By Nishant Mitra
Issue 001: The Menu Nobody Asked For
When I was building the menu for Eddie’s Bistro in Bandra, I did something that made my chef friends uncomfortable.
I stopped asking chefs.
Not because their opinions didn’t matter. But because I had noticed something over years of watching menus get built — the people who know the most about food are often the worst people to ask about it.
They taste with memory. They compare instead of experience. They tell you what something reminds them of rather than what it makes them feel.
So I went elsewhere.
I started feeding people who had no stake in the answer.
A hospital GM who ate the same canteen lunch every day and had strong, uncomplicated opinions about what felt like a treat. An architect who thought about space and proportion and kept asking why certain dishes felt “crowded.” A musician who couldn’t tell me what was technically wrong with a sauce but could tell me immediately whether it had a satisfying ending.
None of them spoke the language of a kitchen.
That was exactly the point.
Here is what non-food people do that food people can’t:
They describe what something does to them, not what it is.
A chef will tell you a dish is under-seasoned. A hospital GM will tell you it made her feel like she needed something more — she just couldn’t say what. That distinction sounds small. It isn’t. One gives you a technical fix. The other gives you an emotional diagnosis.
The architect noticed that one section of the menu had four dishes that all arrived the same way — same temperature, same plate size, same general weight. He called it monotonous. He wasn’t talking about flavour. He was talking about rhythm. About the experience of moving through a meal.
He was right. We restructured that section entirely.
The musician sat with a dessert for a long time before saying it didn’t resolve. I knew exactly what he meant. The finish was muddy — too many flavours competing at the end with no single note landing cleanly. We stripped it back to three elements instead of six.
None of these people could have told me how to fix anything.
But they told me what needed fixing with a clarity that years of technical training can actually work against.
This became my methodology. Not a gimmick — a genuine belief that the people who will eventually sit in your restaurant are almost never chefs. They are people with jobs and lives and complicated days who walk in wanting to feel something. The menu should be built with them in the room from the beginning.
Not focus groups. Not surveys. Just dinner, with the right people, and real listening.
This is what Kachha Pakka is about.
Not just technique. Not just ingredients. But the thinking behind the cooking — the decisions that happen before a single flame is lit.
Some of that thinking is kachha. Still forming, still being tested, not yet settled.
Some of it is pakka. Earned over sixteen years, across two cities, across more menus than I can count.
All of it is honest.