Today felt like one of those days.

I’ve written 8 books. Most of them are baking books. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how I came up with the idea for each of them. I think the idea always finds me. I grew up reading and collecting cookbooks (and I’m very proud of my collection), so I take writing recipes very seriously. With each book, I start at one point. Then everything is tested, and retested, and tested again. From a huge collection of thoughts and ideas, the final list is distilled down. Then the final testing happens. Then we shoot everything. I decided to publish my own cookbooks a few years ago. Design comes next: page layouts, choosing the printing paper, costs of production, the distribution plan, etc, etc. It’s a process, and one that I truly enjoy.

When things got tough during Covid, I decided to write a cookbook about all of it and called it Coming Home. I decided to be extremely vulnerable and write about my thoughts and feelings, and to choose recipes that meant something to me and my career, recipes that made me, me. So I immersed myself in the process. My book before this one had sold out in 48 hours. I was kicked.

The book came out, and for whatever reason, it didn’t perform the way I would have liked it to. Sales numbers didn’t hit targets. I had printed a larger run and was now stuck with all this stock.

Was it too expensive? Were people not vibing with it? Reels had just been introduced, so many people were giving away recipes for free. I felt disheartened and questioned myself and my capabilities. Every time we had a finance call, my team would bring up the “dead stock” of the book, and my heart would break. I decided I was done writing recipe books, because maybe the market had shifted, or maybe I didn’t have anything new to say.

Last week, we celebrated my niece’s 3rd birthday at Pardon Our French. Her best friend Maya’s mom came over and gave me a giant hug. She told me, “My 70-year-old father is your biggest fan. He’s baked every recipe from your book during Covid. You are his biggest celebrity idol.” I blushed. I meet people who tell me my journey has impacted theirs quite often, and I’m very grateful that living my life can help others reach their goals. But a 70-year-old man is not exactly in my demographic. I was curious. I asked her if I could meet him over coffee and get to know him. I assumed he’d been baking from The Big Book of Treats, my bestselling book.

She told me he’d be thrilled, and we set a date to meet. I walked into their home and I could see uncle’s eyes light up. He gave me the warmest hug and told me how happy he was to see me. We sat on the couch in their home and I asked him many questions. He is 76. He retired 15 years ago, and in those 15 years he’s learnt Sanskrit, he’s travelled, he taught himself how to bake. He told me that one is never too old to start learning something new, and that hard work never goes to waste. He worked in the IT industry, at the same company, for 46 years. Forty. Six.

I asked him which book he’d baked from. He looked at me and smiled. “You know I’m your big fan. I buy from Le15 regularly. And in lockdown, I read that you shut your shop. It made me feel bad. One should never shut their business, you should go on for 100 years. So I picked up your book, Coming Home. First I read the whole book. I got to know you better through it. Then I picked my favourite recipes. I was baking every day. My wife was upset because the kitchen was always messy. My kids were asking me to stop because they were gaining weight.” He paused and laughed. “I started buying baking equipment and cookie cutters. Then Covid got over and I stopped baking so much. And I gave the book to my daughter-in-law.”

I had tears in my eyes. To know that the work you do can be a part, so unknowingly, of someone’s life, that’s such a blessing. I thought of all the joy those bakes must have brought him and his family in tough times. I visualised him reading my words in his kitchen while he whipped up delicious goodies. So even though my dead stock remains dead for now, this meeting made me so happy.

I carried a book for him and wrote a message. Meeting you today gave me the hope I needed, I wrote. He read my note and smiled, not knowing that he had just handed me the glimmer I’d been looking for.

When I look back now, the thing I hated most wasn’t the running. It was my own self-judgment. I felt inferior because of things that really shouldn’t have made me feel inferior. Boys would tease me, names were called, and somewhere along the way, all of it stuck.

For years I didn’t want to run. Who was I to think I could? I was still overweight, still huffing and puffing. But older Pooja had more courage, and would throw herself into situations anyway. So a decade ago, I decided I wanted to do the Mumbai Half Marathon.

At 29, I met a running coach in South Bombay. The first time he saw me, he told me I was too fat and wouldn’t be able to run the half marathon in the four months we had. I went home and cried. Then I spoke to a friend who’s a sports scientist, and he told me he’d run with me. All I had to do was show up. So for the next four months, I showed up every day. I could see the coach’s sentiment towards me changing. He became softer. He smiled more. But he was still doubtful.

When I look back at that experience today, I really think I was crazy. Knowing everything I know now, I shouldn’t have run that race. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t have the right information. I wasn’t training or eating to support my running. But I did it anyway. And it was hell, I’ve never experienced pain like that. I never wanted to put my body through that again. I managed to crawl across the finish line, and I knew I’d done it out of stubbornness. It came from a place of ego. And I shouldn’t have. It made me give up running for a whole decade. Every time I started, I’d think of how awful that experience was, and I’d give up.

