A Retired Teacher Who Became Mumbai's Most Followed Food Critic

Meera Nair is very clear about why she started writing about food: "I was going mad," she says, with the directness of someone who spent three decades managing classrooms. "My husband was still working. My children were grown. I had read everything on my bookshelf twice. I needed to do something."

The something turned out to be a blog called Meera Eats, which she launched in 2023 with a review of a Konkani restaurant in Mahim that had been open since 1971 and had never been written about by anyone with more than 200 followers.

"I have no formal training," she says. "I have never worked in a kitchen. What I have is 67 years of eating in this city, a very good memory, and standards." The standards, it turns out, are what people came for.

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Why she turned down the book deals

Three publishers have approached her. She has turned down all of them. "They want me to write about the restaurants everyone already knows. The Taj, the rooftop bars, the places food journalists have reviewed a hundred times. That is not what I do." What she does is find the places that have been feeding neighbourhoods for decades without anyone paying attention. A 40-year-old Sindhi thali counter in Sion. A family running an Assamese tiffin service out of their flat in Ghatkopar.

"I am not interested in discovery," she says. "I am interested in acknowledgement. These places have always existed. I am just finally writing them down."