Beyond naan and tikka masala: How an all-women team won ‘Oscars of food’ for coffee table book on Mumbai and its culinary legacy

Curated and edited by veteran food writer Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, featuring photographs by Bhavya Pansari and illustrations by Nandini Thirani, the book explores Mumbai through its food, communities, and the people who feed the city — from street vendors and home cooks to restaurant kitchens — and traces the city’s dining-out culture and how migration, commerce and changing tastes have shaped it.

The all-women team Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, Sri Bodanapu, Nandini Thirani and Bhavya Pansari gathered in Mumbai last month to celebrate the win. (Photo courtesy: Special Arrangement)

Idea born to beat chicken tikka masala–naan stereotype

Bodanapu spent over two decades in the United States before briefly moving back to India during the pandemic. What struck her upon her return was how narrowly Indian food was understood abroad.

“Even there, except maybe one or two restaurants, everything still leans toward the chicken tikka masala, garlic naan stereotype of Indian food,” she said of San Francisco, adding there was “no real concept of regionality — it’s treated as one overall category of food.”

That observation, paired with a gap she saw in publishing, became the seed for Heirloom Cities.

Most South Asian coffee table books, she felt, focused on art, architecture or textiles, but food was documented mainly through recipe books or academic texts. Bodanapu had previously made custom family cookbooks through the Heirloom Project; the new imprint extended that idea — if a family’s culinary legacy could be preserved in a book, so could a city’s.

Mumbai became the first subject because of its contradictions — a city deeply rooted in its past while racing ahead economically — and because it offered a chance to showcase India’s food diversity beyond the few dishes it’s often reduced to.

Mumbai by Heirloom Cities won 2026 James Beard Media Award (Photo courtesy: Special Arrangement)

Telling the city through its people

Munshaw-Ghildiyal wanted to move beyond the familiar Mumbai food checklist.

In the coffee table, she wrote chapters such as “The Hands That Feed”, “Foraging Mumbai Ishtyle,” “Udupi and Shetty,” and “Mumbai Masala.” She also brought together the city’s seasoned food writers to trace the micro-history of dining out, the mithai culture running from mawa cake to macarons, and the city’s chai-nashta habits. Interspered with handful of recipes, the book also follows communities such as the Pathare Prabhus, Anglo-Indians and Konkani Muslims through lived experiences.

“The book had been living in my head for some time, so when Sri reached out, I knew what we needed to do,” she said, calling the curation both “joy and challenge” since she wanted a fresh take on a city we all think we know. Seafood, she realised, deserved its own chapter given its ties to Mumbai’s Koli heritage.

Tracing the city’s food history was harder still.

“There was zero reference point, making fact-checking difficult,” she said, adding that a 4,000-5,000-word history section was eventually broken up and woven through the book so it added context without overwhelming readers.

Making Mumbai look different

The same philosophy shaped the book’s visual language. Thirani moved away from the colours and imagery typically associated with India: the spine draws on the Paithani weave combined with a food motif, while the cover features a stylised pigeon, a nod to Mumbai’s ubiquitous birds. She said she wanted to “push the boundary” rather than take the usual architectural approach, drawing on the city’s textiles instead.

For Bengaluru-based Pansari, being an outsider helped. She shot around 20,000 images over two to three multi-day trips, of which roughly 150–160 made it to the book.

The brief was deliberately loose, letting her follow what the city offered rather than tick off locations — including, at her insistence, photographing a chaat stall “because that’s the whole story we’re telling.”

The big win

In November 2025, Heirloom Cities applied for the James Beard Award and learned of its nomination in May 2026. The team travelled to Chicago in June to attend the ceremony without expecting to win. They also bought copies of the other nominated books.

Nandini Thirani, Sri Bodanapu, and Bhavya Pansari at James Beard Foundation Award Ceremony. (Photo courtesy: Special Arrangement)

For the three who attended (Munshaw-Ghildiyal couldn’t travel), the win feels less like an endpoint. Bodanapu called it strong validation for design-led storytelling; Thirani pointed to how it registered at home — “having our parents say they’re proud of us makes a bigger cut.” Pansari, the youngest of the group, said it reaffirmed why she got into photography: “never to be a photographer to get rich… but to experience the world.”

With Mumbai and Kolkata published and a Dubai book underway, Heirloom Cities is now closing in on an editor for a Bali edition, with a Sri Lanka title in early talks. Bodanapu’s longer-term ambition stretches beyond books: “Maybe there is a possibility of adapting the cities into other formats — a series on Netflix, or collectibles and objects that let people bring a city’s food culture into their homes.”