The Recipes That Refused to Leave Home: Rajan Sethi on Food, Family and Partition
From his grandfather’s home in Chakwal to the tables of Ikk Panjab, Rajan Sethi on food, memory, migration and keeping the spirit of undivided Punjab alive.
For Rajan Sethi, Managing Director of Bright Hospitality Pvt. Ltd. and the force behind Ikk Panjab, food is a way of holding on to memories of a Punjab that was divided but never entirely lost. As Ikk Panjab takes its philosophy of hospitality into private homes with The Ikk Panjab Table, Sethi talks about family, migration, authenticity and why some flavours are really memories in disguise.
Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Deccan Chronicle.
You are recreating undivided Punjab through food, but how do you tell a story about a place that no longer exists as one geographical entity?
I don’t think of Ikk Panjab as recreating a geographical place. For me, it is about preserving what survived Partition—the food, recipes, memories and ways of hosting that families carried with them. My own family came from Chakwal in Rawalpindi, and much of what we remember of that home lives through food. Ikk Panjab is my way of keeping those memories alive, not as history on a plate, but as something people can experience, share and continue.
In an age when restaurants are built for Instagram, why did you choose to make Ikk Panjab feel like your grandfather’s lived-in home rather than a stylised version of Punjab?
Ikk Panjab was never meant to look like an idea of Panjab. I wanted it to feel like a home I remembered—my grandfather’s home, with its rooms, objects, photographs and the sense that people had lived, gathered and shared stories there. That mattered to me because food is deeply connected to memory, and I didn’t want the space to feel staged or overly designed. If we were telling a personal story through Ikk Panjab, the surroundings had to feel personal too.
You describe your philosophy as “resilience through authenticity”; how do you know when preserving authenticity becomes more important than adapting to what diners want today?
For me, authenticity becomes more important when changing something would mean losing the reason you created it in the first place. With Ikk Panjab, there were moments when we could have made the food more familiar or the story easier to understand, but that would have taken away from what we were trying to preserve. I believe diners will always evolve, and we should evolve with them, but the core of who we are should not change just to make something easier to sell.
Your restaurants draw from migration, memory and recipes that travelled across a border; do you think food has succeeded where politics failed in keeping that Punjab connected?
I think food has a way of holding on to things that history and politics can sometimes separate. Recipes travelled with families, often when they had very little else to carry, and those flavours continued to live in new homes, across generations and eventually across borders. I’ve seen that through my own family and through Ikk Panjab. When people recognise a dish, a flavour or a way of eating that belongs to a shared past, the connection is immediate. Food may not erase a border, but it can remind us of what existed before it.
You have built technology to make a growing hospitality business more consistent, while your food is rooted in recipes that evolved through generations; where do you draw the line between precision and the beautiful unpredictability of tradition?
I see precision and tradition as working together, rather than being opposites. As we grow, technology helps us maintain consistency in the things that need to be consistent quality, processes and the experience we promise our guests. But I would never want that precision to take away the human character of food. Some of the best parts of traditional cooking come from judgement, instinct and small variations. For me, the line is simple: technology should protect the essence of the food, never replace the people and memories behind it.