Cut to 2025, and my first Hyrox. Fifty percent of a Hyrox race is running. And I sucked at it. I did Hyrox a second time and my running hadn’t gotten any better. But somehow, I didn’t hate it as much. I started slow. I mean slow, people walk faster than I ran.

During all of this, I got a call from Nike. Here’s another piece of information: Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s memoir about founding Nike, is one of my favourite books. I read it seven years ago and was so inspired by it that I climbed Mt. Fuji because of Phil’s story (I’ll tell you about that another time). So when Nike called, it felt serendipitous. They asked if I’d like to run in Bangkok, and they’d help me with my running journey. Of course I said yes. And of course I chose to run a half marathon, because I’m crazy like that.

After four months of training, I completed that race. The training changed me. I started sleeping early and waking up early. I pretty much stopped drinking. I said no to social events after 7pm. I stopped going on dates. I just locked in. The race itself was tough, and it made me realise I had a long, long way to go before I got good at this.

I came back to Mumbai and set another goal: Paris. From November 2025 to March 2026, another stretch of training began, more runs, more mileage, more early mornings. I was also opening our café, Pardon Our French, at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever pushed myself harder than I did in those months. My friends were fed up with me. They thought I was doing too much, pushing too hard. But I knew I had to do this.

I finished the Paris race, and I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a run so much in my life. My coach, Brinston Miranda, kept telling me: your training days are when you suffer, and race day is when you enjoy the effort you put in. He was right. I shaved 14 minutes off my time.

I run three to four times a week now, under Brinston’s guidance. My goal is to get lighter and faster over time. Every week he gives me a plan, and every week I think he’s crazy, I could never do that. And every week, I prove myself wrong. It’s an incredible feeling, doing things you never thought you could do.

Someone asked me if running has made me a better chef. My immediate answer was that it’s made me a better person. How? It’s shown me I can do hard things. It’s taught me to show up even when I don’t feel like it. It’s taught me to go through the run and stay present in it. You can’t control outcomes, you can’t jump to the end, you just have to go through it. In the end, it’s you, your mind, and the story you tell yourself.

Am I where I’d like to be? Not yet. But I’m in no hurry. All I have to do is put my shoes on and show up :)

For years I struggled with scaling our cookie business. There was always some problem or the other, but the biggest one was this: all our cookies were made by hand. I spent years trying to find a machine that could do it, but our inclusions, our chocolate chunks and nuts, made it nearly impossible for a dropping machine to handle. After visiting machine after machine, I kind of gave up. We didn’t have the budget for something custom made or imported from abroad.

This trip, I went to France with the France India Foundation, and one of the things we got to experience was a visit to ITER.

For those who don’t know what that is, ITER is being built in the south of France and it is one of the most ambitious science projects on the planet. Thirty three nations are collaborating to build the world’s largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device designed to prove that fusion can work as a large scale, carbon free source of energy, based on the same principle that powers our Sun and stars. That’s the artificial sun bit. They are literally recreating the process that powers stars, here on Earth (!!!)

The scale of it is hard to even process. Seven members, including the EU, US, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and India, signed on to a 35 year agreement just to build and run this thing together. Construction has been underway since 2010 on a 42 hectare site, and the machine itself has an estimated one million components. One single magnet part we saw, called the central solenoid, is 18 metres tall, wound from 6 kilometres of superconducting cable, and each of its six modules weighs over 122 tonnes.

And the goal of all this? To prove fusion can produce a ten fold return on power. 500 MW of output from just 50 MW of input heating power. If it works, it isn’t just for a lab experiment. It’s meant to prove out the physics and engineering that real commercial fusion power plants will be built on one day.

I stood there thinking about the fact that India is one of the seven nations that signed up for this. That we are literally part of the team trying to build a second sun. And then I thought about my cookie dropper.

Sometimes all we can see is our own problem, and how big it looks from where we are standing. For me it was this one machine that didn’t exist for our kind of dough. I had let it become this unsolvable thing in my head, this reason we couldn’t scale. Then you go and see people trying to build an artificial sun, an entirely new energy source for the whole planet, using a plan that takes 35 years and one million parts. And you think, okay. You can figure out how to machine make your cookies, Pooja.

I don’t know yet exactly how we’ll solve it. But I know I’m done treating it like it’s ITER level difficult. It’s a cookie. We’ll figure it out.

I was thinking about it yesterday. I started working out (again) 2 years ago. I was nursing a broken heart and going to the gym was the only thing that made me feel better. And then I got addicted to the way it made me feel. One year went by, and by June of last year, the heart that had healed managed to be broken again (ugh, life). And then the running really started.

I definitely don’t recommend having your heart broken twice to start focusing on yourself. But these are some of the things that have helped me. My journey has been slow and oftentimes frustrating. But I’ve learnt that if you keep showing up, magic happens.

