home Chef Revolution. What sounds like a movement is a new dining series launched by events booking platform Insider.in in partnership with Munaf Kapadia, the business head of The Bohri Kitchen, which he runs with his mother Nafisa Kapadia. The ‘Revolution’ as they’re calling it will employ the city’s expanding community of home cooks to cater meals on weekends. Saikia and Choksi, who specialise and Assamese in Cantonese fare respectively, will host the inaugural lunch and dinner of the series on Saturday, August 27.
In 2014, food-focused website Once Upon My Kitchen and culinary events company Small Fry Co. pioneered the concept of home cooks, especially those who prepare regional and community-specific cuisines, hosting meals at their residences and at pop-up restaurants. The model was replicated by organisations such as MealTango (which now operates only in Pune as a food delivery service), Project Eat and online travel and food events company Trekurious, which briefly hosted similar events in 2015 until it closed in January this year. Among the new players is Authenticook.
The Bohri Kitchen, which the Kapadias now run independently, was in fact discovered and made popular by Trekurious. Through 2015, Trekurious exclusively hosted the Bohri feast, which is now among the city’s most well-known home dining experiences. Munaf Kapadia said that he wants to continue the legacy left behind by Trekurious. There’s no dearth of home cooks, said Kapadia, who already has access to about a dozen that he wants to get on board. By liaising with a well-established organisation such as Only Much Louder, the events and artist management company that owns Insider.in, the business-savy Kapadia plans to “scale up” the concept.
However this comes with challenges. For their launch this weekend, the Home Chef Revolution had signed on four home cooks, Saikia, Choksi, Madhumita Pyne, who goes by the moniker Insomniac Cook and Kalpana Talpade, who caters the food of the Maharashtrian Pathare Prabhu community. On Thursday, August 25, two days ahead of Pyne’s and Talpade’s meals, their events were removed from Insider.in because the experiences had not gathered the minimum number of diners (the figure is set by the host cooks).
Over the last two years, Saikia has collaborated with Once Upon My Kitchen, Small Fry Co., MealTango, Project Eat and Trekurious. The Home Chef Revolution recruit said that there are pros and cons to such partnerships. Splitting the revenue is an obvious disadvantage, said Saikia who has also hosted meals independently at her Juhu home. “The upside is that an established platform takes care of the marketing and has better reach,” she said. “When you run it yourself, you exhaust your contacts quickly.”
The biggest challenge with scaling up, according to her, is maintaining the authenticity of the food. “As home cooks we don’t have the experience of catering for very large numbers,” said Saikia whose lunch on Saturday, for ten diners, is sold out. “So while working with a big partner we still have to keep a check on the number of diners in order to stay true to the cooking.”
Tickets for Cantonese Delights with Tejal Choksi, which will be held on Saturday, August 27 at 7.30pm, are priced at Rs1,800 per person and are available on Insider.in.