Chef memoir spotlights Mumbai

Rahul Akerkar’s new memoir is being sold as the story of one chef. It is really the story of how Mumbai learned to eat differently. In *Biting Off More Than I Can Chew*, published by HarperCollins and profiled this week by *The Hindu*, Akerkar starts in his grandmother’s kitchen in Nashik and follows the line from those early family meals to the restaurant boom he helped trigger in Bombay and then Mumbai (thehindu.com, mid-day.com). That framing matters because Akerkar was never just a chef with a successful dining room. He was one of the people who proved that an Indian city would support ambitious independent restaurants outside the five-star hotel system (thehindu.com, wikipedia.org). The hinge in the story is New York. Akerkar went there to study biochemical engineering, not to become a restaurateur, and by his own account he learned to cook by talking his way into professional kitchens and working without formal culinary training (thehindu.com, robbreportindia.com). When he came back to Mumbai, he brought that kitchen education with him, but not as imitation. His own description is more useful than the usual fusion cliché. He says he never quite knew whether he was westernising Indian food or Indianising Western food. He found a midpoint and built from there (thehindu.com, mid-day.com). That midpoint became Indigo. The restaurant opened in Colaba on April 30, 1999, in a restored bungalow behind the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, and it changed the terms of the city’s dining culture almost immediately (wikipedia.org). Before Indigo, high-end continental food in India still largely belonged to luxury hotels. Indigo made a standalone restaurant feel like the main event. It spent more than ₹5 crore to open, a startling sum for the time, and Akerkar now says that if he saw that business plan today he would throw it in the garbage (mid-day.com). The gamble worked anyway. Indigo later appeared on global best-restaurant lists and became, in the shorthand of Indian food writing, one of the establishments that ushered in post-liberalisation restaurant culture (thehindu.com, wikipedia.org). That older revolution helps explain the newer one. Mumbai’s dining scene now looks less interested in imported ideas of luxury and more interested in memory, region, and comfort. Akerkar himself told *Robb Report India* that Indian luxury dining has shifted away from crystal and chandeliers and toward feeling, sourcing, and authenticity (robbreportindia.com). You can see the same turn across the city’s restaurant coverage. *The Hindu* has spent the past year documenting menus built around “comfort Indian,” community staples, regional identity, and food that once would have seemed too ordinary for trend pieces, including thalis, home-style North Indian cooking, and neighborhood-specific references (thehindu.com, thehindu.com, thehindu.com). The city that once needed to be convinced to trust a standalone European fine-dining room now wants expensive meals to feel personal. That is why Akerkar’s memoir lands now, and not just as a retrospective. The book arrives at a moment when Mumbai’s restaurants are busy translating private food histories into public menus. His career helped create the audience for that move. His childhood gave him the language for it. The first image in *The Hindu*’s profile is still the best one: his grandmother on the floor in a smoky kitchen, shaping puffed rice and jaggery into ladoos, long before Indigo, long before the waiting lists, long before Mumbai decided that comfort food could carry prestige (thehindu.com).