Our Story
I came to England unable to cook a single thing, and what I missed most from home was the food. The rest of this story involves £750, a garden shed, and a stubborn belief that we deserved better than orange tikka masala.
Made with love
We don't churn out a "curry" just because it sounds Indian. Every dish carries a personal story, from my mother's Kaju Chicken to the finest Kaali Dal I ever ate in a small place in Amritsar. It holds the warmth and the laughter of meals shared with family and friends. So whether you eat it alone with a good book or across a long crowded table, we hope you taste that in it too.
From a tea estate to a cowshed
I grew up on a tea estate in Assam, before Calcutta, then Delhi, and eventually the English countryside. When I arrived in 1998 I genuinely could not cook. The weather I could live without. The food I could not, especially the kind an aunt makes for you without ever being asked.
For seventeen years I worked as a management consultant and complained, without pause, about how hard it was to find proper Indian food. Eventually an exasperated friend told me to put my money where my mouth was. So in my forties I did the one thing my parents would thoroughly disapprove of, and left a good job to cook for a living.
It started with two supper clubs in my front room and £750 spent on thalis. The shed at the bottom of the garden quietly turned into a kitchen. By 2019 we had moved into the barn above Silent Pool, and we have barely paused since.
No self-respecting, educated Indian woman gives up a good job in her forties to cook for a living. I did exactly that.
How it went
UK, via an Assam tea-estate childhood. Can't cook. Learn fast.
Supper clubs from the home kitchen. The beginning.
First meals in six farm shops. First Great Taste star.
The barn above Silent Pool. 2,000 came; samosas gone by 2pm.
Lockdown. We pivot, grow, launch Holiday Hunger.
Surrey Businessperson of the Year. Nigella comes calling.
Seven years in. Shortlisted, Women in Food & Drink Awards.
Open seven days above Silent Pool, cooking for the café, the freezer and everybody else's parties.
In her own words
What we're like
I have seen what a little confidence does for a person, in the Holiday Hunger work and in the people who run this kitchen. So we give people a chance. A first job at sixteen. A fresh start after a whole career somewhere else. People who had never worked a professional kitchen now lead ours. None of them arrived trained. They arrived willing, and we taught them ourselves. That is really the whole business.
A different approach
Small batches, produce in season, single-estate spices blended here in the barn. If your grandmother would not recognise an ingredient, neither will we.
Recipes carried across continents, from Assam and Calcutta to Delhi and now a Surrey hillside. Food that remembers where it came from.
A Bengali kitchen wastes nothing. Our award-winning chutney is made from the oranges the gin distillers next door cannot use.
The kitchen
We run like a slightly chaotic household. Most people came here for a small job and never quite left, and at least one came to drink gin and stayed.
Chief Spinner of Plates. Always stirring spices, stories and the occasional bit of chaos. The one who couldn't cook, walked away from the sensible job (much to her parents' horror), and refused to be resigned to a life of orange tikka masala. Fifteen Great Taste Awards and a shelf of others later, she still does a lot of the cooking, mostly by instinct and rarely by the recipe.
Nelo runs our café kitchen and makes sure every plate tastes exactly as it should. Every single pakora you eat, she's cooked by hand.
Our newest team member and café manager. A fabulous cook, new mum and wonderfully detail obsessed. She juggles a baby, a spreadsheet and the daily MK madness with equal calm.
Jack of all trades. Handles ordering, customers, cleaning, changes his hairstyle by the season, and makes a dangerously good naanza.
When she isn't flyballing in a muddy field with Barney, Lynda valiantly tries to keep Mandira and the rest of us in check. No small task.
Our five-foot-nothing powerhouse. Sees every event through from the first message to the last follow-up. So busy she even got married at Mandira's Kitchen. There simply wasn't time to go anywhere else.
Former engineer turned freezer meal expert. Calm, lovely and entirely unshaken, even when the kitchen sometimes isn't.
All things kitchen, events and photography. Spots the light, the angle and the rogue coriander leaf before anyone else does.
Sarah was here before Mandira's Kitchen even existed. She came in for a chat. The only question was, can you drive a van? There wasn't even a van yet. Still keeping things moving.
The smile and the knowledge behind our cookery experiences and stockist tastings, and the queen of customer service. Everyone needs a Clare.
Ellie's mum came in for a G&T one sunny afternoon and somehow volunteered her. Now Ellie teaches the team posh words like "serviette", when she isn't bossing us around.
Part-time drinks wizard, full-time smile machine, with just the right amount of drama for hospitality.
Makes an excellent coffee while studying to become the next hotel management whizz. We're enjoying him before the luxury hotels steal him.
Our resident stand-in for a South Indian film hero. Runs events, kitchens and quite possibly several parallel universes, all with equal aplomb.
Official Licker and quality control of last resort. Has never knowingly let a dropped samosa go to waste.
The shelf is getting full
Fifteen Great Taste Awards, a national businessperson title, and kind words from a few people you may know.
It's like having your very own Indian Auntie fill your freezer with exquisite foods.
Holiday Hunger
Lockdown took our events away overnight. Stopping would have been the easy choice. Instead, working with the Stoke Park Community Project, we have provided more than 5,000 hot meals a year to local children and families across the school holidays.
Of everything this kitchen has done, that is the part I am proudest of.
Come and find us
We sit above one of England's most storied stretches of water, between a vineyard and a gin distillery, where the smell of freshly ground cardamom drifts over the hills most mornings. There is freshly brewed chai, the crispest samosas for miles, and usually someone happy to talk your ear off about a recipe. Bring an appetite, and bring the dog.
Silent Pool, Shere Road, Albury, Guildford, Surrey, GU5 9BW · Just off the A25
Open seven days · Free parking · Wheelchair accessible · Dogs welcome
01483 940789 ·
enquiries@mandiraskitchen.com