Long before zero waste became a term she had be associated with, before Le Cordon Bleu, before Noma and Gaggan and a decade in some of the world’s most feted kitchens, chef Vanshika Bhatia was a 13-year-old in Kanpur being punished with a dinner order for 10.“My mom sent me to fetch an ingredient and I didn’t know where it was. As punishment, I had to make dinner for 10 people that day,” she recalls, laughing. That first forced meal — dhoti dal (moong dhuli dal), a quick pyaaz-tamatar ki sabzi and a few attempted rotis before her mother and sister took over — is, in hindsight, the origin story of everything that followed: Together at 12th, her first restaurant; Petit Pie Shop, the country’s only dedicated pie shop; her three-year run as chef partner at the all-vegetarian, all-Indian-ingredient Omo; and now Gram Street, the coffee-and-croissant brand she opened three months, before giving birth.Cooking at home was never forbidden territory. “As soon as we could reach the stovetop, it was, make the tea and bring it,” she says. Baking began as a way of dealing with board-exam stress. “My elder sister taught me to bake my first pound cake; she gave me a cookbook. Soon people started gifting me cookbooks — I would finish one before moving to the next. I finished 10-12 that year, before my mother hid them all before the boards,” she says, now sitting in her Gurugram living room with a cup of tea — her first break since flying in from Kanpur that morning with her two-month-old son and husband, ordering in momos for lunch, and pulling up BlinkIt for the last few things she needs for her mum’s signature dish, which she’s preparing for this interview.But to pursue culinary formally, she had to put up a fight, her elder sister being the one fighting her case. “Hailing from a business family, girls weren’t encouraged to go out of city, work in a profession that keeps you busy till wee hours of the night and travel all the time. ‘Shadi kaun karega?’ they would say,” she recalls. But the sisters won, Bhatia went to Le Cordon Bleu in 2012, and the rest, as they say, is history. She also got married to a gentleman she met at a food fest.What sets her home cooking apart from her restaurant cooking isn’t technique — it’s memory. Bhatia belongs to the Bannuwali community, descendants of the Valbhatiya clan who migrated from Bannu, now in Pakistan, and settled largely across Uttar Pradesh after Partition. It’s a cuisine built around scarcity: nothing thrown away, everything dried or pickled.“Resources were so little you couldn’t afford to waste anything. The cuisine just became like that.” She grew up eating these dishes, but only started documenting them during lockdown in 2020, craving ghar ka khana while stuck in Gurgaon. “I tried to Google recipes and found nothing, and that’s when I realised this is specifically our home food.” She called her nana and dadi and a few cousins, mostly for the non-veg recipes — in her grandmother’s generation, only men cooked and ate meat and always outside home.A favourite is Andhi Kukdi, which literally translates to “blind chicken” but has anything to do with the chicken. It is a dish made from leftover roti boiled down with black pepper, water, and ghee, invented by mothers who told hungry children to close their eyes and imagine they were eating chicken. “Now it’s a delicacy for us — something we make out of nostalgia.” Alongside it sits Tukkar, leftover roti cooked with onion, tomato, and a fiery tadka, eaten at breakfast with dahi and green chillies, and Arbi wala mutton to make a bigger pot of sabzi with a smaller portion of mutton. “It tells you about the times.”Story continues below this adToday, she is recreating her mom’s dahi-wala chicken, which gets done under 45 minutes, with minimal ingredients and one skillet. “Bannu is a very arid region, so the cuisine is simple — whatever you could keep in dry storage,” she says, adding whole spices to a red enamel cast-iron skillet. “I have added cardamom, but traditionally it’s just onion, ginger, garlic, green chillies, pepper and salt. It was made with chicken on the bone, but I have adapted it to boneless.” The result is a comforting, tangy, and velvety dish that’s polished off with fluffy ‘angaare wali’ rotis, coming to the plate right off the gas.That instinct for using everything runs into her professional identity too. It’s why, at Omo, where she was chef-partner, she insisted on sourcing every ingredient from within India — the olive oil, the chocolate, the cheese. It’s why her research trips, later formalised as “Omo Adventures,” took her to a hill in Nagaland where a variety of sticky millet grows nowhere else, and to a farm in Coorg run by a family who had never hosted a stranger before her. “You can’t go in acting like you are a chef who already knows everything,” she says, still watching the skillet, stirring in the chicken and finally adding the dahi. Her husband, who has also invested in Gram Street Coffee, takes over parenting duties while we talk. Dahi chicken (Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)Motherhood has changed the shape of her ambition. A restaurant she had spent two years planning has been quietly shelved. “After having my baby, my passion for cooking was dying a bit, because I had turned it into a business,” she says. She worked at Gram Street until her ninth month of pregnancy, resting only in the final two weeks on her doctor’s advice, and returned almost fully after her 45 days rest period. To keep the hot-kitchen passion alive while she works up to a full restaurant again, she’s decided to host small, invite-only tables for five or 10 people out of her base kitchen in an industrial pocket of Gurugram — no fixed calendar, no intention to scale.Also Read | Chef Hussain Shahzad: The kid who copied recipes off cooking shows now runs Papa’s, India’s most talked-about kitchen“Not really even to sell. Just for the passion of it.” A restaurant that behaves like a home kitchen: open only when she feels like cooking. Perhaps it’s a fitting return, for a chef whose most sophisticated instincts — resourcefulness, humility, an obsession with where things come from — were all in place long before she ever left Kanpur. Meanwhile, her hands are also full with Gram Street Coffee, which opened its second outpost this week and eyeing a third one very shortly. While the purple coffee made from blueberry milk has taken over the internet, their flaky bakes are just as good, and they also travel well.Story continues below this adIngredients: 750g–1kg chicken, 4 onions, 2 green chillies, 4 tsp ginger garlic paste, 2 cardamom pods, 1 bay leaf, 200g yogurt, Ghee, Salt and pepperMethod:Make a rough paste of the onions and green chillies.To a pan, add ghee, cardamom, and bay leaf. Add the onion paste and roast for 5 minutes.Add the ginger garlic paste and cook for 10 minutes.Add salt, pepper, and chicken. Cover and cook till the chicken is tender.In the end, add the yogurt, mix well, and adjust seasoning. Garnish with coriander leaves.