This writer has a simple ingredient to bringing people together: food

Photo: Aysha and her mother Kathija / Courtesy of Aysha Tanya from The Malabar Tea Room

Indian food writer and media entrepreneur Aysha Tanya started out at The Malabar Tea Room, a blog she runs with her mother Kathija. Here, she talks about how a cuisine evolves with its community, and how food can bring about social change.

How and why did you start The Malabar Tea Room with your mom?

It was a way for us to work on something together, even though we lived so far away from each other. I had just started to cook, and the Malabar Tea Room, especially the first few recipes, serves as a record of me fumbling about in the kitchen. At that particular phase, we’d discuss the recipe, and then I’d make it and photograph it. When I moved back, however, we fell into a system where she cooked while I photographed and wrote. And now that I’ve moved again and have Goya [a web publication] taking up most of my time, we’re trying to find a new avatar for the Tea Room.

What role do you think food plays in understanding cultural identity and history?

A community’s cuisine is very much a product of its time. Rather than being this static entity that we tend to think of it as, it’s more fluid and flexible than people give it credit for. The first thing that adapts to major change is the way we eat; when a people move or experience economic changes, it affects the food right away. This makes it a really great lens through which you can learn about a culture. So many aspects of the history of the Malabar region can be traced through the food. Tellicherry pepper, which is indigenous to the Malabar, has brought traders from South East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as early as 1000 BC. Our food is a reflection of these ties, with heavy influences from the Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch, and the Malays.

How did the blog influence what you do for a living?

The Malabar Tea Room is where I first discovered my love for food writing and photography, and in many ways, it’s the best thing that has happened to me; it helped me figure out what I wanted to do for a living and connected me to a community of likeminded people. Goya is an extension of this journey, only level 2.0, because it’s a publication that involves several voices and not just my own.

What do you do at Goya?

Goya is a web publication that is focused on culinary storytelling. We try to make the conversation around food a little more interesting than just [about] where to find the best burger in town. There are so many people who write passionately about food, but we felt that we didn’t have a space here in India where we could write about food through different lenses, like pop culture, economics and politics, and so we rolled up our sleeves and created it for ourselves, as naive as that sounds.

How did you figure out how to earn money off your passion?

It’s taken a long time, to be honest, and I was lucky to be living at home when I first started. The Malabar Tea Room was a great way to create a portfolio while working on my skills. It opened up a lot of writing opportunities for me, including Food52, which in turn gave me a certain amount of credibility when pitching to other publications.

Working on anything new and exciting for the coming year that you would like to talk about?

We are trying to create more offline communities around food. The Goya Cookbook Club is one such initiative that celebrates cookbooks and cookbook culture at a time when most people believe that cookbooks are obsolete (why buy a cookbook when you can get the recipe off the Internet?). Having events where like-minded people can geek out over the newest cookbook and the latest food trends has been extremely gratifying and one of the highlights of last year. Hopefully, we’ll be able to take this to other cities around the country this year.

*All photos are published here by courtesy of Aysha Tanya from The Malabar Tea Room.

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