A Moveable Feast

I LEFT HOME AT 19. Hungry to live. Hungry to learn. Hungry to become the version of myself I knew existed beneath the layers others had wrapped around me. I wasn’t just leaving a house; I was stepping out of a cage. I wanted to live my identity as it was given to me—not the version others could swallow more easily, but the truth of me. That hunger was both metaphor and fact. I needed food, yes, but I also needed freedom. Needed the road. And the road gave me everything I hadn’t known I was missing.

The farther I travelled from home, the closer I came to myself. Each new place peeled away shame. Each dish dismantled doubt. I wasn’t always brave—sometimes I was terrified. But the moment I sat down at a table, any table, and began to taste, I remembered that all around me were other people with other plates, and each of them carried their own hunger. Some wore different skin. Some prayed to gods I didn’t know. Some spoke in languages I couldn’t yet recognise. But we all paused to eat. To be fed. To feel full. That’s what food does. It reminds us we are all living stories—carried in dif­ferent vessels, yes, but beating with the same pulse. The same heart. The same fragile hope.

In Manhattan, I learned to feed that hope with chaos and grace. A $1 slice, glistening and folded, eaten standing up in the hum of the city, gave me more joy than a linen-draped meal. It was proof that beauty doesn’t need a price tag. But Manhattan is also where I saw the world lean into itself—where cultures blur, then dance. RedFarm—my friend Eddie’s genius—tucked Chinese flavours into new skins and made them swagger. The pastrami egg roll, the lettuce wraps that crunched and kissed the tongue — these were the meals that reminded me: food, like identity, isn’t fixed. It’s fluid. It’s fusion. It’s invention and inheritance in a single bite.

And then there was Moustache—tiny, forgotten by most —where the pita tasted like someone’s grandmother had just pulled it from the fire. Iraqi flavours, bold and unapologetic, served in a room no larger than a living room. The bread alone taught me about home—how it isn’t always where you are from, but where your mouth remembers feeling alive. And Balthazar—part brass, part butter, all theatre—served me New York drama with French precision. Even the oysters seemed to know they were being watched. Every meal there felt like a short film: moody lighting, sharp dialogue, and a lingering sense that you were part of something romantic, slightly dangerous, possibly divine.

And that’s the thing about New York. You’re always eating on the edge of something. Identity. Romance. Discovery. You walk one block and you’re in another country. You walk three and you’re home again. I lived in Manhattan for 30 years, but it never once felt ordinary. It always felt like an invitation—to change, to taste, to become.

Later, when I moved to a farm in He­bron, New York, a speck of land just north of the Hudson Valley, east of Vermont, west of the Adirondacks, and south of Montreal, I found another kind of truth. This was not a city of stimulation. It was a stretch of tundra, a hush of fields, frozen for half the year and overflowing with life for the other. I raised chickens—200 of them—and they gave me a rainbow of eggs, from pale blue to marigold. I had goats, sheep, alpacas, and one dignified llama who looked at everyone like we were his guests. I grew tomatoes so sweet they made me cry. Peaches, pears, apples that snapped with juice. Zucchini the size of your forearm, cabbages like planets. Everything in rhythm with the seasons. Everything at the mercy of time.

That farm taught me how to listen—to the land, to the wind, to the slow unfold­ing of ripeness. I had peace there. Real peace. Not silence—because the birds were always screaming, the goats com­plaining, the rooster shouting his cracked gospel every morning—but peace in the sense of belonging. I belonged to the rhythm. And when you live in rhythm, you cook differently. You eat differently. You love more simply. You realise that food isn’t a performance. It’s participation. A tomato doesn’t need your innovation. It needs your attention.

But even with that stillness in my bones, I still sought cities that pulsed. Like Singapore. Where everything is pristine, but everything underneath is burning with flavour. I once missed a flight just to finish a meal at the Tippling Club. And I don’t mean I was late. I mean I missed it on purpose. The cocktails were wicked little masterpieces. The dishes walked a tightrope between genius and madness. I came back the next night and started again. My cousin Gautam, indulgent and amused, let me eat and drink with careless abandon, and I did. Because Singapore demands indulgence. It’s a city that takes itself seriously, and rightly so. There, food isn’t hobby or convenience. It’s culture. It’s pride.

Even the humble soup dumpling becomes art. At Din Tai Fung, the folds are perfect, the broth inside sacred. One bite and your entire brain goes quiet. But it’s the hawker stalls where you really understand what Singapore means. The plastic tables. The open flames. The cho­rus of languages. The smell of chilli and satay smoke. That’s where the country breathes. Behind the antiseptic shine is a nation in motion. You sit down with strangers. You eat with your hands. You sweat. You laugh. You taste something you can’t name. You’re alive.

Rome taught me the opposite rhythm. Rome told me to stop rushing. To eat like there was nothing after lunch. I wandered into Trastevere and found a bowl of fagioli con le cotiche— beans and pork skin— that undid me. It was soft, humble, gener­ous. It tasted like it had taken a long time to get here. And maybe that was the point. Rome doesn’t cook quickly. It doesn’t live quickly. It stretches the day until it feels elastic. Bread soaks in oil. Wine flows into dusk. Ragu simmers for hours and somehow still isn’t done. It’s a city where food is slow and people are slower, and that’s the blessing.

Then there’s Tokyo. Tokyo isn’t slow. Tokyo is precise. It’s measured. It’s rever­ent. I sat once at a sushi counter where the chef didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His knife said everything. He placed a piece of buri in front of me—yellowtail, glisten­ing—and waited. I ate. And I understood something I didn’t have words for. There was no garnish. No distraction. Just one perfect moment. Tokyo is like that. It doesn’t shout. It whispers. It slices thin. It expects you to notice.

