Chef Vanshika Bhatia is Turning French Pastry into an Ethical Culinary Empire

Chef Vanshika Bhatia has been cooking, quite literally, since she could reach the stovetop. Raised in a household where food was ceremony, her culinary sensibility draws from a heritage that predates Partition, one rooted in the traditions of Bannu, a city in the North West Frontier Province that now lies in modern-day Pakistan. 

The Bannuwal kitchen, as Bhatia describes it, was never a place of excess. It was a place of ingenuity: fermenting, pickling, drying, preserving. Of using everything and wasting nothing. These are not merely cooking techniques. They are survival philosophies, passed down through generations and quietly threaded through every menu she writes today. “More than the flavours, what I use in my work today are the ethics. The art of using all ingredients in a sustainable manner, not wasting, and drying, pickling and fermenting, it’s a big part of me as a chef today.”

What gives her story its particular texture is that much of this inheritance arrived unconsciously. It was only when her mother pointed out that Vanshika’s kitchen habits mirrored those of her maternal grandmother that she recognised how deeply the Bannuwal ethos had shaped her. Archival storytelling, it turns out, does not always announce itself.

London to Copenhagen to Bangkok

Bhatia enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu London at the age of 18 with a singular ambition: to open her own restaurant by 25. What followed was a global education of remarkable breadth. After formal training in classical French technique, she went on to work in some of the most influential kitchens in the world, Noma in Copenhagen, Gaggan in Bangkok, and Junoon in Dubai, before returning to India and joining Olive Bar and Kitchen in New Delhi, where she was eventually elevated to Head Chef at Ek Bar.

One might expect such a rigorous classical formation to result in a purist approach. Instead, Bhatia absorbed these experiences as tools rather than doctrines. “I don’t believe in unlearning anything that my chefs have taught me. I feel all knowledge in this field is used in some form or another one day in your life when you are commanding your own kitchen.”

The departure from classical orthodoxy, she clarifies, is not philosophical rebellion but practical ethics, she will seek a seasonal Indian alternative to an expensive imported ingredient, and she will never turn out mushrooms and bin the trimmings. Meat, too, is reconsidered: in her kitchen, it functions as a side dish rather than the main component of a plate, a quiet but deliberate inversion of the traditional Western approach.

The Pie Shop That Became a Movement

At just 25, Bhatia co-founded Together at 12th at Le Méridien Gurugram, establishing herself as one of the most exciting young chefs in India. But it is Petite Pie Shop, launched in August 2021 at Worldmark, Sector 65, Gurugram, that has become her most personal and beloved project. The cafe was born from the months of lockdown experimentation, when Bhatia found herself returning obsessively to baked goods, and realising that the pandemic had done something remarkable to the Indian diner. “People during the pandemic learnt how to cook, about good quality ingredients and how to recognise them. This was the perfect time to open a cafe with good quality bakes with authentic flavours.”

The instinct was correct. Petite Pie Shop, billed as India’s first dedicated pie shop, arrived as something the market did not know it needed: a small, quaint space with chequered tiles, pistachio green walls, antique light fixtures and French music drifting through the air. The menu is built on sweet and savoury pies, tarts, quiches, freshly baked pizzas, croissant and baguette sandwiches, French onion soup, terrines, cold cuts, house preserves and spreads. The approach is French bistro in aesthetic, but Indian in its produce and soul, a Lemon Custard sits beside a warm Almond and Tangerine pie; house-made preserves carry the fingerprints of Bhatia’s Bannuwal inheritance. A “make your own pie” option turns every visit into a small act of creative play.

The shop, a family venture run with her sisters, quickly earned recognition: it won Best Cafe-North at the Times Food and Nightlife Awards and Best New Cafe at the Restaurant India Awards. In 2022, Bhatia also became chef-partner at OMO, Soul Food Community, which went on to win Travel and Leisure’s Best Vegetarian Restaurant award, further cementing a portfolio built on coherent values rather than opportunistic diversification.

Sustainability as Daily Practice, Not Slogan

If there is one aspect of Bhatia’s work that separates her from the sustainability-as-branding trend endemic to contemporary dining, it is the granular, unglamorous rigour with which she pursues it. Her kitchens are cleaned three times a day. A register is maintained for every gram of salt and flour wasted. Side dishes are made from trimmings rather than new ingredients. Dustbins are checked at the end of every service to identify and correct waste patterns. Menus, wherever possible, are written after the ingredients arrive, not before. It sounds radical. In practice, she says, once you have a full year’s seasonal cycle mapped, the spontaneity and the planning coexist quite naturally.

As a member of the Chefs Manifesto, a speaker at the World Economic Forum on food security, and a name celebrated in Condé Nast Traveller, Harper’s Bazaar India’s “25 in 2025” and The Week’s 40 Under 40, Bhatia now occupies an increasingly prominent platform. She is quick, however, to resist the framing of the ethical chef as one who sacrifices flavour for principle. Sustainability that does not taste good, she argues plainly, will never scale. “Now it is a chef’s job to make things taste good. If that is not achieved then achieving sustainability is tough. So the chefs will still be judged for their good-tasting dishes, and it is the chef’s job to make those dishes sustainable.”

With four new spaces in the pipeline, Vanshika Bhatia stands at that rare intersection of memory and momentum, a chef who has turned the wisdom of a Bannuwal kitchen, the rigour of a Parisian culinary school, and the warmth of a family pie shop into the blueprint for a modern, ethical culinary future. The pastry, as ever, is just the beginning.