A NIVAALA EXPERIENCE

Kitchen Calls, A Living Cookbook Experience

An intimate gathering where people call their grandmothers, document family recipes in real time, and watch those recipes become a community cookbook before they leave.

PILOT • INDIA ART FAIR YCP 2026 AT TRIVENI KALA SANGAM, NEW DELHI

What if the last living record of your grandmother's recipe is her voice on a call, and you never wrote it down?

— THE PREMISE BEHIND KITCHEN CALLS
THE CONCEPT

Family recipes are inheritance. We treat them that way.

Indian families pass down jewelry, saris, and property. But rarely recipes, which carry just as much of who we are
Nivaala was built because our founder lost her mother's recipes. Not to time, but to the assumption that there would always be more time. Kitchen Calls was born from that loss, a structured, intimate experience that closes the distance between people and the food memories they're about to lose. It is documentation as performance. Preservation as gathering. A cookbook created not in a publishing house, but around a table, in real time, by the families who will inherit it.
1

The Trigger

Participants gather around communal tables for a curated nostalgic tasting, each dish designed to unlock a food memory. A chef shares the story behind each pairing. The prompt: "Which dish takes you home? Today, that recipe becomes permanent."
2

The Documentation

Each person calls the person who holds their recipe, a grandmother, a mother, an aunt. In three intimate pods of ten, they document ingredients, method, memory, and story on beautiful A3 log sheets, each one a page in the final cookbook. Aaryama Somayaji illustrates each dish live.
3

The Final Compilation

Every page is compiled in real time. The digital cookbook is assembled and shared with all 30 participants within one week. Thirty family recipes. Thirty living heirlooms. Made together, in one afternoon.
THE PILOT

India Art Fair, February 2026

Kitchen Calls made its debut at India Art Fair's Young Collectors' Programme, one of the country's most discerning cultural gatherings. Held at Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi, it brought together 30 young collectors for an afternoon that no one expected to affect them the way it did.

THE COOKBOOK

Thirty recipes. Thirty families. One afternoon.

The Kitchen Calls: Delhi 2026 cookbook is a record of what happened at Triveni Kala Sangam — 30 handwritten recipe pages, illustrated by Aaryama Somayaji, each one a window into a family's food history. Download it, cook from it, share it with someone who has recipes they haven't written down yet.

VIEW THE COOKBOOK

Free to download · Share widely · Cook often
BRING KITCHEN CALLS TO YOUR COMMUNITY

Your people have recipes worth preserving.

Kitchen Calls is not a catering event. It is a structured cultural experience that leaves something permanent behind, a community cookbook that belongs to the people who made it.

We partner with organisations, institutions, and communities who understand that the stories people carry, in their kitchens, in their families, in their culinary memory, deserve to be honoured. If that sounds like your audience, we should talk.

Cultural Institutions & Galleries

Museums, art fairs, heritage foundations, audiences who understand that food is culture, and culture is worth preserving.

Corporate & Leadership Offsites

A team-building experience unlike any other, one that reveals the person behind the professional, and leaves everyone with something real.

Alumni Networks & Communities

School and college reunions, residential communities, diaspora gatherings, places where shared memory runs deep and food runs deeper.

Literary & Culinary Festivals

Bookshops, food festivals, literary events, spaces where stories are already valued and a live cookbook is the natural next chapter.

BRING KITCHEN CALLS TO US