Split chins.Cut fingers. Toxic boardrooms. Idyllic days on the Mediterranean. Who would guess we are talking not about the latest potboiler, but chef Rahul Akerkar’s memoir, Biting Off More Than I Can Chew. This isn’t your typical cooking career story—it focuses on the choices he made, like leaving a PhD in biochemistry, opening Mumbai’s most talked-about restaurant in the 1990s, and then stepping away in 2015 when he realised his investors weren’t respecting his business principles, and the ups and downs that followed.
These days, Akerkar, 65, helms the restaurants Ode and Waarsa as the creative and culinary director for Aditya Birla New Age Hospitality. Most recently, for the group, he opened Flint, an all-day restaurant with executive chef Jaydeep Mukherjee.
Akerkar knows what he created. When Indigo opened in 1999 in an old bungalow in Colaba, it seemed different from any other standalone restaurant in the country. It also moved fine dining out of five-star hotels and taught a new, young, post-liberalised generation of urban Indians what restaurants can be, as markers of lifestyle, taste, and identity. Akerkar drew on his German-Jewish and Maharashtrian roots, along with his Indian-American upbringing (he studied in the US, and visited his grandparents there often), to introduce a European-influenced, ingredient-driven cuisine, served with serious wine and polished, but unstuffy service. He went on to create brands such as Indigo Deli, Neel at Tote on The Turf, and Qualia.
The memoir documents a time in F&B hospitality that now feels like history, when restaurants were built on word-of-mouth and real hospitality, long before they became the backdrop for Instagram.
The narrative follows a loose timeline, where Akerkar shares stories in a light, sometimes offhand way. In one, while catering for a Marwari wedding, he washed cumin off jeera aloo and added fresh basil when guests couldn’t get enough of his Italian menu compared to the desi food from the Marwari caterer.
When a Colaba restaurateur started poaching his bar staff every weekend, Akerkar invited him to lunch at Indigo and said nothing during the meal. He then walked him over to the bar where the team was lined up. “Please take whoever you want right now,” he said.
His restraint is most deliberate in the section about 26/11. Indigo was just a block from the Leopold Café. Akerkar describes his team feeding guests stuck at the restaurant through the night, while he is confined to his home, watching the Taj dome burn on TV, feeling helpless. Later, he learned that Pakistani-American mastermind of the plot David Headley’s Indigo Deli credit card receipts had, in a way, by accident, helped investigators track the attackers. Akerkar narrates this chapter plainly, without being dramatic.
Biting Off More Than I Can Chew belongs alongside memoirs likeYes, Chefby Marcus Samuelsson andBlood, Bones & Butterby Gabrielle Hamilton, which use a career in food to explore identity, work and its rigour, as well as ambition and its many costs. But Akerkar’s book brings something uniquely Indian and uniquely Bombay, rooted in a city that was changing its food and identity after liberalisation. Where it differs is in the texture of its honesty. Samuelsson and Hamilton dig deep; Akerkar observes and reflects. It's a different kind of candour, not a lesser one.
At the end of each chapter, there’s a recipe or two, sometimes more. For those who have eaten at Akerkar’s restaurants, most of these—like Indigo’s lobster bisque, and Indigo Deli’s roast mushroom sandwich—are recognisable. This reminds us that, no matter what else is going on, a chef’s real work is about the food. Investors, critics, awards, and chaos are just the weather around the central fact of feeding people.
In an interview with Lounge, Akerkar talks more about the book. Edited excerpts.
You’ve said this book was a long time coming. How and when did it actually begin?
I was looking to do a book back in the Indigo days. Then just before covid-19, I was in New York, met Perry Garfinkel, a friend of my mom’s. I wanted him to help me write it. We were sitting in a restaurant, talking about Indigo. These people at the next table came over and said, “Are you Rahul from Indigo in Bombay? That’s our favourite restaurant.” You couldn't have staged it! Perry just looked at me and said, “Okay, done. I’ll do your book.” It took about six years, on and off.
What’s changed the most in the way we cook and eat today?
Back then, the style of eating was very structured—starch, vegetable, protein, sauce. That’s pretty much how all our plates were at Indigo. Today, it’s much more fluid. And there’s access now—to ingredients, techniques, information. You can be cooking and looking something up at the same time. But what you don’t get is how to balance taste. And that gap shows. You can see it on the plate—the idea is there, the technique is there, but it doesn’t come together. That only comes from experience.
What do you think about today’s restaurant reviews and critics?
Everyone is a critic today, everyone wants to be an influencer, and I think restaurateurs are pandering to them. I don’t think much about it. Appeasing that has meant that restaurant and menu design, cuisine offering are now done with it in mind. We’ve had cases where if they’re not called to the opening of a restaurant, they will put up ridiculous statements out of spite. I remember, back in the day, when we opened Indigo Deli in Delhi, our PR team told us that there was one of several influencers we were recommended to get. She required to be picked up from her home, brought to the restaurant and then dropped back home after. I don’t think much about it. Sadly, every time you open a new restaurant though, you are forced to do this. I get sheltered by my team who know that I have little patience with these inexperienced influencers, and so I am kept away from them, because I lose it very easily.
In the early 90s we had an all-India chef’s conference, and they had a very famous English food critic who wrote for The Times. I asked him at the time, “What gives you the right to give someone a negative food review and in so doing, kill or harm their business?” He said something very interesting, something that stayed with me. He said, “As a critic you have a responsibility. If it’s a place that’s not purporting to be something fancy and is just a simple cafe or a run-of-the-mill average place, if that’s the kind of food they are doing… rather than say something negative about them, I just won’t review them, for precisely this reason. It’s not fair for me to critique them, because they have their clientele. They have an undiscerning clientele that goes to them, eats their food, and keeps them in business.” Contrast that to today's influencers who are trying to boost their followers, and do that by being sensationalist. People feel like they get more interest by being negative, and tearing someone apart.
Was there anything you hesitated to include?
Yes. A lot. There were probably another hundred pages. Some of it was cut for length, but a lot was removed for legal reasons—stories about the underbelly of the industry. I’m still working in this industry, in this city. So I have to be careful.
What do you want people to feel when they read this book?
To me, so much (in my life) was just happenstance. The book is, in a way, meant to help people who are curious about the industry—how you do things without really knowing what you’re doing or why.
Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi (@roshnibajajsanghvi) writes on food, travel, and design.