Chef de cuisine and culinary consultant. Fourteen years, six kitchens, two restaurant launches — from a five-star coastal kitchen to my own 40-seat room. I cook Kerala food with technique, not tweezers, and I run kitchens that keep their cooks.
Restaurants & cloud kitchens
Menu engineering, kitchen design, SOPs, vendor lists, food-cost control and the first three months of hand-holding. I've launched two rooms; I know where the money leaks.
Homes & small venues · 8–30 guests
The tasting menu, in your dining room. I shop that morning, cook in your kitchen, and talk through every course. Two weeks' notice; menus built around your table.
Hotels & teams
Guest-chef pop-ups, festival menus and line training — knife discipline, station hygiene, prep-list culture. Your cooks keep the recipes and the standards.
*A kitchen's real numbers: cost, consistency and whether cooks stay. Awards are nice; a line that doesn't turn over is nicer.
The launch dish · 2022
Everyone serves it; ours sold out nightly. The difference was refusing the shortcut — real banana leaf, char from coals not a blowtorch, karimeen bought whole and filleted in-house. Food bloggers called it "worth the drive from Bengaluru." It's still the top seller three years later, cooked by cooks I trained, without me in the building. That last part is the achievement.
The cost fix · consulting
A client bleeding 41% food cost on their best seller. I didn't touch the recipe — I fixed the yield: portioning by weight, a marination SOP, and switching to whole-bird buying with the trim going into two new menu items. Cost fell to 29%, taste tests came back identical, and the kitchen stopped losing money on its own hit.
The humbling · 2019
My cleverest plate — a deconstructed sadya, seven elements, gorgeous on Instagram. Guests photographed it, then left half of it. It took me a month to admit the truth: it was cooking for other chefs. I replaced it with my grandmother's vellappam and stew, barely styled. It outsold the clever dish five to one and taught me whom the menu is for.
Photograph — at the pass, whites on, mid-service
I grew up in Thrissur above my uncle's toddy-shop kitchen, where I learned the first rule of cooking before I could spell it: the customer is hungry, not impressed. Hotel management came later, then the long apprenticeship — five years of five-star banquet lines, burns, and 16-hour Decembers.
At my own restaurant I found the style I'd defend: Kerala's repertoire, cooked with real technique and priced honestly. Now I split time between consulting, private dining and training — because the thing I'm proudest of isn't a dish, it's the nineteen cooks who run their own stations, and in two cases their own kitchens.
"Technique is invisible when it works. The guest should taste the fish, not the chef's ego."
Kitchens
Kochi + Bengaluru
9 consulting engagements · 60+ private dinners · 2 cloud-kitchen turnarounds.
Fort Kochi
Launched, ran and profitably sold a Kerala tasting-menu room · 4.8 rating across 2,000+ reviews.
Five-star coastal property, Kochi
Ran a 22-cook brigade · 400-cover peak services · seafood specialty restaurant relaunch.
Luxury hotel group, Bengaluru
The apprenticeship: banquets, butchery, and every station on the hot line.
From guests & owners
Restaurant owner · consulting client
"Vikram's report was the opposite of consultant fluff — page one said 'your best seller loses you money, here's the maths.' Six months later my food cost is down nine points and my head chef asks his advice, not mine."
Owner, cloud kitchen group, BengaluruEngagement: 2025Private dining guest
"He cooked my mother's meen curry better than she does — and then told her so, and then told her why, and now she uses his trick. Dinner became a masterclass became a family memory."
Anniversary dinner, Kochi · 202612 guests, seven coursesConsulting, private dinners, residencies and training. I take on one consulting engagement at a time and eight dinners a month — dates go fast around December.