To mark its 11th anniversary, The Bombay Canteen returns with Canteen Open House: Chef’s Edit an all-day, open-to-all event designed to unpack the realities of building and sustaining a hospitality business. Featuring conversations with globally recognised chefs, the six-session lineup explores entrepreneurship, format innovation, creative resilience, and early-career challenges.
To celebrate the 11th anniversary of Bombay Canteen, one of Mumbai’s most beloved restaurants, is returning with Canteen Open House with ‘Chef’s Edit’, a deep dive into the hospitality and food business on 28th February. An open to all, all-day long event, Chef’s Edit is the right place to be for everyone from young F&B professionals to hospitality students or anyone who wants to dip their toe into the food business. The aim of the event is to highlight the sort of creative entrepreneurship and business acumen that one should develop in order to thrive in this tumultuous and sometimes uncertain business environment.
The multiple sessions throughout the day will be conducted by seven established chefs from all over the world like Prateek Sadhu, the chef-owner of Naar, an intimate 16-seater restaurant in Kasauli and American pastry chef Will Goldfarb, chef-owner of Bali’s Room4Dessert.
The six sessions will trace a map for the participants about all the necessary pointers required for a business in hospitality. The first session starting at 10:45 am will be a conversation between two chefs, Chef Chalee Kader, the Thai Indian chef with years of experience and some of Bangkok’s most famous restaurants under his belt, and Chef Hussein Shehzaad, the executive chef at Hunger Inc. on dabbling and dealing across formats and the importance of firmly positioning yourself as a chef-entrepreneur. The day ends with the final session with “The Diary of a Young Chef’ a conversation with Saylee Padwal, Sous Chef at O Pedro and Shruti Purandre, part of the pastry team at Hunger Inc. Central Kitchen, about the trials, missteps and difficulties faced in early culinary careers, helping guide aspiring chefs and entrepreneurs.
The Chef’s Edit is framed to be a day where ideas and inspiration are exchanged to inspire the next generation of F&B professionals. And access to the lived experiences of chefs who have navigated failures, funding gaps, creative burnouts, and the balance between art and commerce. By opening up conversations that don’t usually happen in the open and are relegated to kitchen doors or in boardrooms, the initiative demystifies what it truly takes to build, and sustain, a hospitality venture. The Open House format transforms the restaurant from a dining destination into a knowledge-sharing platform, reinforcing the idea that the future of hospitality lies in collaboration.
The Canteen Open House is on 28th February, from 10:30 am to 6 pm and entry is free for all. Register and know more about the event here.
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