ADD the Big Food Energy, a new video podcast on food and drink – especially the spirit of entrepreneurship and the evergreen excitement around it – to your playlist. It’s hosted by Smitha Menon, a taste hunter with the World’s 50 Best, a regular jury member of notable food industry awards, and the former culinary editor at Condé Nast Traveller India. “I’ve been fine-tuning the idea for this podcast for a few years now,” she admits, speaking to her eagerness to experiment with story-telling across mediums and formats. Smitha has previously worked in television with Bloomberg TV “covering the stock markets” and NDTV Good Times “producing lifestyle programmes”. She then dove into the digital publication space as “the secret sleuth of everything cool” for the Mumbai edition of Brown Paper Bag before spending the past eight years overseeing the food section of the web and print platforms of CNT India.
Smitha has brought together her more than a decade of experience in journalism, her ability to shapeshift between mediums and her access to produce a show with sparkling discussions and dissections of the business of food and drink in India. Over the first season (thirteen episodes out so far, two more to go), we travel from potato chips to posh restaurants and more. For her premiere episode, Smitha spoke to Jeegar Mota of the Mumbai-based snack brand – Mota Chips. While Smitha did “have to spend months trying to pin him down for the interview,” this choice “of her favourite chips” does form a solid foundation for the context of Big Food Energy. Kicking off with a brand that started in 1992, more than three decades ago, Smitha brings to the fore how business was done before anyone had to hire a social media manager.
Smitha in conversation with Aditi Dugal of Masque
She wanted to step outside the space laden with conversations around “food histories and trends, chef journeys, new restaurants or top ten dishes to try out”. Instead, she wanted to channel “her curiosity about the goings on behind-the-scenes of restaurants, bars and brands. I’ve always been excited to know: How did you do this? Where does this dish come from? What’s the backstory of the restaurant’s name? These were the kinds of details I’ve always looked for,” she says. But she also wanted Big Food Energy to ask these questions through the business side of the industry: “How do you open a restaurant or a bar? How do you run it? How do you scale it up? How do you build a food brand?”
Besides nudging out honest answers to the uphill task of running a hospitality-first business in the country, there are delicious details tucked into this podcast too. In the episode where Smitha interviews Sumesh Govind, the CEO of the Paragon Group of Restaurants, known for their legendary biryani, Sumesh reveals that it isn’t just enough to have “a great biryani” but one should also know “how to slice it”. This perfecting of the “slicing technique” ensures that each serving has the right mix of meat, masala and rice “as well as maintains the dum – or piping heat” through each of the eater’s mouthfuls. Or, Aditi Dugar, the restaurateur and founder of Masque, India’s Best Restaurant in Asia’s 50 Best, telling us about her mother “embarrassing her” by adding methi masala to their polenta while holidaying in Italy, “which actually changed the dish” and impressed the chef. And, from the very next month, her mother began exporting “ten kilos of methi masala to this restaurant”. Or Chaitanya Muppala, the CEO of Manam, India’s first craft chocolate company, sweetly reminiscing about how growing up as a kid in the 90s, a chocolate bar for him only meant Dairy Milk. "I like it. I grew up eating it. I have a strong connection with it. I find it yummy,” he says. For Muppala, instead of telling people “what they like is not good or they should like something else or elevate themselves”, his intention with Manam is to “balance familiarity with inventiveness and complexity”.
Smitha with Yash Bhanage and Sameer Seth founders of Hunger Inc Hospitality
Through the medium of podcasting and her show Big Food Energy, Smitha finds that “there is a place for the rest of the conversation to go.” She mentions how she’s had to sometimes “sacrifice these details” in her writing for the story's angle or “simply because there’s no space for it on the page”. And through Big Food Energy, she gets “to have these in-depth conversations” and we’re richer for it.
Watch Smitha Menon’s Big Food Energy podcast here, or across platforms where podcasts are available.