Intimate supper clubs by home chefs are bringing strangers together on small, personal tables

A new dining movement is emerging in India: small, personal tables with food, memory and storytelling, challenging old norms of who cooks, who teaches, and how we understand cuisine.

As India’s cities grow louder and more hurried, a quiet shift is happening behind apartment doors and in tucked-away studio spaces. Small groups gather around long tables where the evening unfolds more like a friendly gathering than a restaurant service. These supper clubs aren’t chasing spectacle; they’re trying to recreate the feeling of sharing food the way most Indians have known it — with context, care, and attention that gets lost in commercial dining. One might revolve around heirloom rice varieties from Bihar, another around a home cook’s interpretation of forgotten recipes of the 17th century. The draw isn’t just the food, but a chance to sit with like-minded strangers and understand a cuisine through someone who lives it, cooks it, or has carried it across cities and generations.

I host my own experiential dinners, but have never warmed up to the word ‘supper club’. It doesn’t quite match the cadence of how we share food here. My most recent one — Dhoop aur Dhaan at Indica in Delhi — was to talk about Bihar beyond the stereotypes. That evening, a professional chef sat beside a home cook. Watching them eat the same meal that served sattu ghati, Bihari kebab, dahi chudha, thekua, Darbhanga fish curry, ahuna mutton, linger over the same flavours, I was reminded that these gatherings flatten hierarchies. Everyone becomes just a person at a table, curious about food and the stories that travel with it.

What began as a quiet disruption in the West is now unfolding in its own way in India. In many ways, we’re in the middle of our own culinary renaissance. And one of the biggest catalysts has been MasterChef. The TV show, not just in India but across countries, has shattered the old hierarchy by proving that skills and stories don’t belong only to trained chefs. Home cooks walked in, took up space, and changed the rules. Over time, the show stopped being only about technique and started valuing memory, identity, and lived experience.

And this energy has spilled into the way people cook at home, and the way they host. It has also shaped how diners think. Today, people will happily pay as much for a six-course meal in someone’s home or studio as they would at a fine-dining restaurant, because they know they’re getting something more — a curated, exclusive experience, a point of view, a cook who walks to the table and explains not just the “history” of a dish but what it means to them and why it exists on that plate.

Apart from my own cooking experiments, one of my most vivid memories is dining with Sheeba Iqbal Jairajpuri at Aab-o-Dana. She welcomed guests into the aangan of her old haveli in Lucknow, alive with warmth and old-city grace. At the table, she served food with stories, explaining how dishes were prepared, suggesting which breads or rice would pair well, speaking to each diner personally.

As Sheeba explains, “For us, food is an expression of culture, a way to bring alive memory, hospitality and the lost rhythms of home kitchens.” Today, she leads Naimat Khana, continuing the legacy: home-cooked dishes like ande ka halwa or khade masale ka gosht are offered to guests invited into a living tradition.

I often feel that traditions like these help you walk into a living, breathing museum, one where dishes carry stories of a time many of us know only through textbooks.

At Manzilat’s, Kolkata, Manzilat Fatima carries forward a royal legacy. She is a direct descendant of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh. Her kitchen isn’t about reinvention or fusion but preservation. She draws upon recipes passed down through generations, upholding what she describes as ‘khandani’ Awadhi cuisine. Each served dish — from majlisi pasanda, muharrami khichda to Kolkata-style biryani — reminds diners that food can be history, memory, culture, bearing witness to survival, to inheritance, to the quiet reclamation of flavour and heritage.

Sneha Saikia’s home table in Delhi is a kitchen-turned-classroom where you learn and unlearn Assamese cooking. Through her ‘Table for 6’ intimate lunches and dinners, she confronts prejudice head-on. “People think Northeastern cuisine is about insects and snakes,” she says.