Things that will help you on your fitness journey

1. Start small. I was so used to making tall claims in my head. I’m going to lose 5 kgs this month. And then I obviously wouldn’t, and I’d feel disappointed and give up. So when I started this time around, I had only 1 goal. And that was to move every day.

This meant walks in the morning, or the gym, or playing pickleball. I just kept showing up every day.

2. Start layering. Once you’ve made the habit of movement, start adding little things. For me this looked like, I’ll only eat home food for a few months, or I’ll eat dinner by 7pm.

Once I did that for a few weeks, I added more layers. I started sleeping early and waking up early. I started adding supplements to my diet. It was all about building slowly.

3. Have a goal. Once I was set with movement, and some habits were in place, I started training for Hyrox. It seemed impossible. But I kept showing up, and before I knew it, I had finished two. The goal was just that, to cross the finish line. Then I wanted to run a half marathon. I couldn’t even run 100m without stopping and 21km sounded outrageous. But I knew if I did it slowly, I could build up to it. Happy to report that I finished 2 half marathons in the last 12 months!

4. Get nerdy about the process, and start enjoying it. There’s so much information out there. And sometimes that can feel overwhelming. I do, however, really like deep diving into everything. How my muscles work, how much protein do I need, which supplements do what, how can I get better at deadlifts. I decided to focus my energy on everything but the scale. But my key advice here would be to know what works for you.

I have a traumatic relationship with the weighing scale, and I had to divert my attention from it.

5. Don’t listen to the noise. Every single person has an opinion. How much you should sleep, what you should eat, whether you should take GLP-1, what workout you should do. I decided to trust a few people: my coach, my nutritionist, my physio, and myself.

The journey can be long and frustrating. I’ve cried more times than I’d like to admit. I’ve felt like giving up and just saying “what’s the point of all this.”

But eventually, I just made peace that this process is long and I just have to keep at it. I actually enjoy my routine so much. I look forward to being challenged at the gym. Last week I beat my own running speed and I was delirious. I never thought I could do any of this. I mean, I eat sugar for a living. Calorie counting is hard (I say this as I taste our new dessert menu, which is worth the calories).

Wherever you are on this journey, I hope you give yourself some grace. I hope you have the courage to start no matter how hard it feels. But most importantly, I hope you can truly see yourself and love yourself, no matter the outcome.

Love xx

Pooja

I consider myself a fairly self-aware person. I have spent a lot of time and a lot of money on therapy. I have done the journaling, the reading, the inner-child work, the patterns. I have written about it. I have, on this very Substack, said the words I have done the work.

And I sat there in her office and I thought, when does it get done?

And here’s something we all already kinda know. I don’t think it does.

You become aware of something. You move forward. You stumble back into the same pattern in a new costume. You become aware again. The work is the becoming-aware, not the arriving-anywhere.

This is, I think, why I have started to feel that my business is my biggest spiritual practice.

I know how that sounds. I try to meditate every morning. Most mornings I sit for ten minutes and watch my mind plan a marketing calendar. The cushion version of spirituality is not where the real practice lives for me. The real practice lives in the throws of it. In the middle of the day. In the middle of the mess.

I do not think a spiritual practice is running away to a mountain. I think it is when you are in the middle of the shit, when everything around you is making you want to scream, and you have the awareness, just for a second, to stay with yourself. To not become the storm. To work it through anyway.

The business does not make you serene. It may make you wise. It makes you angry and tired and petty and unreasonable. It makes you cry in your car. It makes you irrational about one person on a thirty-person team. It makes you snap at the people you love most because you have been holding it together for everyone else all day.

But what the business does, if you let it, is hand you the test every single day. (Also, I don’t know why we need so many tests!). Not once. Not in a retreat in Rishikesh. Every shift. Every Sunday morning when the counter is loud. Every WhatsApp at eleven p.m. Every staff member who has not shown up, every customer who has decided your croissant was inferior, every review that misses the point. The test is the same. Can you, for one breath, stay with yourself?

Most days, it is very, very hard.

The Instagram version of a spiritual life is built around removal. Remove the noise. Remove the stress. Remove the people. Sit on a cushion. Drink the tea. The version available to me, the one I actually live in, is the opposite. I cannot remove the noise. The noise is the business. The business is how I pay my team, how I feed my family, how I became someone who could feed other people. I cannot leave.

So the practice has to live inside it. In the next lane, in the parking lot, in the thirty seconds between the call I did not want and the call I have to make. In the moment I notice that I am about to lose it on someone who does not deserve it, and I choose, just barely, to not.

That noticing is the practice. Not the meditation. The noticing.

And here is the part I keep coming back to. The reason the therapist’s question stayed with me. It is the same answer.

The healing does not get done. The practice does not get done. The business does not get done. You do not arrive at a finished version of yourself, calm and complete, with all the patterns resolved and the team running itself and a clean inbox and a clear head. That woman does not exist. I have looked for her. I have, at various points, tried to become her.

