Flavors of My Journey

My mother never wrote a recipe down in her life. Ammachi cooked every meal from memory - from instinct built across generations in Irinjalakuda, Kerala. She was the most gifted cook I have ever known. , and she taught me everything that mattered even after I entered a professional kitchen . The book begins with her.

Flavors of My Journey is a memoir-cookbook — part personal history, part culinary pilgrimage, part tribute to the ingredients and people that shaped forty years of cooking. It traces a journey from a military school in Bangalore to the Ashok Hotel in New Delhi, where I cooked for 42 heads of state at the age of twenty-five. From Washington DC, where my partner Surfy and I launched and ran Bombay Bistro , Indique & Indique Heights, serving the Washington Metropolitan area for over three decades.

And it traces a journey back — across India, through the spice markets of Guntur, the jaggery farms of Erode, the cardamom hills of Munnar, and the coconut groves of Kerala — to understand the ingredients I have cooked with my entire career.

This is the story I have been living for a long time. I am ready to tell it.