I found myself going down a familiar late night spiral on YouTube recently, watching a conversation with Chef Vikas Khanna, where he spoke with a kind of steady clarity about the women who shaped him. He spoke of his grandmother, mother and sister—not simply in the expected ways of teaching him how to cook, but in the deeper, less visible ways of shaping how he understands care, discipline, resilience and instinct.
It stayed with me, not because it was new, but because it felt uncomfortably familiar. Khanna, at his very core, addressed the assumption that these figures will always remain in place—steady and available, holding things together without asking to be acknowledged. We rarely question that assumption until something interrupts it, and take it for granted that someone has already defined for us what food should taste like, what comfort should feel like, and what enough looks like.
And, it made me think about Delhi.
This thought didn’t come in the usual ways we describe cities, in terms of scale or chaos or history—but in terms of function. If you look closely, Delhi behaves less like a singular point of culinary origin, but more like a maternal force. It has not necessarily given birth to as many cuisines as it has absorbed, held and nurtured—allowing them to settle, adapt and eventually feel native to it.
The arc becomes clearer when you place it against memories of the Partition. Waves of migration brought Punjabi families into the city, carrying with them food that would, over time, come to define what many now assume to be Delhi’s own. From slow cooked rajma and dal to the robust, ghee laden repertoire of meat gravies that continues to anchor the city’s palate, none of these dishes perhaps originated here, but they were all given the space to root themselves deeply enough to belong here.
Alongside this, the legacy of the Mughal courts ensured that what we now call Mughalai cuisine found not just a historical home, but an evolving one in Delhi. It is here that dishes moved beyond royal kitchens into everyday consumption, shifting in form–yet retaining a certain gravitas. Even kayastha food traditions, with their own nuanced interplay of meat, spice and technique, folded into the city’s domestic life in ways that are less documented but equally enduring.
Then, there’s everything that has followed since—Bengali sweets arriving with families that settled in Chittaranjan Park, south-Indian tiffin cultures establishing themselves with remarkable consistency near Lodhi Road, and kitchens from the north-east finding voice in smaller, more personal formats at Majnu ka Tila and Humayunpur. Each of them added to a city that does not erase differences but accommodate them—imperfectly, yet persistently.
In that sense, Delhi’s culinary identity is less about authorship, and more about stewardship.
It does not insist on ownership, yet it shapes everything that passes through it—adjusting flavours, absorbing techniques, allowing them to become instinctive over time. Think of this as how a mother does not necessarily create the world her child inhabits, but equips them to move through it, recalibrating constantly without drawing attention to the effort involved.
At ‘Mood’ in Vasant Vihar, for instance, Nicole Juneja cooks alongside her mother Kusuma, bringing the flavours of Darjeeling into Delhi not as something to be altered for the city, but as something to be held intact. Here, the act of cooking together becomes central to the experience, and where authorship is shared rather than singular.
What ties these threads together is not nostalgia alone, but a recognition of structure, the understanding that what we often attribute to individual talent or restaurant innovation is, in many cases, the outcome of a much longer lineage of learning. Such characters begin in domestic spaces and are shaped, overwhelmingly, by women in most cases.
Like the mothers we grow up with, Delhi does not always make visible the extent of what it holds together. Instead, the city’s variety allows us to assume that what we have will continue to be there. At times, such continuity can overlook the labour that makes it possible.
Yet, it is that labour—uncredited, instinctive and enduring—that defines both.
This Mother’s Day, the question is not simply one of celebration. Instead, let’s choose attention and recognition, both for the city and the people who shape it. Let’s celebrate how nurturing is not as an abstract idea, but a daily, deliberate act—one that feeds, sustains, and more often than we admit, teaches us everything we know about how to belong.