What exists is the noticing. The catching yourself, a little earlier each time. The fifteenth meltdown that is slightly smaller than the fourteenth. The Sunday you take off without checking your phone every twenty minutes. The pattern you spot in real time instead of three weeks later in your therapist’s office.

That is the whole practice and that is the whole thing.

It does not get done. You just get a little better at being in it :)

I do not remember the girl across the restaurant. I was twenty-five, terrified, opening a store I was so scared to open and operate, trying to look like I knew what I was doing. The ledge was where I went to not be inside. If I had looked across, I would not have known what I was seeing. A future chef. A future founder. A twenty-year-old in a kitchen uniform who was, at that very moment, using me at home as an argument.

“I used you as an example a lot,” she tells me, sitting across from me now in my new cafe in Fort. “It was always like, all right, but you know, there is someone who’s already doing it. Maybe I could be a Pooja Dhingra one day.”

I do not know what to do with this sentence. She owns her own cafe, in her own city, runs her own kitchen, and she is telling me she once needed me to exist in order to make her case at home.

Her case was simple. She was nine or ten when she decided. Her mother used to run a restaurant in Goa, would cook for five and six hundred people at food festivals in Panjim, would win best dish of the year, would gather the women of her hometown in the kitchen and feed everyone. Priyanka wanted that. The food, the women, the validation of a stranger telling you the thing you made was good.

Her parents said no. She is the second of two daughters in a five-sister mother’s household. The script for girls was already written. In the early 2000s, when she told people she was going to be a chef, they laughed and called her Tarla Dalal, which she took as a compliment.

But there were no women like the one she wanted to be. So when she found me, she used me. The way I had once used the women before me. The way the women before them had used the women before them. It is the oldest currency we have.

She told me she used to finish a shift at Indigo Deli and walk across to my store to buy a box of macarons. Every day. Sea salt, because she was playing it safe. She would take them down to Smokehouse Deli with her friends. That was the comfort. The macaron, the walk across, the small daily ritual of being near the thing she wanted to become.

We talked about the cost of becoming it. We are both members of what we, mid-conversation, named the Crying Club. She has fifteen days of meltdowns a month and fifteen days of recovering from the meltdowns. She has learned to pull over on the next lane and cry where her team cannot see her. She is impatient and learning not to be. She is in year six and still waiting to be invited to the table she has been quietly setting for everyone else.

That is the deal. We make Sundays for everybody else. The whole goal, she tells me, when she was starting out, was to one day take a Sunday off. She has now. That is the win. It sounds small. It is not small.

What I keep thinking, days after the conversation, is about the girl across the road. How she did not know that the woman she was watching on the ledge was also, on the inside, twenty-five and terrified. How being someone’s proof does not require you to feel like proof. How you can be the argument in someone else’s house while losing the argument in your own head.

She said something I am still sitting with. She said, you shouldn’t have any self-doubt. And I wanted to tell her, but did not, that the only reason I could be the example she needed was that I had, at the time, no idea I was being one.

This is the part nobody tells you. You do not get to know when you are someone’s ledge.

You just keep showing up. You keep opening the store. You keep sitting on the railing. And somewhere across the road, a twenty-year-old is taking notes (and if you’re lucky, she feeds you hot honey donuts a decade or so later!)

My relationship with eggless baking is a strange one.

My earliest memory is from my teens, wanting to bake cookies at home. My mom told me it was a Tuesday and eggs were not allowed in our house, so no cookies. Being the Leo that I am, I knew I had to make them some other way. This was wayyyy before we had access to recipes online. So I took my usual cookie recipe, read up some of my mom’s books, and did some experiments. What turned out was a cookie recipe I still use to date.

Later, when I was studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, I remember the day we made a genoise sponge. This sponge is made by whipping eggs over a bain marie and gently folding in the flour. I tried to act smart, raised my hand, and asked the question I came to hate in the years to come. Chef, how can we make this eggless?

The chef looked at me like I was a crazy person, like it was the hardest question he had ever been asked. I was the only Indian student in class and the Paris campus didn’t have many alumni from India back then. He went into a tizz thinking about protein substitutes and all my classmates glared at me. I should’ve just asked my mother, I muttered under my breath and sat down.

When I moved back to India, I HATED it when people asked me to make things eggless. You CANNOT make a macaron without eggs. If you want something eggless, go somewhere else. My mother used to tell me to relax and listen to what my customers wanted, instead of leading from my “French chef” ego.

Over time, and many years, I took it up as a challenge. I started experimenting. I didn’t want to make things eggless just for the sake of it. I wanted them to taste just as good. That’s how my book Can’t Believe It’s Eggless was born.

Making eggless macarons was a challenge too. But hey, not only did I crack the recipe, I also became friends with my pastry idol Pierre Hermé because of it.

Okay, before I go on and on… here’s the story of why all of this came back to me.

