Step into most kitchens today and it is remarkably easy to forget that food begins somewhere far beyond the stove. Before it arrives washed, trimmed and portioned, it has passed through fields, orchards, rivers and hands that rarely enter the conversation. When we stop asking where our food comes from or who has cared for it along the way, it becomes little more than a product. Something to be bought, plated and consumed. But the moment we place a face, a name or a farm behind an ingredient, the relationship begins to shift.
For Chef Chetna Chopra, that connection is not a romantic idea. It is the foundation of how she cooks.
“For me, cooking begins long before the kitchen,” she tells me over a glass of fermented ginger beer at OMO, her produce driven café in Gurugram. The afternoon sun filters through the café’s windows and the conversation drifts, as it often does with chefs who think deeply about food, towards land and memory.
“It begins in the field.”
Chopra, who originally hails from Delhi, spent over eight years living and working on farms in Italy. Not as a visiting chef passing through for inspiration, but as someone immersed in the rhythm of the land. She grew vegetables herself, harvested them with soil still clinging to their roots, and cooked with ingredients that had been in the ground only hours earlier.
“That experience changes you,” she says. “Once you have lived that close to the land, you cannot unsee it. You begin to ask different questions about everything that enters your kitchen. Who grew this? Where did it come from? What season does it belong to?”
It is a perspective that has shaped her work ever since. “Because of that experience, I have developed a strong resistance to working with produce that is not traceable,” she adds, almost matter of factly.
Last weekend, OMO hosted a table built around a simple but evocative idea. Food from soil to soul. The phrase sounds poetic, but the afternoon itself was grounded in the realities of farming and sourcing. Chopra, who recently stepped in as the culinary director for OMO, speaks about the phrase farm to table with a seriousness that cuts through the usual restaurant rhetoric.
“Farm to table becomes a buzzword when it is reduced to a marketing phrase,” she says. “In reality, it is about restoring a broken relationship between kitchens and the land that feeds them.” For her, the philosophy is neither fashionable nor new. It is simply the natural order of cooking that existed long before menus began announcing it.
The menu unfolded in five thoughtful courses, each designed to draw diners closer to the ingredients on their plate. Guests were gently encouraged to eat with their hands, turning the act of dining into something more tactile and intimate. It slowed the table down.
Several dishes linger in memory. An upcycled cauliflower dish arrived first, where golden pan fried florets were layered with tahini and lemon, and lifted with zaatar, pine nuts and shards of crisp kale. A delicate ceviche followed, bright with Godhoraj lime and tender coconut meat, sharpened by raw mango and finished with herb oil.
There was also a kachori that stole the show. Its crisp shell gave way to a filling of caramelised onion and sweet corn, brought alive with a smoky Mathania chilli mole. Then came a ravioli that felt almost nostalgic in spirit, stuffed with khatta meetha kaddu and finished with a pour of coconut moilee that tied the flavours together.
What made the table particularly compelling was the provenance behind every ingredient. Much of the produce had been sourced through close collaborations with farms around Delhi, including Tijara, Shroomery and Krishi Cress, with the OMO team actively involved in foraging and sourcing.
“One of the ways we try to bridge that gap is through an initiative we run called ‘Know Your Farmer’,” Chopra explains. “Every month we visit one of our partner farms, spend time with the growers, walk the fields, and build dishes inspired by what we see and learn there.”
For her, the relationship between chefs and farmers goes far beyond flavour. “Working closely with farmers is not only about quality,” she says. “It is also about responsibility. Restaurants sit at a powerful intersection between agriculture and the public. The sourcing decisions we make can either support regenerative, ecological farming systems or continue to feed into extractive ones.”
If the future of dining is to be meaningful, Chopra believes it must begin with rebuilding that lost relationship with the land. Kitchens, she suggests, have an important role to play in helping diners see food not as a commodity, but as something that begins in soil, shaped by seasons, people and place.