Travellers bring the global table home

Home chefs are setting their dining tables with pop-up menus inspired by their trips around the world

- Shirin Mehrotra

Turkish breakfast in a Mumbai suburb, Lebanese dessert in Gurugram, and matcha maple ice-cream in Chandigarh—food and travel enthusiasts across the country are opening their homes to strangers and serving multi-course menus that are often at par with popular restaurants, albeit in a cosy, intimate setting.

Over the last decade or so, home chefs have started hosting supper clubs, often introducing the foods of their community, with some taking it outside their home kitchens and doing pop-ups at restaurants.

Now, there's a new wave of home chefs bringing cuisines inspired from their international travels to their supper clubs.

Aparna Bhat, founder of The Traveling Thali, is known for her Turkish and Georgian breakfasts in Mumbai. "Food for me is a way to connect with an unfamiliar culture," she says. Her pop-ups, started in 2022, follow a specific theme like the recent kahvalti or Turkish breakfast spread inspired by the menu of her favourite spot Mükellef Karaköy in Istanbul. The spread included a mushroom and eggplant pâté, lahmacun or Turkish/Kurdish flatbread, honey and homemade butter, stewed fresh and dry fruit, and menemen or scrambled eggs with tomatoes.