I was at POF when a woman walked in with that slightly nervous, slightly excited energy I’ve come to recognise. The energy of someone who has been waiting to walk in for a while.

Her name is Hemika. She’s a civil engineer. She lives in Australia.

She told me she only comes to Mumbai to visit her parents, and every time she does, Le15 is on her list. When her dad retired, she made sure the family booked a restaurant somewhere in Mumbai just so they could order a Le15 cake for thhe celebration. Every time she was at Palladium, she bought “heaps of macarons,” and always asked the staff, just on the off chance, if I happen to be around that day.

I asked her what she missed most about India.

“To be very honest,” she said, “I miss your macarons. Because I don’t eat egg.”

I laughed. She didn’t.

“I’m not even kidding. It’s very hard to find eggless things outside India. And here, it’s a convenience that no one really knows about.”

She told me her favourite is the paan macaron. She told me she stopped eating egg after marriage. Her husband is Jain. The desserts at POF, with the little eggless markers on the menu, felt almost too good to be true. So tempting, she kept saying.

And then I asked her something I’ve started asking people who move far from home. What she had learned about herself after living in Australia that she didn’t know before.

She paused.

“I feel like I can do anything now. When you’re in India, you have your parents, you’re dependent. If anything happens, you know someone’s going to be there. But I went there alone. I moved there alone. I set myself up in a whole new city. I’ve moved cities by myself. So I know I can be independent if I need to be. I feel very strong now.”

I think about that a lot. The version of strength that only reveals itself when you remove the safety net :)

Another story from across the counter at POF <3

I don’t know if you know how Le15 got its name.

I’ll give you the short answer. It’s named after the 15th arrondissement in Paris. Where I lived. Where I discovered who I was. Where I felt at home.

I remember the exact moment the name came to me. I was back in India after my pastry course, deeply missing my time in Paris (and a love that I’d left there, but that’s for the longer version of this story). I was in my home gym, on the treadmill (the irony), and the main thought I had was this. I want people to feel what I felt. I want them to connect with this brand the way I feel about Paris.

And voilà. 16 years later, I think 23-year-old Pooja did alright. :)

But let me tell you about today’s encounter. Which is serendipitous and links right back to my 15th arrondissement.

There’s something about meeting someone who once wrote to you during the hardest moment of your life.

Today, Tanavii walked into the café. She lives in Paris now, in the 15th arrondissement, no less! I smiled when she told me that. Life has a way of folding back on itself like that.

Tanavi studied in Pune, but her heart was always in food. In people. In the sensory experience of bringing the two together. So she moved to Paris to study cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu, worked in restaurants, then did a Master’s in food business management (in French!). She’s now the Operations Manager at a food group in Paris.

Five years in Paris. I asked her if it felt like home.

“It’s always felt like home,” she said. “I found myself there. I felt like I knew the place even before really knowing it.” (Was this girl living in my head?)

We talked about language, and she said something that stayed with me. “Learn the language… not as a formality, but for the joy of it. So you can read the poetry that’s everywhere in Paris. The little ads in the metro. The literature. It teaches you so much about life.”

I know exactly what she means. Paris does that to you.

But here’s the part of our conversation that caught me off guard.

She pulled out a message on Instagram. One she had sent me in 2020, when we announced that the Colaba café was shutting down during COVID.

She told me that she used to come to Le15 with her best friend, her family. That they’d drive in from Pune, sit by the sea, and then come to us. That she’d had photoshoots by our big glass windows with the pink latte and the Marie dessert. That Chef Pablo was part of the memory too (of course ;p).

“When it shut down, I was actually very affected,” she said. “That message was just to tell you that we are with you in whatever you’re feeling. As clients who shared that experience with you, we know how it feels. And we hoped you’d create something as beautiful, which would eventually come along.”

I don’t think I fully registered that message back then. 2020 was a blur of grief and decisions and trying to stay afloat. But today, sitting across from her five years later, with her telling me how much she’s loving the Chikoo Hazelnut, noticing how our flavours have evolved, and how much she thinks I’ve evolved as a chef, it felt truly special.

We don’t always know who’s watching our journey. Who’s rooting for us quietly. Who’s writing us notes that we might only truly receive years later.

I asked her what she’d want to say to whoever reads this.

She thought for a moment.

“Your life will give you opportunities, go for them fearlessly. Trust your intuition. Keep the people who are close to you very close, and be as loyal to them as possible. They’re the ones who’ll keep you afloat when nothing else can. And believe in yourself. You can surprise yourself.”

Tanavi is currently in the middle of her work visa process in France. Fingers crossed, universe. Send her back to her 15th.

Another story from across the counter. Thank you for reading. 🤍

I was 28. Le15 was five years old. I was writing my second cookbook and still very much in the phase of saying yes before I felt ready. I was told I was not only the first Asian but the first female to give this prestigious talk.

