From IHM Pusa, Taj SATS and The Leela to Gurugram’s weekday lunches

I am asked, fairly often, why a chef runs a meal plan. The honest answer is that a meal plan is the hardest kind of cooking I know: the same person eats your food every day, so there is nowhere to hide a bad dish, a short portion or a late delivery. I like that. It is the discipline the kitchens I came from ran on.

Where I learned to cook

I trained at IHM Pusa, and then cooked for Taj SATS and The Leela. They are different schools of the same subject. Taj SATS cooks for airlines, where a dish has to come out the same way thousands of times and be judged by a passenger who never meets the cook. A hotel kitchen like The Leela cooks for one guest at a time, and that guest is in front of you. A meal plan needs both: the consistency of the first, because you will eat our food on a Tuesday and a Thursday and expect the same thing, and the attention of the second, because you are one person and your week is not a flight schedule.

Since 2021, in Gurugram

I started cooking for Gurugram in 2021, from a kitchen of my own. Today there are two, Sushant Lok and Sector 66, both FSSAI-licensed, with a team of fifteen between them, and every meal plan is cooked in one of those two rooms. The licence numbers, the addresses and the hours are on the About page; the numbers the plans run on are on the Facts page, with the date they were last checked.

What the kitchens insist on

These are the rules, and I would rather you held us to them than took them on trust.

The bowl is weighed. A base of about 100 g, a protein of about 150 g, sides and a dip. The portion is the same on a Monday and a Sunday, and it is the reason the protein on a dish is a number rather than an adjective.

The numbers are calculated, not guessed. Every dish lists its calories, protein, carbs, fat and fibre, worked out from the recipe and the weighed portions of each component. The served dish can vary a little from the figure; the figure is never rounded to look better than it is.

It is cooked the same day. The kitchen receives each order about two hours before its window and cooks it in the hours before. Nothing is cooked the day before and reheated into a window, which is also why a dish, a time or an address can change until 2 hours before and not after.

Every dish is mine to approve. Every plan family, every weekly rotation and every dish on the menu passes me before it reaches a bowl. When you ask for a plan designed for you, the quote comes from those chef-approved weekly rotations, matched to your answers, and a person checks it before it goes out.

We don't claim what we haven't checked. We have not completed an allergen review of our standard dishes, so we make no allergen claims and cannot promise a kitchen free of any ingredient. Tell your relationship manager before you start, and we will tell you plainly what we can and cannot do.

Nothing renews on its own. You pay for a plan once. When it ends, you decide whether there is another.

What that means for a weekday lunch

It means the food arrives in the hour you chose, with a WhatsApp message about 3 hours before it, that it tastes the way the dish is meant to taste, and that the number printed on it is the number in the bowl. It means that if the week changes, the plan changes with it, and if it doesn't suit you, you say so to a person on WhatsApp who can do something about it.

The four plans are on the plans page. If you would rather tell us how you eat and let the kitchen build the week, ask for a personalised plan and a priced one comes back within 24 hours. I read the rotations it is built from. That is the job.