Another food newsletter no one asked for

There is something faintly absurd about launching a food newsletter in 2026, a year in which the average urban Indian already receives enough restaurant recommendations to sustain three parallel lives, most of them arriving via a stranger holding a phone six inches above a plate that has not yet been served, speaking about a meal still somewhere between the kitchen and the table with the urgency usually reserved for election results, natural disasters, or the quarterly earnings of a technology company.

The nation, one suspects, has confused lunch with content.

Every day brings another reel, another list, another declaration that a particular café, cloud kitchen, tasting menu, ramen bar, cocktail programme, neighbourhood bakery, or aggressively lit dessert counter has changed somebody’s life forever, which is curious because the average Indian has survived family weddings, board examinations, Delhi traffic, and customer care helplines with considerably less emotional commentary than is now devoted to a plate of burrata.

So before we begin, let me explain what this newsletter is not.

It is not a place where everything is amazing.

Nothing can survive being described as amazing. Not biryani or sunsets or moisturisers. A word that is deployed with equal enthusiasm for all three has surrendered its right to mean anything at all. If a kebab is excellent, I shall call it excellent. If it is disappointing, I shall say so. If it is famous and disappointing, I shall enjoy saying so considerably more.

The trouble with contemporary food writing is not that it is dishonest, although it occasionally is, but that it is eager, and eagerness is a dangerous quality in matters of taste because it mistakes novelty for merit and popularity for quality.

Nor is this a newsletter dedicated to identifying the ten best places for anything.

The modern listicle is less an act of judgement than a hostage note written to an algorithm. Half the establishments have been visited, the remaining half have been borrowed from somebody else’s list, and by the time the article appears three of them have changed chefs, one has become a co-working space, and another has pivoted into selling artisanal coffee at prices that suggest the beans have an Oxbridge education.

I have never entirely trusted rankings where the conclusions arrive before the meals.

And this is certainly not a recipe newsletter disguised as an autobiography. The internet has already supplied us with enough recipes that begin with four generations of family history, a transformative childhood memory, an unexpected lesson about resilience, and several photographs taken in natural light before eventually revealing how many onions are required. If a story appears before a dish in these pages, it will be because the story matters, because the food cannot be understood without it, and because the economics, geography, history, vanity, nostalgia, or sheer human eccentricity surrounding the meal are more interesting than the meal itself.

What this newsletter proposes instead is something rather simpler.

I have eaten well and badly across a fair number of cities. My girth speaks for itself; indeed, it may be the most comprehensive body of evidence I have ever assembled on any subject. I’ve vivid memories of eating in establishments ranging from celebrated dining rooms to roadside institutions whose owners possess neither branding consultants nor social media strategies, and over time I have come to suspect that the most interesting thing about food is rarely the food itself. It is the people who make it, the people who sell it, the people who romanticise it, and most importantly the people who insist on explaining it to everyone else.

Food, after all, is one of the few subjects on which every human being considers themselves qualified to hold strong opinions.

The dish itself is only the beginning. What interests me is why a place serves what it serves; why one restaurant charges three times as much for an experience that is somehow less memorable; why some neighbourhood establishments survive decades while trendier competitors vanish before their second anniversary; why every Indian city eventually develops a passionate argument about authenticity; why Delhi cannot stop opening pan-Asian restaurants; why every modern menu appears contractually obligated to contain burrata; or why your mother’s fish curry, mutton curry, rajma, sambhar, or whatever family dish has achieved legendary status in your household continues to outperform establishments whose investors have spent heavily on interior design.

Some weeks we will talk about restaurants.

Other weeks we will talk about airport meals consumed in defeat, neighbourhood eateries discovered accidentally, family recipes inherited imperfectly, culinary fashions that deserve to disappear, menus that promise far more than they deliver, and dishes so overpraised that one begins to suspect the marketing budget was larger than the kitchen.

We will discuss the gap between what a place is selling and what it is serving, because those are often two entirely different products.

We will discuss the dish everyone photographs and the one nobody notices, the meal that was recommended by fifteen people and disappointed all fifteen expectations, and the modest plate of something unfashionable that quietly ruined you for every competing version thereafter.

And occasionally we will discuss the simple and increasingly unfashionable pleasure of eating at home, alone, standing in the kitchen, without photographing anything, while consuming something so satisfying that you immediately understand why entire industries have emerged to persuade you this experience requires optimisation.

Mostly, however, we will talk about taste. Not merely the taste of food, but the taste of people. The most revealing thing about someone is rarely what they eat. It is what they insist everybody else must eat. Entire personalities now appear to be constructed around recommending restaurants with the evangelical intensity once reserved for religion, politics, and cricket, and there is something deeply fascinating about a civilisation that can transform lunch into a declaration of identity.

That, then, is the proposition.

No affiliate links masquerading as enthusiasm, no sponsored discoveries dressed up as personal revelations, no breathless attempts to keep pace with whatever the algorithm has anointed this week. No hidden gems, because any establishment still being described as a hidden gem in 2026 is usually hiding for a reason.

Just one column, once in two weeks, about food, restaurants, culture, memory, aspiration, economics, family, and the strange things human beings do around a table.

If that’s the kind of thing you’d open while your tea goes cold, subscribe.

The first time I call anything a hidden gem, you’re free to leave and tell your friends I’ve lost it. And if I ever describe a truffle oil drizzle as a journey, you have my permission to unsubscribe immediately.

END OF ARTICLE