Book Review | A Visual Archive of Mumbai Through Cuisine
There’s a certain visual language that lays out the mosaic of the chaotic beauty of Indian cities charms both local and Western eyes alike
The first thing you notice about Mumbai: A Journey Through Its Kitchens, Streets, and Stories is not the writing or the recipes. It is the object itself. The weight of the book, the tactility of the paper, the rhythm of the layouts, and its confident use of white space and colour.
Published by Heirloom Project, Mumbai has now become the first Indian food book to be nominated for the prestigious James Beard Awards in the visual design category, and it is easy to see why it’s a big moment for Indian food publishing and design.
Behind this ambitious project is the proud Hyderabadi Sri Bodanapu, founder of Heirloom Cities, an independent design-led publishing house that explores urban identities through food and visual culture. Dividing her time between India and current home in San Francisco, Bodanapu’s intention is to move beyond standard cookbook formats and present visual archives of cities and their communities and cuisine.
Designed by Nandini Thirani and Team Unfold, the book treats Mumbai as a layered visual experience. Its design language borrows from the city’s collisions like old café signage, train routes, market clutter, fading typography, cinema posters, stainless steel utensils, monsoon greys and bursts of tropical colour. The pages carry the reader through street food stalls, Irani cafés, home kitchens and contemporary bars and dining spaces with cinematic flow.
There’s a certain visual language that lays out the mosaic of the chaotic beauty of Indian cities charms both local and Western eyes alike. Skirting the temptation for coffee-table books to flatten Indian cities into postcard exotica, Mumbai’s visual identity feels rooted in the city’s actual textures that are humid, crowded, excessive, elegant and worn at the edges. The book’s real triumph lies in how seamlessly the edited volume of essays sits alongside the photography, illustration, artistic typography and design, all speaking to one another to offer a sumptuous platter of urban life and its foodways.
The photography by Bhavya Pansari offer images that are lush without becoming overly styled. An old table bearing a cold drink and snack glows under café lighting; a street-side vendor pulling chai is caught mid-motion; old interiors hold onto their melancholy; dabbawallahs flash cheerful smiles on speeding trains. The photographs document atmosphere, migration, fatigue, aspiration and appetite, pleasure and remembrance.
Heirloom Cities is attempting to push the margins of conventional food publishing: a visual archive of cities through cuisine and memory. And the James Beard nomination feels special because it places an Indian food book and an Indian city within a global conversation on design excellence.
Mumbai: A Journey Through Its Kitchens, Streets, and Stories
Edited by Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal
Heirloom Project LLC
Pp: 378 Price: Rs 5,100