The venue was the Stravinski Centre in Montreux, the same space that hosts the Montreux Jazz Festival. I had lived in Montreux before. I used to pass that building almost every day on my way to work. It always felt larger than life, reserved for people who had already “arrived.”

And now, I was about to walk onto that stage.

I remember sitting backstage, my black diary in hand, flipping through pages of scribbled thoughts. I wanted to wing it, but not completely. I wanted to sound natural, but not unprepared. Mostly, I just didn’t want to mess it up.

Right before I went on, I asked one of the organisers who had been on stage the night before. He was walking me through the corridors, speaking into his headset, moving quickly. Then he paused, smiled, and said, “Stevie Wonder.”

I laughed, but my stomach dropped.

There was something surreal about it. That a 28-year-old pastry chef from India would stand on the same stage the very next day.

Just before I walked out, I remember giving the universe a quiet nod. Not a big moment, just a small acknowledgement. Thank you.

It feels strange to think about it now.

How easily we move past these moments. How quickly they get buried under day-to-day problems, targets, things not going right.

But every now and then, a memory like this surfaces. And reminds me that life has been, in its own way, quite incredible :)

The term didn’t even exist when I started posting what is now called “content”.

I started with a blog. Completely unfiltered. Just thoughts from the day.

A 23-year-old me would spend the whole day in the kitchen dealing with the chaos of starting a business. And at the end of it, I would go home, open WordPress, and write.

And suddenly, it felt like I was seen. People left comments. Strangers told me they loved something I wrote. That feeling stayed with me. Then came Instagram.

I fell in love with those sepia-toned photos. But more than that, I’ve always loved documenting things. I was that person who carried a camera everywhere. Even at 12, I was shooting random evenings with friends. On film.

So I started documenting my days. I made friends. Real ones. Most of my friendships in my 20s started on the internet. It was a different time. Simpler. Kinder.

And before I knew it, content could became a career.

It used to feel so easy. I just posted what I liked. Now there were videos, edits, algorithms. Everything kept changing. It started to feel like a lot.

But, the one thing I’ve realised is this - you just have to keep showing up as yourself.

And sometimes, that can be the hardest part.

To be vulnerable in front of people you don’t know. To wonder if they’ll judge you.

And that’s exactly what I spoke to Arjun Vaidya about.

Today’s conversation across the counter isn’t with a stranger. It’s with a friend. And someone I deeply respect.

I’ve been observing his content for a while. And I’ve always wondered.

Why would an investor start making content?

So I asked him

.

“If people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, even our Prime Minister are doing it… there must be something there,” he said.

It wasn’t about vanity. It was about access.

“As an investor, my currency is simple. If I message you, do you reply?”

We think of content as output.
But maybe it’s actually a bridge.

He told me his process is simple. It starts with a thought. A spark. Sometimes just a conversation like this.

He writes every day on his Instagram broadcast channel. Raw. Direct. No overthinking.

“Five minutes. Done.”

He doesn’t care about scale. He cares about depth. A smaller group of people who actually read.

I liked that (hello to everyone reading this! I appreciate you)

I asked him what content has changed for him.

“It’s made me appreciate people who do this.”

People who show up every day. Who put something out into the world.

That kind of consistency.

That kind of vulnerability.

I asked him how he handles criticism.

“Take it in from one ear, process it, and let it go from the other.”

Some feedback helps you get better.
Some of it… isn’t yours to carry.

And then I asked him what he would say to someone who’s scared to put themselves out there.

He didn’t hesitate.

“Just post your first piece of content.”

The worst case is simple.

“You don’t like it. You take it down.”

That’s it.

“The world won’t remember,” he said.

I smiled when he said that.

Because it’s true.

We spend so much time overthinking. Holding back.

And most of the time, no one is paying as much attention as we think they are.

Maybe the real risk isn’t putting yourself out there.

Maybe it’s waiting too long to start.

Another story, from across the counter.

I had gone back to culinary school for an advanced course, still figuring things out, still very much in the middle of becoming.

That’s where I met Ellionr Forje. She was a journalism student. She spent a day with me. Watched me in class, spoke to me, observed the in-between moments I didn’t think anyone noticed.

And then she wrote this.

It was the first time anyone had ever written about me.

And I remember reading it and feeling… seen in a way I didn’t quite understand yet. If you’re wondering why I’m sharing this with you 17 years later - it’s because it remains special to me, and I wanted to share it with you today to remind you to have big plans and goals for yourself. You can do the thing you really really want to do (I know you can!)

Pooja Dhingra is funny, a fact her classmates at Le Cordon Bleu readily point out. Yet she appears entirely oblivious to her own charm and to the ease with which people are drawn to her. Her English carries the lilt of a Bollywood actress, and her beauty is quietly blossoming. Dhingra seems to embody a line from a Britney Spears song, poised delicately between youth and self assured womanhood. Her personality is an intriguing composite of culinary icons. She possesses the assertiveness of Gordon Ramsay, albeit without the expletives. She carries the approachable, almost archetypal appeal associated with Jamie Oliver. She also exudes a certain sass and sensual confidence reminiscent of Nigella Lawson. Though only half Lawson’s age, Dhingra is equally ambitious, with expansive plans and a clear awareness of the obstacles that lie ahead.

