Kitchen, Camera, Roll! Ranveer Brar is Always Serving

Ranveer Brar—a celebrity chef, actor, poet, photographer, reality show judge, a YouTube creator with millions of true-blue followers—enjoys a pop-culture ubiquity that comes from steadier, solid footing and a sorted “flow where the river takes you” persona.

- J Shruti

The last aspect might seem trite to some because in our dystopian, ads infested attention economy—which one of us is not anxious, scattered, and taking it easy? “While we are surrounded by hacks and formulas and tactics and strategies, you know, there is a certain value to just being,” Brar says when I ask him about the self-consciousness that has inevitably crept in the work of up-and-coming creatives due to the casual, but relentless scrutiny of smartphones.

When we get on a Zoom call, Brar is exhausted, and jet-lagged from his flight from Dubai, but forthcoming and articulate, as he divulges details about Kashkan 2, the second branch of his restaurant, Kashkan by Ranveer Brar, in Dubai. “So we were supposed to open the first week of August, then mid-August, then the end of August, then the first week of September, and now it’s mid September, but we should be good to go,” Brar puckishly contextualised why a chef should never divulge the opening date of the restaurant, making me feel foolish for blandly asking if the “process was going fine”.

A “notoriously social” kid, born into a Jat Sikh family in Lucknow, Brar has spoken extensively about his early influences: His grandmother, and his Gurudwara. With the former, when prodded to answer about the (lack of) legitimacy Indian grandmothers are bestowed for shaping Indian cuisine, he speaks about patriarchy being imposed on a setting that is inherently matriarchal in its operations. “As a child, the first symbol of that matriarchy is your grandmother, and the house she’s running, not just the kitchen. The culture of the house and everybody else is just, without being emphatic about it, a part of this opera,” Brar says.