For the longest time, chef Anahita Dhondy has been associated with Parsi food. Born into a Parsi family, she was the founding chef of SodaBottleOpenerWala (SBOW) when it opened in 2013 and left as chef-partner in 2021. Her first book, The Parsi Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Memory, saw her sharing family anecdotes and recipes like fried boomla and ravo. So when we reach out and she says she wants to make ragi tacos with mushroom filling, we are surprised. But millets are not new for 36-year-old Dhondy. She was introduced to the grain a decade ago by Pallavi Upadhyaya, who runs the organisation Millets for Health.“She walked me through the basics: how to clean them, whether to use them as flour or whole grain, how long to soak and wash them and how to cook them. Once I had the fundamentals, I could bring my own creativity as a chef,” recalls Dhondy, who did an entire millet menu in SBOW in 2015. “A full sit-down, eight-course menu, which no one had done at that point. After that, I started working millets into different dishes at the restaurant — sneaking them in, for instance, in place of rava for a crust.”Early September, when we meet Dhondy, she has her hands full. Pregnant with her second child, she tends to her 20-month-old son Avram, even as she runs the house and creates content for social media, that is, in between promotions for her second book, The Grain Kitchen. Yet, she is fully present the minute we start.Cooking, she tells us, happened naturally. Her mother, Nilufer Dhondy, has been a home chef and baker for 36 years. Dhondy started cooking at 10. Her earliest food memory, at three or four, is licking the batter off the bowl when her mother baked a chocolate cake. Her mother had once wanted to attend culinary school but stayed home to raise Dhondy and her brother, so the kitchen became her world, recalls the chef.By 14, Dhondy was sure of becoming a chef and when she told her parents, they were taken aback. Not because they disapproved of her choice but simply because they knew of only three or four women chefs. They supported her anyway. Ragi taco and its ingredient (Photo: Abhinav Saha)After Institute of Hotel Management, Aurangabad, a working year at Taj Mansingh, Delhi, shaped her path: A senior chef moved her from the bakery to the hot kitchen, telling her that to run a kitchen she had to be thrown into the deep end. At Le Cordon Bleu in London, she chose the full cuisine and pastry course over bakery alone. But London did not deliver the career she had hoped for: No one would sponsor a visa, and she returned to India in 2013.ALSO READ | Around Town: Inside Nepali Tales, a cloud kitchen in Thane that failed twice before Prajakta Koli called it ‘the best momos in India’Then, she met AD Singh, whom she had approached for a job at Olive, Delhi. Learning she was Parsi, he told her about a café concept, and within four days she had joined the founding team. SBOW opened a couple of months later. She was 23.Story continues below this adDhondy called aunts for recipes and trained a team that had never cooked Parsi food. Being older than her, they assumed she was a front-of-house face. “Only once I started cooking alongside them, morning to night, did that change,” she says. She stayed for nearly a decade, leaving in 2021 when the company moved towards regional cuisine and away from Parsi food.Millets, meanwhile, had become a slow-burning passion. That first millet menu caught the attention of the UN’s SDG2 Advocacy Hub, which invited her into The Chefs’ Manifesto — a global group of chefs promoting sustainable kitchens. She has since cooked millet dishes at the UN in New York, in California and across Europe, and started #MilletMonday on Instagram, where she shares unique recipes. Dhondy kneading the dough for the taco (Photo: Abhinav Saha)Millets have an image problem, she says, adding, “I took it upon myself to make millets cool.”Her ragi taco is a step in that direction. She turns a roti made out of ragi flour and atta into a fillable taco. Mushroom was among the first fillings, because the earthiness of nachni pairs well with mushrooms. Her advice for the hesitant: Start with millets at breakfast or lunch, so the body has the day to use the slow-releasing energy.Story continues below this adThat thinking runs through The Grain Kitchen. She initially wanted a book only on millets but her publisher HarperCollins felt that was premature. So, she widened it to grains. Its opening line calls the millet the first victim of “cancel culture”. The book also has a berry pulao, because “there was no chance anyone would let me leave without a berry pulao recipe.”Life after SBOW has been a portfolio of projects. There have been restaurant consultancies, the latest being White Tiger in Liverpool in the UK. There is the constant FMCG research on getting more grains into baby food, including a long association with Slurp Farm. There is also Figure 8 Catering in Delhi, where she is a consulting chef. Another cookbook is in early development.What she isn’t doing is opening a restaurant, purely for personal reasons: She doesn’t want a commitment that is “bigger than having a child.” She plans to revisit the idea once her children are in school. For now, it’s books, content and consultancies, plus a weekly roti wrap, with the filling swapped to suit whoever is at the table.