When Kanchan Adhikari lost his job in 2019, he announced his plans to start a Nepali restaurant to his Japanese wife Asumi, leading to the biggest fight in their relationship. Asumi’s argument: Kanchan had never cooked professionally. “I told him, ‘You’re a smart guy, you can get another job’,” she recalls. “But he didn’t listen to me.”
Kanchan, who is originally from the Chitwan district of Nepal, moved to Tokyo 16 years ago to study business administration. After being laid off, he taught himself to cook through YouTube tutorials and calls with his mother and grandmother back in Nepal. He also drew on the muscle memory of following his mother’s instructions from outside the kitchen when she couldn’t enter during her period. Thus armed, he began serving home-style Nepali curries for the lunch seating at his friend’s bar. “I had to dive straight into the deep end and cook to protect my family,” Kanchan says. “There was no choice.”
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Emboldened by the results, the couple decided to start their fine dining restaurant, Adi, in August 2020. It was perhaps the worst time to open a restaurant, but they were galvanised by the challenging circumstances of the pandemic. At Adi, Kanchan combines high-quality Japanese produce with the spices and flavours of Nepal. Samosas are made with wild ashitaba from Izu Ōshima (an island off the coast of Honshu) and kinmedai (golden eye snapper) is served with coconut raita and tamarind chutney. Established Tokyo fishmongers typically don’t supply to restaurants without Michelin stars but they sell to Kanchan because they like his respectful South Asian manners. “Old Japanese men love Kanchan,” Asumi confirms.
The couple knows how to play to their strengths. In the early days, shy and unassuming Kanchan led the kitchen while bubbly Asumi ran the service, carrying their infant daughter in a carrier, charming diners and explaining Nepali dishes she didn’t fully understand herself. With the launch of Chiyaba, their tea house that Asumi runs entirely, they now have separate yet connected workplaces. “Earlier, we were two bosses in one kingdom,” Asumi smiles. “Now, we’re finally like business partners.” Despite it all, the Adhikaris’ restaurants are family businesses—emphasis on family.
Cooking together might just be one of our most primal behaviours, dating back to the Neolithic period, which started around 10,000 BC. Even today, the kitchen is a site of community and intimacy, where people come together hoping to find new dimensions to their friendship in a rising loaf of bread or resolve arguments while taking turns to stir a pot of simmering dal. Yet, no two people do it alike: communal cooking is a practice with as many unique variations as there are types of dumplings around the world. For Kusuma and Nicole Juneja, a mother-daughter duo from New Delhi, sharing space in the kitchen is how they healed from the grief of a shared loss. “Like most moms and daughters, we are impatient with each other,” says Nicole. “But after my dad passed away, food became the thing that made us happiest. It shifted the equation from parent-child to friends.”
The Junejas run Mood, a takeaway kitchen that serves the ghar ka khana that Kusuma and her eight siblings grew up eating in Bara Mangwa, a village in the Darjeeling district. While she is busy in the kitchen, Nicole, who previously worked as a PR professional, handles the front-end of the business. Kusuma’s home region is known for the many migrations from neighbouring areas, so Mood produces a mix of Nepali, Tibetan, Bhutanese and Lepcha cuisines. The menu, which changes weekly, features hearty dishes like ema datshi, a spicy Bhutanese stew; khapse, a sweet Tibetan biscuit; and pork with rayo ko saag, a Nepali dish. And momos, of course. Always momos.
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“We’re a big family of foodies and my dad, Vijay, was the biggest one of us all. Like many women from Darjeeling, my mother is feisty and a lot of fun,” Nicole says. “Mom’s mood was central to my day; a good mood meant good food. In Mood, I see my parents: mom’s panache and dad’s love for food.”
On a typical workday, Kusuma and Nicole’s conversation is almost muted as they work side by side with soft music playing in the background. But they come alive while hosting their community of diners during their biannual supper clubs at home. For many daughters, working alongside their mothers can feel like a constant tug of war between fondness and frustration. For Kusuma and Nicole, it’s like staring into a mirror every day. “I was always restless. She used to be calm and collected like her father,” Kusuma explains, looking at her daughter. “Now I’m more laid-back, and she’s turning into me.”
For Akshita Garud and Sabah Sheikh, researching, installing and documenting food cultures together made them realise they had always been kindred spirits. Despite being in each other’s orbit for years—they studied in the same college, were part of the same dance group, had a bunch of mutual friends, one of them had even dated the other’s close friend—it took a pandemic-induced existential dread to bring them together as friends and collaborators. “I just texted Akshita out of the blue saying that I had an idea: ‘Why don’t we start something together that gives us an oulet so that we can feel creatively satisfied?’” Sheikh reminisces.
Until then, creative consultant Garud and event designer Sheikh had never felt like their social or professional lives were accurate representations of who they were. Today, through their creative studio Two Odd, they celebrate the sense of belonging they found in each other after years of feeling adrift. More importantly, they use food to make a statement. Part of their work involves curating dining experiences via tablescapes and culinary installations, where the ingredients help people approach difficult topics around identity, politics and culture with curiosity.
Last October, for their installation called Rotating Histories: Chutneys, Bread and the Taste of Resilience at the What the Food festival in Dubai, Garud and Sheikh designed a tablescape featuring a cornucopia of unmarked bowls on a mirrored glass surface. In these receptacles, they served 13 dips from regions of oppression around the world, to highlight their shared persistence. The vast array of dips—including labneh from the Levant region, mojo from Cuba and the Caribbean, tamarind sauce from Southeast Asia and harissa from Algeria and Tunisia—emphasised how so many diverse cultures and far-flung places continue to suffer yet, so much shared humanity exists between them.
They also use their installations to change the perception of South Asia in the West by presenting food in unconventional formats and contexts. For an event about sleep and capitalism in Berlin, they created variations of sesame, turmeric milk and fruits that encourage better shut-eye: twisted garlands of grapes were draped across grid-like rows of sesame laddoos and chikki alongside mounds of grated coconut and Tajín. “It was a Western-style installation about a very fundamental part of South Asian culture,” says Garud. “I remember one guy from Mumbai came up to me and said, ‘I never thought I’d see til presented like this.’”
The biggest challenge the duo faces is not sourcing rare ingredients or settling on installation topics but doing all of it long-distance: Garud is based in Berlin, Sheikh lives in Dubai. It’s over the barrage of long messages sent at odd hours and video calls across time zones—Garud remembers taking a work call with Sheikh while sitting on a street corner in Mexico—that they discover their thinking is pretty much always aligned. Even their moodboards often have the same references. “Two Odd is a product of something that we could have never fathomed before we met each other. That’s what makes it very special,” Garud says. “It’s like Sabah and I share the same brain.”
This story appears in Vogue India’s September-October 2025 issue, now on stands. Subscribe here.
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