Currently completing a Diploma in French Pastry at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, Dhingra intends to return to India to establish her own chain of pastry shops in Mumbai. She is under no illusions about the challenges she will face as a young woman entering a male dominated business landscape. “People don’t take you seriously,” she said, in a soft spoken voice, yet firm in her speech. At times, when reaching out to potential business contacts, the response has been abrupt dismissal; “My father would have to call,” she said.

Raised in a family deeply rooted in the food and catering industry, Dhingra did not always envision herself as a chef. After high school, she briefly pursued law in India, only to realise within a month that it was not her calling. She withdrew from the programme and moved to study at César Ritz Colleges Switzerland. In 2007, she graduated with a Bachelor of International Business in Hotel and Tourism Management, and in 2008 relocated to France to refine her pastry skills. She does not regard her brief foray into law as wasted time. “By trial, that’s how you learn,” she said.

Looking ahead, Dhingra plans to establish a centralised kitchen in Mumbai, from which pastries will be distributed to her various outlets. She has already conceptualised her brand. “French technique, Indian flavour,” she said, and continues, “the key will be to find a common ground, you have to tweak the recipes to suit the ingredients available in India, and the temperature.”

Her menu will also feature chocolate pralines, inspired by her internship with chocolatier JEAN CHARLES ROCHOUX during her year in Paris. Her venture will be named Le 15 Patisserie Pvt. Ltd., after the arrondissement where she lived and spent most of her time. Catherine Baschet, development manager at Le Cordon Bleu, speaks with enthusiasm about Dhingra’s entrepreneurial drive at such a young age. “She’s very focused and determined at the age of 23,” she said. Having already collaborated with Dhingra on a workshop project in India, Baschet anticipates further partnerships. Dhingra represents a generation of highly educated young women steadily reshaping India’s business landscape. Despite this, she remains modest about her achievements. “I don’t think I am an inspiration yet. But, hopefully one day I could be.” she said.

The last few years have left me a bit jaded. Some kind of fear set in where if something good happened, there would be a feeling of impending doom. Both personally and professionally. And that’s strange to me. Usually I’m the most optimistic person in the room. But you grow up, and life hands you some hard lessons and some sour sour lemons. The past 10 months have been an unlearning of sorts. Of doing things. Of finding myself. Of letting go of fear. Of remembering that there’s no lemon so sour that you can’t make something resembling lemonade ;p

But anyway, here is today’s POF story!

I met Pratick on a quiet day at the café.
The kind of day where people linger a little longer. Where conversations stretch. Where you have the time to ask one more question.

I asked him what he did.

He told me he runs a few businesses. One in Australia, he’s from Sydney, in the events space. And he’s hoping to start something in India soon. An Airbnb, maybe.

But what I really wanted to know was his Bombay story.

Because everyone has one.

His starts with a local train.

He was 20. New to the city. Didn’t know how to buy a ticket. Walked straight into first class like he belonged there. Got caught. Had to bribe the ticket collector, his first bribe ever.

He laughed when he said it.

Then he got off at Churchgate, met his cousin, and spent the day going from café to café.

“That was my first real experience of Bombay,” he said. “And it was great.”

There’s something about Bombay that does that to you.
It throws you in before you’re ready. And somehow, you still find your way through it.

He comes back often now. As much as he can. Almost like the city has a way of pulling him back in.

He remembered our Colaba space too.

Not what he ate, but how it felt.
The natural light. The openness. Sitting at a corner table, feeling comfortable. Watching everything unfold.

“I remember the vibe,” he said. “It was on my bucket list.”

I always find that interesting. What people remember.
Not the specifics. Just the feeling.

That’s one of my favourite quotes from Maya Angelou “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” (A lot of what I build, starts from this. But i’ll explain that in a later post)

I asked him what he thought of this space.

“I love it. It’s intimate,” he smiled.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, I asked him what he’s learnt about himself from travelling so much.

He didn’t pause.

“You are better than you think you are.”

He said it twice.

“You are better than you think you are… but if you think you’re the best, you probably need a reality check.”

I laughed and asked him to explain.

He told me he constantly pushes himself out of his comfort zone.
To the point where it feels uncomfortable. Sometimes overwhelming.

But every time, he figures it out.

And every time, he comes out stronger. Wiser.

“That’s how you learn,” he said. “You don’t stop at something just because it scares you.”

“BUT if you think you’re the best, there’s some kind of arrogance there. Because there’s always something more to learn.” He signed off with a smile.