And somewhere between Tokyo’s silence and Hebron’s wind, there is San Francisco—where memory, family, and flavour swirl together like fog in the bay.

San Francisco wasn’t just a destination. It was family. It was my nani and nana’s home, my mother’s parents, post-retire­ment. They welcomed me into their mod­est apartment where my grandmother cooked well into her late 70s and 80s. She cooked not out of duty, but devotion. Her food had no shortcuts, no cheats, only patience and purity. Everything was fresh. Everything was right. She made lentils that held your heart. Sabzis that soothed. Her cooking didn’t show off, it healed.

That city has always been more than its postcard icons. Yes, there’s the Golden Gate. Yes, the bay. But the real beauty is edible. At Dandelion Chocolate, I tasted batch chocolate made from cacao beans with stories. Farms I could read about. People I could thank. The chocolate melted like velvet. And Stephen Durfee, the pastry whisperer, took those bars and turned them into poetry. It was a revelation—not sugar rush, but soul.

And pizza—real pizza—came at Pizzeria Delfina. A nettle pizza. A dandelion green pizza. Ingredients that sound like medicine, but taste like magic. Once you eat there, you question every other pizza in your life. Was that even pizza? What have I been eating? This—this is pizza.

The Vietnamese food. The Thai curries. The Chinese banquets. Walk a few blocks and the continent changes. Walk further and poverty shocks you. The city holds its contradictions close. Wealth and want. Madness and genius. But always, always, there is food. Always someone cooking something that tastes like home—even if it’s halfway across the world.

Seven miles long, San Francisco contains the whole planet. People from ev­erywhere, sitting on sidewalks, dreaming with flavour. You can taste hope there. You can chew on resilience.

And then there’s Boston and Cam­bridge—a city and its thoughtful shadow, wrapped in intellectualism, rebellion, and an old-world kind of pride. The American story bends around this place: the Boston Tea Party, a brewing storm over taxes that spilled into revolution. A city with librar­ies older than some countries and streets that remember the weight of boots and protest. But these days, something gentler is shaping the spirit of Boston: food.

Boston is blooming, plate by plate. And at the center of that harvest is Ana Sortun, who has made her restaurants into chap­ters of a shared, fragrant novel. At Oleana, her flagship in Cambridge, Turkish fla­vours dance through the New England air with warmth and conviction. It’s a garden of a restaurant—herbs, flowers, sumac, saffron, lamb, yogurt, citrus. Everything sun-kissed, spiced, softly dazzling.

Then there’s Sofra—a bakery and café where flatbreads, mezze, and sticky pastries pull from Istanbul, Aleppo, Cairo, and swirl through Cambridge’s academic cool with irreverent generosity. You sit, you bite, and you are elsewhere. You are home.

And Sarma—riotous, loud, joyful. A restaurant that says, “Come hungry, leave different.” Each dish is a passport stamp. Each bite is a ticket. You eat roasted carrots with dukkah, lamb sliders that feel like midnight in Ankara, and desserts that re­define what sweetness can mean. Dining there is travel—without packing, without panic, without borders.

If you go to all three in a weekend— Oleana, Sofra, and Sarma—your summer will not just be filled. It will be verdant. Alive. Full of promise. These are not just restaurants. They are memory machines. You leave changed. You leave curious. You go home and cook differently. You reach for flavours you didn’t know how to spell a week ago. You understand, deep in your gut, that food cre­ated by people who have travelled, who have crossed continents with flavour in their pockets, is food that opens the world.

Boston taught me that history doesn’t end. It just adds more courses to the meal. First came tea. Then came bread. Then came hum­mus, harissa, and hope.

That’s the gift of travel. It makes you notice. It makes you pay attention. Not just to the food on your plate, but to the hands that made it. To the stories folded into the dough. To the migrations and mixings that brought ingredients to the place you now sit. In India, we worship dal makhani, rajma chawal, butter chicken. But the kidney beans, the tomatoes, the chillies— these are foreign travellers. They came from the Americas. They’re young. And yet we have made them ours. That is what travel does. It stretches tradition. It remixes memory. It lets the world cook inside us.

I’ve lived between Delhi, Mum­bai, and Goa in recent years—and all three carry this delicious contra­diction. Old and new. Foreign and familiar. Local and global. A Goan fish curry with kokum and coconut tastes like the sea—but also like Portuguese influence. A street sandwich in Bombay holds chutney, yes, but also cheese and white bread, and somehow it works. Delhi’s Mughlai kitchens hum with Persian ancestry, but today’s butter chicken belongs to everyone. Food has never obeyed borders. Why should we?

And so I imagine—often—what I would do if I won a billion-dollar lottery. I would create a fund to send children from every background to somewhere they have never imagined. From small villages in Odisha to the suburbs of Detroit, from Lagos to Lima, I would send them across the world. I would place them in homes where people eat with differ­ent spices, speak different syl­lables, worship in different ways, love in different ways. And I would wait. Because I know what would happen. The fear would fade. The cu­riosity would win. And they would return having tasted something that changed them. Maybe a dish. Maybe just a moment.

And isn’t that what we’re all doing, all the time? Travelling towards ourselves. Hoping to find someone who tastes the way we feel. Hoping to be fed something real. Hoping to sit down at a table—anywhere—and know, in our bones, that we are home.

So wherever you go this summer, don’t just sightsee. Don’t just photograph. Sit down. Eat. Listen. Let the food do what it does best — turn strangers into neigh­bours, fear into wonder, and appetite into understanding Because the world is delicious. And you are invited.

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