Taking on the world with food and flavours

A great chef once said that a recipe, no matter how good, is without a soul. It is the job of the chef to give it a soul. If there’s ever a definition for cooking, it would be how Wolfgang Puck described it; “Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors – it’s how you combine them that set you apart”. This is the fine line between a good chef and a great one, the ability to give life to otherwise mundane and commonplace recipes while curating new and exciting ones.

The culinary world is one that requires tact, patience, and extraordinary patience, an eye for detail, innovation, flexibility, and discipline. It is no wonder that only a handful can be judged to have seen it all and attained feats that many others can only dream of. For Mahendra Khairiya, Founder and Director of Culinary Mantra – a global culinary consultancy company – cooking opens one up to a whole new world of possibilities. If anyone says “Chef Khairiya” – as he is fondly called – has seen it all, they won’t be wrong, but Khairiya believes he’s just beginning.

After graduating from Delhi University and completing a Hotel Management Programme at the Culinary Institute of Hotel and Tourism Management Dehradun, he dived right into the highly competitive culinary world. His diligence and talent was visible to the eye and pleasant to taste buds, hence earning him his first big job as an Executive Chef at the young age of 23. Today in his early 40s, this exemplary chef and connoisseur has already plied his craft in some of India’s biggest hospitality brands, including Marriott, Hyatt, Taj Group, Jaypee, Sarovar, and so on.