Can’t wait to bring you another story from across the counter :)

Yes, of course, because that means we’ll hit our sales targets. But the real reason is that I love people. And I love stories.

When I worked in housekeeping at a Swiss hotel, I was always trying to decipher the stories rooms told me. How people left their things. How messy some rooms were — were their lives as messy? Sometimes, guests would leave us notes with a tip. Something as simple as “Merci Housekeeping” and a 5 Euro note. It would make me so happy.

I started doing it myself. Every hotel I stay at, I leave a thank you note and a small tip. (Highly recommend doing the same - ufff the joy you’ll bring to someone’s day.)

Anyway, getting back to my point.

I meet so many interesting people every day.

Today, a woman walked in and said hello. She told me she had been following our journey since day one. She used to be a regular at our Bandra store. Seven years ago, she moved away from India, but she still comes back every year.

Sue Cope is a sommelier and a fundraiser. She remembers our red velvet cupcakes and orange chocolate macarons fondly. But more than that, she remembers a life she built here.

When I asked her what she misses most about India, she didn’t hesitate.

“It’s the people and the food,” she said. “I miss my friends. I miss the vibe in Bandra. Even though it’s a big city, everyone knows everyone. I miss the simple things — walking to the bakery in the morning, buying bananas from the same vendor every day. The coconut wala would come and say hi every morning. London is not that friendly, you know.”

I couldn’t help but smile.

That’s exactly how I felt when I left Paris. My boulangerie. My walk to the metro every morning. The tabac seller who knew my name.

I asked her what she’s learnt about life since moving back to the UK.

She paused for a moment, then smiled.

“Home isn’t necessarily where you’re born.”

Funny how much a cup of coffee can hold. Can’t wait to bring you another story from across the counter :)

Welcome to my newsletter. I hope I’m doing this right?! 

I don’t know how you found this, but WELCOME :) I started my journey online with a blog nearly 11 years ago (I feel OLD) and writing a newsletter just feels like life has come full circle. Through the years I’ve always managed to find my voice through various platforms - whether word press, Facebook, Instagram, twitter or snap chat but everything feels too crowded nowadays and everything feels like it will get lost. I wanted to find deeper meaning and say things that truly mattered and so I’m happy you’re here. I’m hoping we can build a space to get to know each other better, have real conversations - and share recipes and ideas!

I don’t think I’ve truly processed what 2020 was like or what it taught me. I look back at it today and I feel.... proud. Imposter syndrome is a strange thing. I think for so many years I was just always on and on autopilot that I never really gave myself credit for anything I did. 2020 put me in a strange place. But the greatest lesson it taught me is that I can rely on myself.  The sadness of losing a big part of my business lingers (I haven’t been able to go to Colaba yet), but there’s also hope.  I got to see and do so many things that  I’ve only read about in management books or heard in podcasts. Words that I knew the meaning of before last year but never had any emotions connected to. Words like ‘downsizing’ that I’ve read a million times, but to understand what it truly feels like in my gut and how sad it made me - was a lesson of 2020. Earlier when I heard words like ‘pivot’,I only had the voice of Ross in my head screaming it (If you’ve ever watched Friends, I hope you got that reference). But to truly be given a second chance to start all over again - with all the lessons of 10 years - I consider that to be a blessing in disguise. 

The thing with blessings in disguise is that they are awfully painful when they occur. So many times I’ve been heartbroken because a boy I liked didn’t like me back and then much later I think PHEW dodged a giant bullet. But at the time the pain is real, the sadness is real, the process of processing everything crushes you. April and May of 2020 was that for me. I sat all alone in a corner of my bedroom each night with barely no hope. Nothing seemed like it would work out. I would cry myself to sleep on most days. Imagine working SO hard for SO long and suddenly absolutely nothing is in your control. The one song that kept playing over and over in my head was ‘Shake it Out’ by Florence & The Machine. I kept repeating to myself - it’s always darkest before the dawn, it’s always darkest before the dawn. And it was. But then dawn came. And here we are :) 

I don’t know why you’re here or how you found me. But I’m happy you did. I’m going to try and be as real as I can about my journey, my head and my heart. I don’t really know how these newsletters will be but I promise to try and be regular with them and tell you all the really cool things I learn each week. 

But as I sign out, here’s my dad’s special chai recipe. This chai saw me through some rough days and became an integral part of my quarantine life.  I hope you enjoy it! 

Love, 

Pooja 

My Dad’s Lemongrass Chai Recipe

Makes 3 cups 

3 cups water

½ cup milk 

½ inch ginger 

3-4 lemongrass stems 

3 spoons Red Label Chai patti 

3 tsps sugar 

Method

Cut the lemon grass into small strips and boil with the water for 5 mins 

Grate the ginger in the water

Continue boiling for 2-3 minutes 

Add the milk and boil for another 2 mins 

Add your chai patti 

Stir and let this boil till it gets a nice deep brown colour

Strain and enjoy!