She serves dishes like khar, masor tenga, bamboo-shoot curries and even misolia xaak, the 101-leaf preparation eaten during Bihu, not as exotic curiosities but as everyday meals shaped by season and soil. Every dish and spice pushes back against the lazy myths around Northeastern food, making diners face a cuisine they’ve overlooked for far too long.

It was a similar impulse for Mumbai-based home chef Reshma, who wanted people to taste Maharashtrian and South Indian food beyond the usual vada pav and idli fare. She began by hosting home-cooked meal experiences and running cooking sessions for travellers, serving food shaped by local soil, coastal rhythms and her family’s repertoire.

Her stories travelled with the dishes, making the meal feel personal rather than performative. And when she cooks in someone else’s home or collaborates on a pop-up, the format shifts, the plating may get sleeker, the setting more polished, but the flavour never changes.

And then there are voices like Samiksha and Taarini, who built Sere Supper Club out of a simple longing: the need for community. After years of watching supper clubs abroad, they realised their own city, Chandigarh, offered no such spaces where strangers could sit together without pretence. The duo, lifelong friends, and craving for connections in the new phases of their life, turned their home into a space where food could do the introductions.

Their food philosophy is simple: cook what feels true to the season, appetite, and the experience they want to curate. They aren’t chasing authenticity in the purist sense, nor do they want to imitate restaurant-style plates. What matters is curiosity: giving guests something they won’t find in a restaurant, like their take on chili con carne or tacos reimagined with condiments that tilt tradition just enough.

They’re doing this because food, for them, is a way of building community in a world where adult friendships are hard to form and harder to sustain. Each menu is an act of invitation — part-comfort, part-discovery, part-cultural storytelling.

Many urban Indians are increasingly treating meals out as routine rather than an occasional treat. In several metros, diners now visit eateries at least five to nine times a month, well above what was common even a few years ago. This rising appetite for external meals, combined with growing disposable incomes and changing lifestyles, has helped transform eating out into a habit, not a luxury.

That change shows up in the bottomlines, too. India’s food-service market was worth over $100 billion in 2024 and estimates suggest it is likely to cross $114 billion this year. Within that, independent restaurants, small, curated dining setups and non-chain formats hold a majority share, making space for pop-ups, home-chef tables and experiential dinners to grow alongside big chains.

Together, the data suggests something important: we aren’t just seeing isolated experiments in dining. They’re not side notes to India’s food culture; they’re rising in the very gaps the market is opening. A diner today is not just choosing a meal, he/she is also choosing meaning, context and a front seat at someone’s story.

And when diners start choosing meaning over mere convenience, their behaviour shifts too. The table becomes less of a service point and more of a social space. People are willing to try unfamiliar flavours because they trust the person who cooked them. The presence of the host, sharing stories about the cuisine served, changes the power dynamic as well. Eating becomes participatory instead of passive.

In these smaller, story-led settings, diners aren’t just consuming food. They’re learning, unlearning, and recalibrating their ideas of what Indian cuisine can hold.

Once diners begin to rethink, the ripple hits the system that has long decided who gets authority in food. These participatory tables chip away at the hierarchy that restaurants built around their polished kitchens. When a home cook can command the same attention at a similar cost as a fine-dining chef, the centre shifts. Skill is no longer measured by chef jackets or Michelin dreams, but by clarity of flavour, cultural honesty and the ability to connect. It’s a quiet disruption, but it forces the restaurant world to reckon with a truth it often ignored: expertise doesn’t only live in institutions; it lives in people.

Maybe that’s why I keep returning to these tables. Because each time I host, or sit at someone’s home, I’m reminded of why I began cooking publicly in the first place. To perform, to impress, and to create a space where food feels honest. A space where stories travel beyond cliches, they’re lived memories; where the art and artists are part of the conversation.

These intimate tables offer a way to be present without pretending. They pull me back to the reason I ever picked up a ladle or wrote a recipe — to feed, to share, to listen, to be human around food. And if that isn’t the future of Indian dining, I don’t know what is.

— The writer is a chef and author