Women’s Day 2026: Women rewriting the restaurant script

On a busy evening at a restaurant, the room carries a familiar rhythm. Orders called out. Plates lifted from the pass. The low hum of conversation from the dining room drifting into the kitchen. Someone wipes down a counter. Someone else tastes a sauce and nods.

Restaurants are built on movement and pressure. For decades that pressure came with an unwritten script about who held authority. The professional kitchen has long been framed as a masculine arena. Hot, hierarchical and relentless. The mythology has endured across continents, reinforced by television chefs and industry lore.

Yet the irony runs deep.

For generations across India, cooking belonged to women at home. In restaurants, leadership rarely did. Studies and industry surveys still reveal how persistent the imbalance remains. Women account for roughly 10 to 15 per cent of professional chefs in India, even though they enter culinary schools in far greater numbers. That disparity has shaped the culture of kitchens for years.

But something is shifting. For International Women’s Day, we spoke to 14 women across India’s hospitality industry about leadership, resilience and the realities of building restaurants in a demanding, fast-moving sector.

Across India’s restaurant landscape, a growing group of women are stepping into positions of creative and operational authority. They are founding restaurants, building hospitality companies, designing menus, running bar programmes and reshaping how teams function behind the scenes. 

Among them are Chef Swati Harsha, Sanskriti Gupta, Chef Jasleen Marwah, Ishaa Jogani Shah, Karrena Bulchandani, Nikita Harisinghani, Chef Anuradha Joshi Medhora, Mickee Tuljapurkar, Sasha Tasgaonkar, Divashri Sinha, Rachel Goenka, Chef Beena Noronha, Niketa Sharma, Deepa Desai and Priyanka Jain.

Their restaurants vary widely in style and scale. Some operate neighbourhood cafés and bars. Others oversee restaurant groups expanding across cities. Together they represent a change in how hospitality leadership is imagined.

The shift begins with a simple premise.

The room around the plate

For the founder behind the café Blondie, Natasha Hemani, the turning point came while building the space itself. “At some point I realised I wasn’t just interested in what was on the plate,” Hemani says. “I was interested in the entire world around it. The design of the room, the music, the people it attracts, the way someone feels when they walk in.”

Restaurants, she realised, have the power to shape culture.

“I didn’t want to simply operate within a system that already existed,” she says. “I wanted to create a space that reflected my own point of view.”

The idea resonates across many of the women leading restaurants today.

Sanskriti Gupta, co-founder of Fiori, remembers how the restaurant gradually became personal. “As the space started taking shape, I found myself caring deeply about every detail,” she says. “The lighting, the tone of the room, the way the menu reads, the mood at different times of day.”

Eventually the responsibility became clear. “I didn’t just want to be involved,” she says. “I wanted to protect that feeling.”

At Mokai, Karrena Bulchandani experienced a similar realisation while watching regular guests return week after week. “You start recognising people,” she says. “You see them bring friends, celebrate birthdays, sit in the same corner.” The restaurant stops feeling like a business. “It becomes a community.”

Finding authority in an unlikely place

For Chef Swati Harsha, head chef at HyLo, the path into the kitchen began far away from hospitality. “My entry into the industry was very atypical,” she says. Before becoming a chef, Harsha worked in advertising and banking. Travel across India eventually shaped a different ambition.

“My belief was to bring Indian food, not Indian restaurant food, to the fore,” she says.

The distinction lies in authenticity rather than theatre.

Harsha’s menus draw from regional flavours encountered during those travels. Dishes emerge from memory and observation rather than rigid tradition. It is a philosophy shared by many chefs redefining Indian dining today. Across the country, women are shaping food narratives rooted in cultural memory while introducing new forms of creativity. 

Unlearning the old language of leadership

For several women in the industry, leadership required abandoning the behaviours they once believed were necessary. Restaurant kitchens have long rewarded aggression. Authority often appeared through raised voices and rigid hierarchy.

Nikita Harisinghani, co-founder of Chrome Asia Hospitality, admits she once assumed that style was unavoidable. “In high-pressure environments, authority is often equated with dominance,” she says. “For a while I thought I had to mirror that energy to be taken seriously.”

Experience altered that assumption.

“Clarity commands far more respect than volume,” she says.

Chef Anuradha Joshi Medhora, co-founder of The Silver Train, arrived at a similar conclusion after years in professional kitchens. “Intensity often gets mistaken for aggression,” she says. “And volume gets mistaken for authority.”

The distinction matters. “Fear might produce compliance for a short time,” she says. “It doesn’t produce pride.”

Restaurants depend on pride. Without it, service becomes mechanical and the rhythm of the kitchen collapses.

