Food, according to Hansal Mehta, is one of the strongest places memory lives. And Khana Dil Se, his way of holding on to his family’s memories. “I realized the recipes my mother, aunt, and father-in-law made would slip away if no one held on to them,” reflected the filmmaker.

The filmmaker, known for politically charged dramas like Shahid, Scam 1992 and Scoop, says food became another way to talk about memory. “Food is one of the last places memory lives,” he says, adding that the pilot episode is an attempt to “find and reinvent” his mother’s Undhiyu. 

So, Mehta went back to the kitchen for Khana Dil Se, just as he had done in the early 1990s when he directed the genre-defining cooking show, Khana Khazana. But this time, there’s a new ingredient — Artificial Intelligence (AI). Agreeing that filmmakers’ concerns about AI replacing artistes are legitimate, he asserted that AI is not at the forefront of his show.

“The families and their recipes are what the show is about. AI is a tool that helps me tell that story. Working the conventional way means animation budgets, period reconstructions, and location shoots. These costs put this kind of show out of reach for almost everyone. AI lets me do that visual work at a fraction of the time and cost.” 

Even as we have seen a surge in competitive cooking shows, meaningful culinary storytelling is absent from Indian platforms. That’s a void Mehta hopes to fill with his YouTube show. 

“We have travel-and-eat shows, we have competitions, we have celebrity chef formats. What we don’t have are enough shows documenting our recipes. Somebody Feed Phil is a wonderful show, but it’s an outsider’s affectionate gaze, and that’s not the same as an insider’s archive. India has, conservatively, a few hundred distinct culinary traditions, most of them undocumented in any serious filmed form. The platforms might not be wrong that conventional food shows have lost captivity. They’re wrong about why. Audiences haven’t stopped caring about food. They’ve stopped accepting cooking shows that have become more like a sports league than a kitchen. The plan is to make something good enough that the question of where it sits primary network, streaming, somewhere we haven’t thought of yet becomes a happy problem rather than a strategic one. I’ve been around long enough to know you can’t reverse-engineer a hit by deciding the platform first. You make the show. If it’s the show people are talking about, the platforms come. I’d love for ambitious, archival, slow-cooked food television to find its way back to the kind of mainstream audience Khana Khazana once had. There’s a generation that grew up watching Sanjeev on Sunday mornings and is now raising children of their own. I think they’re ready for a food show that takes them, and the food, seriously again."

The show also leans heavily into the politics of food, something Mehta says was inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s worldview. “Bourdain was right about nearly everything, and food being political was the most important thing he kept saying. Take Gosht Nihari. We tend to think of nihari as a single dish, Lucknow’s, Delhi’s, or Karachi’s. It’s actually three different preparations across a border that didn’t exist when the recipe was written. Nihari was perhaps born in 18th-century Shahjahanabad as labourers’ food. A pot left on dying embers overnight so it would be ready before fajr prayer. The Nawabs of Awadh refined it in Lucknow, perfumed it with kewra and rose. After Partition, it crossed into Karachi in the mouths of refugees and became a national obsession in Pakistan. Three cities, three versions of a single dish, separated by a line on a map. Most of the great Indian dishes are working-class food that the courts later adopted, not the other way around. Nihari belonged to soldiers and dyers before it belonged to Nawabs. Undhiyu was farmers’ communal food, with multiple Patidar and Koli families contributing vegetables to a single pot buried in a shared field at Uttarayan. Butter chicken, which will be featured in our third episode, was invented by Punjabi refugees in 1947 Delhi who had to figure out what to do with leftover tandoori chicken. Almost every dish we celebrate as heritage was, at some point, a survival strategy."