Manu’s passion for food surfaced at a young age, thanks largely to a foodie family. Food, the cooking of it, the discussions and arguments around it, and most importantly the celebration of it, were so integral to his family’s normal functioning that it was hardly a surprise when he opted for it professionally.

At St. Stephen’s College, as an under-grad, he wrote, designed and helped photograph a book on fusion cuisine. Manu then enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) Hyde Park, New York, where he apprenticed with some of the City’s most celebrated kitchens, including Restaurant Daniel, Le Bernardin, Gramercy Tavern, Café Centro, Jean Georges and Town and also opened the now legendary Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan.

A lover of slow cooking, Manu leans towards painstakingly controlled and cooked things, a process that enables one to extract flavours and textures. On the flip side, he’s fond of incredibly fast cooking, which keeps the integrity of ingredients and freshness intact. A minimalist, he believes that removing an ingredient rather than adding one usually improves the flavour of a dish.

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Her passion for the written word is the reason she has nine books to her credit. Odette’s first book, Masci: The Man Behind the Legend, which she wrote on her father-in-law, Miguel Arcanjo Mascarenhas, who was the executive chef at Taj Mahal Mumbai in 1939, won a Special Jury Award at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2008.

Her ninth book, The Culinary Heritage of Goa, brings alive the kitchen tradition of Goan households all around the state. She has followed the culinary journey of Goa down the ages, from the times of the Chalukyas, Kadambas, the Vijaynagar Empire, the Muslim Bahamani Sultanate, the Portuguese rulers, to the present times and how it is all reflected in the evolution of Goan Cuisine. The book has won the Best in the World for Historical Recipes and Best Self Published Book in India at the Gourmand World Cookbooks 2015 awards.

She is the co-founder of the Goan Culinary Club – a non-profit venture which strives to preserve the authenticity of Goan cuisine and researches lost recipes of the past with local chefs and restaurateurs.

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