I started cooking before I understood why it mattered. As a kid in Mumbai, I would slip into the kitchen of my grandmother every time I visited, watching first, then helping, then taking over small pieces of the process myself. Years of it went by, until my first chef knife finally showed up and the first thing I made with it was a lettuce wrap. Lettuce wraps became fried rice, then soufflés, then whole menus. When a school principal asked me at thirteen what I wanted to become, the answer came without hesitation - chef, multiple restaurants, three Michelin stars. The specifics have narrowed since then. The ambition has not.
At sixteen, I was in a real kitchen — THEORY, a modern European restaurant in Mumbai, apprenticing under Chef Clyde Comello. From there, I went on to an internship at Indigo, the first fine-dining restaurant in India, and eventually eight months at The Bombay Canteen, one of the most acclaimed modern restaurants in the country — working butchery, garde manger, pastry, plancha, and tandoor across seventy-to-eighty-hour weeks while still finishing high school. I spent a year of school breaks working directly under Chef Thomas Zacharias, the head chef of the restaurant, keeping a diary of everything I was taught.
Then came 2020. When the pandemic closed restaurants across Mumbai, I started Savour It, a home-kitchen operation cooking and delivering à la carte meals across the city — menu, sourcing, prep, packaging, delivery, all of it run solo. It was my first time building something of my own rather than working a line that belonged to someone else, and it planted the idea that would eventually become BYOND.
In 2021, I moved to New York to attend the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Food Business Management. The externships kept coming - at Junoon, the Michelin-starred modern Indian restaurant in Manhattan, under Chef Akshay Bhardwaj, where I was fast-tracked from the appetizer station to tandoor and expo within my first month. At Bocuse Restaurant, run by the CIA itself, I worked my way from front-of-house to lead bartender, running the full bar solo on 100-cover nights and getting my own cocktail specials onto the menu. My class unanimously elected me General Manager of Apotheca, our senior capstone event, where we planned and executed a 130-guest charity dinner sourced from donations secured from more than a hundred partner companies — raising money for the Hudson Valley Food Bank in what became one of the most financially successful events in the history of the school.
After graduating, I spent two and a half years on the line at Four Seasons — first at the Michelin-recognized Lido in Miami Beach, working stations across Garde Manger, Crudo, Pizza & Pasta, and the full Hot Line, then moving to the grill station at the Michelin-recognized signature restaurant at Four Seasons Fort Lauderdale.
In April 2026, I founded BYOND LIFESTYLE GROUP, LLC, the parent company behind BYOND Hospitality and its sister brand, BYOND FiTNESS. BYOND Hospitality was built on a simple premise: that the level of food and service usually reserved for a Michelin dining room should not require leaving the house to get it. Every private dinner, cocktail event, and cooking class I run across South Florida draws on the same training that shaped me — CIA technique, Four Seasons discipline, and a decade of kitchens that gave me no shortcuts.
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I started cooking before I understood why it mattered. As a kid in Mumbai, I would slip into the kitchen of my grandmother every time I visited, watching first, then helping, then taking over small pieces of the process myself. Years of it went by, until my first chef knife finally showed up and the first thing I made ... Read more
