Ten women chefs worth knowing this International Chefs Day, from the researcher expanding our understanding of Karnataka’s food to the pastry chef making dessert an entire evening.
Bengaluru will cross town for a good meal. It will negotiate traffic for a pizza, set reminders for a restaurant reservation and spend an entire evening debating where to find the best croissant. We remember what we ate, what we paid and whether we would go back. The person who made it possible can remain a little less familiar.
That is where this list begins.
For International Chefs Day on October 20, Balcony Stories looks at ten women whose work deserves a place in the city’s food conversations. They lead restaurant kitchens, build independent bakehouses, develop tasting menus and research culinary traditions that rarely receive the attention they deserve. Some have established followings. Others are names to learn now. This is an editorial selection, without ranking, brought together by the distinct ideas each woman brings to Bengaluru’s tables.
Their stories also make a useful argument for being a more curious diner. A restaurant recommendation becomes far more interesting when you know why the food exists.
A City’s Appetite, Seen Through Six Different Kitchens
Anusha Venkatesh, Ōle Project
How does a landscape become a cuisine? For chef and researcher Anusha Venkatesh, that question leads into the ingredients, techniques and everyday ingenuity of Karnataka’s regional kitchens. Through Ōle Project, she explores food shaped by geography, community and the resources available to people. Her recent Jawari menu brought particular attention to North Karnataka, a region whose culinary breadth can disappear behind the state’s more familiar restaurant dishes. Hand-rolled grain preparations and regional ingredients found contemporary expression, accompanied by the research behind them. Anusha gives diners something substantial to carry home: a better understanding of the food of a state they may have thought they already knew.
Niharika Peri, Eating Love
Pizza is familiar enough that the details can slip past us. We notice a topping before we consider the dough beneath it. Chef and founder Niharika Peri’s Eating Love offers a reason to reverse that order. Neapolitan-style sourdough pizza sits at the centre of its food identity, with slow fermentation and toppings that stretch beyond the predictable. Her work invites a closer look at a dish Bengaluru orders almost automatically: the texture of the crust, the balance of what goes on it and the choices that turn a familiar meal into a restaurant’s signature. For an International Chefs Day feature, hers is also a story about building a culinary business around a clear, recognisable craft.
Jenny Clinta, Minibé
At Minibé, dessert gets the evening to itself. Chef Jenny Clinta leads the food at the Indiranagar restaurant, where a nine-course dessert tasting experience draws on her childhood in Minnie Bay in the Andaman Islands and her training in French pastry. The menu moves between savoury and sweet, allowing memories of home to enter a format usually associated with elaborate technique. Jenny runs the kitchen with her team; her sister Steffi handles the front of house and operations. What makes Jenny particularly interesting is the specificity of her inspiration. A mother’s preparation or a grandmother’s dessert can become the starting point for a course, giving diners a personal connection alongside the pleasure of something unfamiliar.
Ria Belliappa, Juny’s Bakehouse
A neighbourhood bakery holds a particular place in Bengaluru’s memory. It is where an ordinary evening snack can become a lifelong reference point. At Juny’s Bakehouse in Jayanagar, pastry chef Ria Belliappa brings professional experience to that familiar world. Named after her grandmother and created within her ancestral home, the bakehouse carries family history into a working culinary space. Her interpretation of the khara bun Congress connects with South Bengaluru’s bakery vocabulary while giving it her own treatment. With more than a decade in pastry, Ria has an appealing subject to work with: food people already feel strongly about. The interest lies in how she makes it recognisably hers.
Sagarika Joshi, Muru Muru
The café meal has a difficult job. It has to suit a quick catch-up, a long conversation and the customer who returns expecting the same pleasure as last time. Chef and co-founder Sagarika Joshi approaches that territory at Muru Muru, where fresh, comfort-driven food sits within a restored 1960s house in Indiranagar. She and co-founder Garvit Luthra retained much of the building’s character, creating a setting that encourages familiarity. Sagarika’s inclusion draws attention to the thought behind an apparently easy café experience. The room may persuade someone to walk in, but the kitchen has to give them a reason to make it their regular place.
Vichita Kumar, Pizza No Cap
Bengaluru’s weather is part of the process at Pizza No Cap. The team behind the Ulsoor Road opening works with fermentation and adjusts its dough to the city’s conditions, treating pizza-making as an evolving workshop. Chef and co-founder Vichita Kumar brings personal references into that experimentation. Her Parma & Peru Pizzette, which pairs Parma ham with guava jam, grew from memories of an after-school snack. It is a revealing detail: a technical kitchen can still begin with a very ordinary food memory. Vichita is a newer name worth following for the way she brings those two sources of inspiration together.
The Craft Behind the Food We Come Back For
Rhea Aaron, Klaa Kitchen
Family food changes context when it enters a restaurant. The cook must decide what to preserve, what to explain and how to serve something deeply familiar to people encountering it for the first time. At Klaa Kitchen, chef Rhea Aaron works with Goan food and recipes connected to the Aaron household. Her journey includes professional hotel kitchens and an independent venture that developed into a restaurant. Preparations such as Alice’s Beef Pasty make that family connection visible on the menu, alongside Goan and Portuguese influences. Rhea’s work offers a compelling way into a chef profile: through the relationship between what she grew up eating and what she now chooses to put before a dining room.
Pallavi Mithika Menon, NĀVU
A seasonal menu asks a kitchen to keep making decisions. What is available? What deserves attention? Which dish has had its moment? At NĀVU, chef and co-owner Pallavi Mithika Menon works alongside Kanishka Sharma on short, produce-led menus. Their path has included supper clubs, catering and restaurant operations before an independent space of their own. Pallavi is one of the more recognised chefs in this selection, but her work belongs here for the sustained practice it represents. An independent restaurant develops its identity through those repeated decisions—and through diners who return curious about what the kitchen will do next.
Aarohi Sanghavi, Mäki Pâtisserie
There is a great deal of work concealed inside a pastry that takes only minutes to eat. Chef-owner Aarohi Sanghavi brings that discipline to Mäki Pâtisserie in Indiranagar, with French-inspired baking and experience that includes Cheval Blanc Courchevel in the French Alps. Her collaboration on the Japanese cheesecake at Naru Noodle Bar is another glimpse of her practice beyond her own counter. Aarohi’s story opens up the technical world behind the city’s appetite for baked goods: the testing, the precision and the judgement involved in getting texture and flavour to arrive together. It is a useful reminder that pastry chefs deserve as much curiosity as the desserts do.
Monisha Kaur, La Soirée
An independent pastry business carries the experience of the chef who builds it. Monisha Kaur, founder and pastry chef of La Soirée, brings more than twelve years in the culinary profession, including work with Shangri-La, Ritz-Carlton, Marriott and Accor. Her venture gives that hotel-kitchen experience a personal direction through cakes and baked creations. Monisha adds a different career perspective to this selection: the professional who has worked within established hospitality systems and then taken on the decisions of a business of her own. Behind the finished cake is a chef responsible for both its craft and the enterprise that delivers it.
These ten women offer more than ten places to bookmark. Their work gives us ways to read the city through its food: Karnataka’s landscapes, an island childhood, a grandmother’s house, a family recipe, a climate-sensitive dough and the experience carried from one professional kitchen into another.
The next time a friend asks where they should go, recommend the dish. Recommend the place. Then tell them who is behind it.
