How gourmet meals are elevating the movie-going experience
Cinemas are serving food tailored to the films on show in an effort to make movies immersive
On an average weekend in the National Capital Region (NCR), there are heritage walks and nature trails early in the morning; poetry readings and book club meetings in the day; tastings galore—from coffee and chocolates to wines and whiskies—to fill the evenings, and some fake weddings too. As these endless options for communal experiences vie for our attention (and money), there’s one pastime that has remained relatively unchanged: The movie.
Most halls have stuck with the same old recipe of overpriced snacks and carbonated drinks. So, when I came across a social media ad for a “gourmet cinema experience", I was intrigued. The films on offer weren’t new but the kind you didn’t mind rewatching. The price was steep— ₹3,000 per person—but it was a five-course meal inspired by the movie. It was an experience served by the Sunset Cinema Club (SCC), which currently runs events in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Amritsar, Goa, Dehradun, and Chandigarh. The nine-year-old company started with an open-air screening of Pulp Fiction in Connaught Place in 2016. The experiment was such a hit—with casual bean-bag seating and snacks—that it led to a three-day film festival in Chanakyapuri, Delhi, with food trucks, cocktails and artists in 2017.
After hosting 200,000 people over eight years—in screenings at a variety of venues like malls, rooftops, amphitheatres, microbreweries, and drive-in spaces—SCC cut to the gourmet cinema experience in June. Founders Sahil Kapoor and Sanchit Gupta, batchmates in engineering college, curate the film menus with a creative team and tweak it in collaboration with each host partner. “You should be able to feel the movie through your palate," says Kapoor, a Delhi-based entrepreneur who got the idea for SCC after experiencing an array of nightlife offerings in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. He was engaged in his family business until he took the leap with co-founder Gupta, who held a job in a leading NBFC.
Movie-hall fare in India has improved lately, with cinema chains collaborating with celebrity chefs to pepper their menus with razzmatazz. INOX (now PVR INOX) famously launched a healthy menu curated by chef Vicky Ratnani in 2017. While it sounds like a great idea in theory, navigating a bowl of khichdi in the dark just doesn’t feel right. Another long-term collaboration—PVR Cinemas with chef Sarah Todd—yielded an expanded menu with global influences. Cinépolis matched this by partnering with chef Saransh Goila to introduce 40 dishes in 2019. Recently, PVR INOX launched its first “luxury dine-in cinema" in Bengaluru, serving chef-curated menus from nine F&B brands cafe-style, with tables facing the screen.
These ventures aren’t a minute too early. Elsewhere in Asia, cinema has been engaging the senses with food. For instance, a hotpot cooking and dining experience from a cinema hall in Chengdu, China, inspired a similar venture in Malaysia last year. In Hamburg, Germany, Eat The Film Restaurant & Bar has been plating films since late 2023. The biggest player in this fusion of cinema and food seems to be Fork n’ Film, which started as an apartment rooftop pop-up event in Los Angeles in mid-2023 and now has events across eight locations in the US plus one in Mexico and another in London.
Gourmet menus at Indian movie halls cannot provide a sensory portal to the film’s world unless they are customised for every show. This takes time and work, as shown by Taste Cinemas Gurgaon, which curates eight-course menus inspired by the movies/shows it screens as limited editions. It started in 2024 with some Harry Potter screenings, moving to obvious choices like Ratatouille and then some not-so-obvious ones like Twilight, Mean Girls, and episodes of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. in its latest and seventh edition. Sometimes, the choice of movie is so outlandish that the dishes too must look out of this world—picture watching Avatar while eating blue dimsums. Sacrilegious, but also curious.
The movie I watched was Eat, Pray, Love. SCC organises one screening per weekend for its gourmet cinema experience, each film selected for its predominant travel and/or gastronomic themes. It started ordinarily enough with a small basket of truffle popcorn that kept getting refilled. While I was still getting to know the main characters of the movie at a party, I was served an appetiser of baked nachos with cheese—the platter arriving at the exact moment when nachos were mentioned in the film. Service was timed exactly for all the 40-50 patrons in the restaurant. The nachos portion was unlimited, too. Until Julia Roberts’s character, Elizabeth Gilbert aka Liz, decided to quit her marriage, and travel to Italy. It is here that she would discover her appetite for life—and I, for gourmet cinema.
As Liz tucked into spaghetti and pizza, so did I. There are vegetarian and meat options for all the courses, and I had chosen in advance. My spaghetti pomodoro and margarita pizza did not just look like they had been coaxed out of the film’s universe but they arrived perfectly timed to Liz’s order at a restaurant. And so, as Liz sipped on red wine on the screen, I sipped a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.
I have watched Eat, Pray, Love a few times, always on TV and always in fragments. Liz’s ashram experience, when she lands in the chaos of India, plays out to me as an annoying stereotype. Maybe it was this aversion to cliches or my revulsion for beetroot that made the next course leave a bad taste in the mouth. Or maybe, a beetroot galouti chaat was never meant to follow spaghetti and pizza.
Thankfully, it didn’t take Liz too long to make peace with her past and explore new shores. As she found balance and new love in Bali, I found myself trying tofu steamed in banana leaves with rice and a sauce that was as hot and sweet as Liz’s affair with Javier Bardem’s Felipe.
We go to the movies to escape the boring certitude of our daily lives. We pay a premium because we want to be immersed in another world, where we can fly through the clouds and save the world, or find unexpected love on a train journey. Seeing is believing, but add smell and taste and you’re suddenly living the story.
Eat, Pray, Love had to run out of food at some point. And even though Liz’s story had a sweet ending, it lacked a dessert. So, the curators had to improvise—a tutti-frutti sundae, inspired by a girl called Tutti, whom the protagonist helps find a home with some white-people crowdfunding magic.
When the lights finally came on, they left the audience dazed with a sudden displacement. There was a souvenir to take home, a themed postcard commemorating the film and its destinations. To counter my post-vacation blues, I began planning my next shoestring adventure—I began to list all the other movies I would like to taste.
Sumeet Keswani is an independent journalist.
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