Learning to stand firm

While many leaders softened the tone of their kitchens, they also learned that authority sometimes required firmness.

When Chef Jasleen Marwah, founder of Folk, entered professional kitchens she noticed the reaction her presence sometimes provoked.

“There is always that moment when you walk into a kitchen and people are surprised,” she says. Early in her career she responded with patience. Later she recognised the limits of that approach.

“Leadership requires clarity,” she says. “You have to stand your ground.”

For Sasha Tasgaonkar, founder of the cocktail bar Houdini, leadership evolved through observation. “At first I thought leadership meant authority,” she says. Over time she realised that how a leader behaves shapes the entire culture of a restaurant.

“Conduct, communication and respect influence the room far more than titles.”

Building Teams Instead of Hierarchies

As their businesses expanded, many of these founders reached the same realisation. Control is not leadership.

Mickee Tuljapurkar, co-founder of La Loca Maria and La Panthera, remembers trying to oversee every aspect of the restaurant in its early days. “That instinct eventually becomes unsustainable,” she says. Restaurants depend on collaboration. “You have to trust the people around you.”

The same lesson emerged for Priyanka Jain, co-founder and director of Prasuk Jain Hospitality, whose ventures include large experiential venues such as Game Palacio.

“I used to think I had to be involved in everything,” she says. “Then you realise leadership lies in building teams that can operate without you.”

That moment of independence becomes a milestone.

For Divashri Sinha, founder of Bar SoGo in Goa, the definition of success arrived in a simple moment. “When the bar runs smoothly while I’m at my daughter’s school event,” she says, “that feels like leadership.”

Conviction as a business strategy

Running a restaurant requires constant negotiation with customers, investors and trends. Several of these founders describe learning when to refuse compromise. For Ishaa Jogani Shah, founder of Tóa 66, the line appears in the menu.

“I won’t replace tofu with paneer just to make something more familiar,” she says.

Her restaurant’s identity rests on authenticity. Altering the menu for convenience weakens that identity. Across a larger hospitality portfolio, Niketa Sharma, managing director of Keish Hospitality, approaches the same principle through design.

Restaurants such as Blah BKC and Vivi Italian aim to deliver immersive experiences where food, interiors and service operate together. Consistency, she says, builds trust.

Claiming Space

For restaurateur Rachel Goenka, founder and CEO of TCSC Hospitality, leadership has often meant learning how to occupy space without hesitation. Running a group that includes restaurants such as The Sassy Spoon and House of Mandarin placed her in rooms where decisions carried financial and creative weight.

“Being a restaurateur demanded the most courage because it required visibility,” she says. “In the kitchen or on the page, the work speaks. But as a restaurateur you are the vision, the risk and the accountability.”

That visibility required a shift in how she approached authority. Early on, Goenka realised that warmth and collaboration were sometimes mistaken for hesitation. “I had to choose clarity over comfort,” she says. “I stopped cushioning decisions or over-explaining standards. Not everyone loved it, but the room shifted.”

Over time, she began to see authority less as something granted by others and more as something built through consistency.

“Authority doesn’t need to be borrowed,” she says. “It can be built. On the plate it comes from intention. In restaurants it comes from coherence.”

For many women entering hospitality leadership today, that clarity can be transformative. It removes the need to wait for permission. “When you lead with taste, instinct and emotional intelligence,” Goenka says, “authority follows naturally.”

The personal cost of reinvention

Hospitality leadership often demands resilience. Few stories capture that reality more clearly than Deepa Desai, co-founder of Vanilla Beans. Before entering the restaurant world she worked in corporate marketing. Balancing professional expectations with raising a newborn child became impossible.

She eventually resigned. “The day I walked out,” she says, “something settled in me.” Years later she began baking from home, slowly building a business of her own. “I realised ambition doesn’t expire.”

Turning the old phrase around

For generations, the phrase appeared almost as a taunt. Women belong in the kitchen.

The line carried a long cultural history. It suggested domestic labour rather than professional authority. Cooking was expected, yet rarely celebrated when women did it.

The restaurant industry amplified that contradiction. Women prepared meals at home across the country. Professional kitchens remained overwhelmingly male. Today that paradox is beginning to unravel. In cities and coastal towns, in bakeries, bars and fine-dining restaurants, women are building spaces that reflect their own ideas of hospitality. They are designing menus, training teams, negotiating leases, raising capital and shaping the culture of the rooms they run.

The kitchen still belongs to them. But the meaning has changed. It no longer refers to a private domestic space hidden behind the walls of a home. It refers to the centre of a restaurant on a busy evening. The pass glowing with heat. Orders moving across the counter. A team working in rhythm. And at the centre of that rhythm, increasingly, a woman calling the service.

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