Raised in India and based now in Brooklyn, chef Rachel Gurjar has crafted an ode to the cuisines of both parts of the world with East to East: Recipes and Stories from Mumbai to New York. Bursting with 101 recipes for everything from spicy butter masala pasta to dirty chai espresso martinis, the cookbook rejoices in the culinary possibilities that arise with blending cultures. This week, Vogue spoke to Gurjar—formerly an associate food editor at Bon Appetit—about Mumbai’s rapidly expanding food scene, venturing to Queens for regionally specific South Asian treats, and the books that were on her mental mood board as she wrote East to East.
Read that conversation—and find a fried-fish recipe guaranteed to wow with minimal fuss—below. Vogue: How did this project first come together for you? Rachel Gurjar: Well, I first started writing the proposal in 2019.
Then I kind of shelved it because of the pandemic and job changes and all these things that came up for a couple years, and then I picked it back up after I joined Bon Appetit, because I felt like I was on stable-ish ground creatively and I was cooking again. I started working on the proposal again and took a few meetings with agents. My eventual agent and I ironed out the proposal a bit more and shopped it around in the beginning of 2024.
We sold it in January, and then I didn’t work on it for another eight months because I was at BA doing a full-time job and union stuff. Then I dove back into the book after my time at BA. I love the way you talk about existing between cities and cultures in East to East; is there anything from New York you crave that you can’t get when you’re in Mumbai, and vice versa?
I love Sichuan food, and that’s something I miss a lot in Mumbai and India. Thai food gets generalized a lot, but it’s so regional—Lao food, Cambodian food, northern and southern Thai—and I crave those flavors deeply, and I’m not really able to find them in Mumbai. Mumbai’s restaurant landscape is changing so much, and it has grown a lot in the past five years, so you can get really good Korean and Japanese.
Sushi is big right now, and there are a few Southeast Asian restaurants coming up. But I haven’t seen a Cambodian or Laotian place there. But even in New York, Lao food is mostly pop-ups.
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