By Chef Ankit Sharma, Chief Culinary Officer, Compass Group India
Last month, we put a shakshouka on our breakfast menu, right next to the poori bhaji. The shakshouka was well made, nicely presented, and picked up a few photographs and some polite compliments. The poori bhaji counter had the queue.
That didn’t surprise me. Poori bhaji is the dish I grew up on. Sunday mornings, hot oil, a bhaji that was always a little too spicy for the kids. When I tasted ours before service, I stopped checking the seasoning somewhere between the first bite and the second. For a few seconds I was ten again, standing at the kitchen door waiting for the first poori to puff up.
A colleague had a plate later and said, “This tastes like Sundays at home.” Nobody says that about a shakshouka.
There’s a reason for that. Smell and taste are processed close to the parts of the brain that handle emotion and memory. So a childhood flavour doesn’t bring back just a dish. It brings back the room, the people, the time of day. A 2025 study in Cognition and Emotion found that food-linked nostalgia brings comfort because it makes us feel more connected to other people. The familiar dish returns who was at the table.
We behave the same way. We say we want novelty, but when we’re tired, we reach for what we know.
In India this runs deeper, because food carries family and region with it. A Bengali mishti or a Rajasthani dal-baati on a workplace counter says something simple: someone noticed where I come from.
That’s why, at Compass, we start menu design with the eater, not the trend report. Who is eating, where are they from, what do they eat when nobody is cooking for them? Then we build in three layers: an anchor dish that is unapologetically familiar, a bridge dish that takes a known flavour somewhere new, and one small spark of surprise. The anchor earns trust. The bridge earns curiosity. The spark gets people talking.
None of this is against innovation. It just starts with respect for what people already love.
READ MORE: New Menus, Satvik Specials & Durga Puja Feasts to Try Across India
