Hyderabad is a city that feeds people generously, emotionally, and almost ceremoniously. From overflowing wedding feasts and late-night biryani rituals to homes where an extra guest is never counted as extra, food here has always meant far more than just eating. And yet, somewhere between gated communities, endless workdays, food delivery apps, and screens that never switch off, the city began to eat alone. Families became smaller, friendships became harder to hold on to, and social life slowly slipped into group chats and scrolling. The table was still there, but the circle around it had begun to shrink.
But inside homes, behind secret doors, in borrowed cafés and living rooms, the spaces slowly turned into sanctuaries, and soon the circle started filling up again. Supper clubs arrived in Hyderabad not with noise or spectacle, but as a much-needed correction.
For Jungshi Imti, the founder of A Third Space Project, this need for correction came from a very personal place. He moved to Hyderabad four years ago for his Master’s degree, and while campus life initially offered a feeling of belonging, that comfort faded once work began. “On campus, everything felt easy because you’re surrounded by people who are like you,” he explains. “Once that ends, it suddenly becomes really hard to connect.” In the city, he found himself constantly being seen but rarely truly understood. “People were more interested in me as a Northeastern person than as just me,” he shares. “It always stopped at my culture, my food, my accent.”
What Jungshi missed wasn’t attention but intimacy, the kind that doesn’t require explanation. Back home, friendships had always been woven into everyday life. People showed up unannounced. Friends cooked together. The kitchen was where everything happened. In Hyderabad, that ease felt distant and, at times, even unattainable. “Everyone is in their first job, everyone is struggling, and even having a proper kitchen feels expensive,” he admits. For nearly two years, he carried that emptiness until he returned to the one thing that always made sense to him — cooking. Every recipe Jungshi makes comes from his grandmother. “I grew up with her, I took care of her, and everything I know comes from her,” he explains.
One evening, Jungshi posted an Instagram story asking if anyone would like to come over for a supper club. Five people replied. Only one showed up. “Thankfully, my friends were visiting that day, or it would have been heartbreaking,” he laughs. Slowly, the table grew. He called it A Third Space Project because that was what he wanted to build — a space that wasn’t home and wasn’t work, but something in between, where people could arrive without expectation and simply be.
His food is unmistakeably Naga, ingredients travel from home because Hyderabad’s produce doesn’t always behave the way memory demands. “What people eat is what I show them,” he shares. “And what I show them is who I am.”
Across the city, connection unfolds in another form through Trishala Kamath and Tanusha Bajaj’s The Secret Supper Club, which began as a joke born out of dining fatigue. “It was always the same thing — dinner, drinks, repeat,” Trishala shares. “So we joked, what if the menu was a secret, the location was a secret, and we took people’s phones away?” What started as a playful idea turned into one of Hyderabad’s most intriguing social experiences.
Details are sent a day before so the guests are in the know. At the event, they surrender their phones at the door and sit beside strangers they would never have chosen otherwise. Conversations unfold through shared discomfort and unexpected laughter. “People don’t really know how to make friends anymore,” Trishala explains. “When the phone goes away, something unlocks.”
Their editions stretch far beyond the expected — a Japanese-themed dinner with a sake workshop led by a guest from Japan, a Friends Thanksgiving re-created with trivia, the foosball table, and the cheesecake-eating challenge. Guided activities are stitched into the evening subtly that guests don’t realise they’re being eased into connection. What surprises Tanusha is not how people behave at the start, but how hard it becomes for them to leave. Some end up at movies together, some meet again the same week, and some carry the warmth of the night back into their routines.
At Bhojanam & Banter, connection arrives through memory. For Krishna Kireeti Kakarla and Kavya Yenigalla, food has never been separate from life. “Our grandparents were farmers, and our parents still grow vegetables in the backyard,” Krishna shares. Watching Telugu restaurants thrive in the city without Telugu hands in the kitchen unsettled him deeply. “Food has an essence that only comes when you’ve grown up with it,” he explains.
Their first gathering was an Onam sadhya served on banana leaves with matka water and vegetables brought straight from their village. “Sustainability wasn’t a theme for us,” Krishna admits. “It was just normal.” Their menus follow the calendar of the soil — vegetables in winter, when they’re available.
On the idea of balancing a space of one’s own with people who are essentially strangers, Krishna says, “Coming from a joint family, guests kept pouring in. When I was a child, there were always 20 to 30 people staying and visiting our home.Krishna and Kavya carry the same spirit in their house in Hyderabad.“I know it’s strange letting other people who we don’t know come in. But we’ve never felt that ‘strangeness’, and in my opinion, that’s the whole point of building intimacy. So, we always welcome people with a smile,” Krishna adds.
Then there is Karthikeya Konda, whose relationship with food was shaped not by nostalgia but by survival. He learned to cook because he had to and fell in love with it along the way. After working abroad, he returned to Hyderabad with curiosity rather than sentiment.
Along with Amrutha Katikaneni, The Culinary Affair became his playground for ideas — Korean one month, Mexican the next, Mediterranean after that. He cooks for just six people at a time, running a menu for a month before moving on.
A glimpse of the food experiments you can find at The Culinary Affair run from a homey and comforting Mango shrikhand cheesecake where every flavour reminds you of home to a palate that is more towards global fusion. “When I was in the UK, we would have a lot of guacamole for breakfast back at the restaurant where I worked. So when we were coming up with a Mexican menu, we experimented with a very Telangana dish called appalu. They are basically like mini papads (how we have in papdi chaat), but bigger in size. And we topped guacamole on that,” Karthikeya says. His inspiration stems from what he sees and eats everyday with elements from his past experiences.
For Darani Janarthanan of The Social Brew, the starting point was not food at all, but loneliness. “Once you’re out of college, it becomes so awkward to make friends,” she explains. “You can’t just go up to someone and ask, ‘Do you want to be friends?’” The Social Brew brings together people from different professions and backgrounds, placing designers next to doctors and filmmakers next to software engineers. “It changes how people see each other,” she shares. Her gatherings often centre around themes — journaling, fitness, even a session for cat lovers with a cat behaviourist. Once, she watched a gathering unfold without any moderation at all. “That’s why this exists,” Darani adds.
What makes these gatherings powerful is how instinctively they all respond to the same urban hunger. In a city that is growing faster than it can pause, these tables offer a kind of permission to exist and to remember what it feels like to share space without distraction.
What Hyderabad is experiencing through its supper clubs is a cultural shift shaped by digital fatigue, shrinking friendships, and the slow disappearance of spaces where people once gathered without agenda. They are built on memory, on repetition, on the comfort of recognising faces, and on the ease of staying a little longer than planned. Hyderabad is not learning how to eat again, it is remembering how to sit with each other.
Email: anshula.u@newindianexpress.com
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