“Tastes Like Home” - Vikrant Mannat Story

Hey all ,

An attempt on these characters and the cooking background the show started with initially.Posted it on another platform and thought of posting it here .

Chapter 1 - A Hire no one asked for

Vikrant Saluja built Sarson on one rule, and he didn’t bend it for anybody: nobody touches his menu who hasn’t actually bled for Punjabi food. Not read about it. Not done a semester abroad and called it research. He meant people who’d stood over his nani’s chulha at three in the morning during wedding season, who’d gone dhaba to dhaba between Ludhiana and Patiala begging cooks to hand over things they’d never even tell their own sons.

So when the board — his investors, the ones who’d funded the outlet and now apparently thought that bought them a say in everything — told him they were bringing in a new Head Chef without even running it by him first, he was angry before he’d heard a single name.

Then he heard it.

“Mannat Khanna.”

He didn’t know her, not really. Just her reputation, which somehow made it worse. Le Cordon Bleu. A couple years in some Michelin place in London where she must have deconstructed butter chicken served in a martini glass with one sad coriander leaf balanced on top like it was about to perform surgery. He’d seen her name once in a food magazine, under a headline calling her “the chef reinventing Punjab for the global palate,” and he’d genuinely wanted to throw the magazine across the room.

Punjab didn’t need reinventing, he believed

“She’s not a fit,” he told the board flatly, in the meeting they’d technically called to “inform” him, not to ask his opinion. “She’ll bring all that nonsense in here and call it elevation. I built this place on my dadi’s recipes. I’m not just handing it over to someone who thinks sarson da saag needs a quenelle.”

Rajeev Malhotra — loudest guy on the board, also happened to write the biggest checks — just smiled the smile of a man whose mind was already made up. “Vikrant. Her numbers in London were extraordinary. She’s moving back to India, family reasons, we didn’t ask, and she wants Chandigarh specifically. We are not turning away a chef like that because you’ve decided, sight unseen, that she’s going to insult your dadi’s saag.”

“I’ve seen enough, Rajeev .

“You’ve seen a magazine spread.”

He didn’t have an answer for that, which somehow made him angrier.

“She starts Monday,” Rajeev said. “Co-head chef, equal say in the kitchen. That’s the deal, and honestly it’s a good one — for you and for Sarson. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”

He made it harder for about four days anyway. Argued, sulked, even called his mother to complain — which backfired completely, who wanted to meet the Punjabi kudi.

By Friday he’d lost. Board had voted. Mannat Khanna was Sarson’s new co-head chef starting Monday, and there was nothing left to do but show up and decide how badly he wanted to behave about it.

What he didn’t know — what nobody bothered telling him, was that Mannat already knew exactly how this was going to go.

Yikes and done

Chapter 2 :” We’ll see “

Mannat Khanna heard about it. Heard it straight from Rajeev, actually, over a phone call she’d taken standing in her empty London flat, packing boxes stacked around her feet . He hadn’t meant he’d let it slip. One board member had pushed back. Hard.

“Let me guess,” she’d said, already smiling into the phone. “The chef.”

“Vikrant’s protective of the place. It’s not personal.”

It was extremely personal. She knew that before she’d even hung up, but she looked him up anyway,Found his profile - three years of interviews where he used the word authentic like it was a knife he kept sharpening on every journalist who came near him. Authentic Punjabi food doesn’t need a passport stamp to prove itself. I didn’t go to Paris to learn how to cook food my grandmother already perfected. There’d been a photo with that one too — him mid-rant, beard trimmed into a precise, deliberate shape. She’d looked at the photo longer than she needed to.

Somewhere over the Arabian Sea, on the flight home, she made a decision. She wasn’t going to bring any of it up. Not the call, not the vote, not his objection. She would just be good. Undeniably, repeatedly good.

Monday morning, Sarson’s kitchen smelled like cumin toasting and somebody’s barely-contained resentment, and honestly the second smell was easier to locate than the first.

Vikrant was at the tandoor when she walked in, and her first thought — gone almost before she’d finished having it — was that the photo had undersold him, infuriatingly. He had a pair of eyes that didn’t match the rest of him at all, wide and almost startled-looking, the kind of eyes you’d expect on a kid asking why the sky was blue ..

He’d been ready for her. He’d spent four days being ready for her, rehearsing some version of cold and brief that he could deploy and then go back to his coals and not think about again. He looked up once, fully prepared to deliver it.

And then, somehow, he forgot to.

He couldn’t have said exactly when the anger slipped out of his hands, only that it did, quietly, the way a held breath leaves you before you’ve decided to let it go. He told himself it was nothing — just surprise, just the gap between the magazine photo and the actual woman standing in his kitchen, glasses on, dupatta knotted.He almost let himself think she looked like home — caught it, corrected: no, she’d put butter chicken in a teacup like that was normal, like elegance and chaos could share a plate.

Then she set her knife roll down, unzipped it without ceremony, and started warming up at the board next to him — testing the give of the dough, checking the heat of his tandoor with the back of her hand like she’d done it a thousand times in a thousand other kitchens, picking up a blade and falling into a chop so fast and so clean it barely looked like effort. Low grip near the heel, knuckles loose, wrist doing all the real work while her fingers just guided — and he found himself watching the rhythm of it instead of finding fault with it, which had been the entire plan. There was no hesitation in her hands at all, no performance for an audience, just the unhurried certainty He recognized it the way you recognize your own handwriting in someone else’s notebook. That was the worst part — not that she was good, he could have managed her being merely good — but that she was good in the specific way that only comes from doing something until your hands stop asking your brain for permission. He knew that kind of good.

“Chef Saluja,” she said, not even looking up from the board, and there it was — his name in her mouth, flat and businesslike, exactly the right amount of nothing in it, and it landed on him like a hand on the shoulder of someone standing too close to a ledge.

He blinked. Came back into his own body like he’d been somewhere else entirely. “Ms. Mannat.” His voice came out perfectly level, perfectly cold, the line he’d rehearsed for four days finally arriving, four seconds too late to mean anything.

She felt something in her ease, just slightly, at that — not Chef Khanna, braced for a fight, but Ms. Mannat, softer without being smaller, and which happened to be exactly what she preferred, though she hadn’t told him that and couldn’t imagine he’d guessed it. She decided not to read too much into it.

“Staff meeting’s at eleven,” he went on, recovering his footing word by word. “Until then, the pass is yours to learn. We don’t do tweezer plating here. Hope that’s not a problem.”

“I’ve plated a lot of things with my hands, Chef. I’ll manage.”

She, for her part, had clocked the way he held his own knife at the board beside the tandoor — high on the handle, knuckles loose, an economy of motion no culinary school taught because it couldn’t be taught, only earned, hour after hour, the kind of grip that comes from cutting onions before you were old enough to be trusted near a stove. She filed that away too, the same way she’d filed his face, under things she would not be thinking about again, and then thought about it again anyway, briefly, before setting her jaw and getting to work.

“We’ll see,” he said, and turned back to his coals — too fast, the way you turn away from something you’ve been caught staring at.

We’ll see, she thought, tying her apron with more force than the knot strictly required. Yes. We will.

Please do continue...really eager for the next parts...

Another world of ManVik..

😊