Eventful City: A seat for Odisha at Delhi’s food table

4 min readUpdated: Jul 13, 2026 11:51 AM IST

Dahi bara aloo dum, the Cuttack street snack made of soft urad dal vadas soaked in buttermilk, served alongside ghugni (a white pea curry) and a spicy aloo dum

‘Dil waalon ki Dilli’ has always welcomed migrants from across the country — so much so that some neighbourhoods even carry the accent and scents of other states. Punjabi dhabas in some lane, Kerala meals in another, Bengali sweet shops tucked into a third. Anubhuti Mishra and Aditi Mohapatra, however, were of the view there should be more flavours from Odisha on Delhi’s platter.

The two women, both lawyers, run their cloud kitchen venture ‘Rosei Ghara’ — where one is served with homemade Odia food. Aditi and Anubhuti moved to Delhi for work from Cuttack and Bhubaneswar in 2013 and 2015, respectively.

Over the years, they found themselves missing the “specific mustard-sharp, spicy and unmistakably flavours of home”.They started this outlet out of “sheer homesickness”.

The two met through a mutual friend in 2021. Aditi recalls it all started with discussions on how they miss Odia food in Delhi.

“And then we just decided to do it ourselves.”

They began with home-kitchen deliveries in October, 2024, and switched to a cloud kitchen by March 2025.

They now host ‘supper clubs’ — intimate sit-downs for anywhere between 12 and 20 people — at their own or a friend’s house, and sometimes in partnership with venues across the city.

They serve dahi bara aloo dum, the quintessential Cuttack street snack made of soft urad dal vadas soaked in buttermilk, served alongside ghugni (a white pea curry) and a spicy aloo dum, finished with raw onion, green chilli and sev.

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Then there’s the badia piaji and nadia aloo bara — smashed onion fritters and coconut-potato cutlets — paired with ambula rai, made of sun-dried raw mangoes and a raw mustard-coconut paste, and amba khatta, a traditional sweet and tangy raw mango chutney.

But it is mudhi mangsho, which pairs crispy, puffed rice with a mutton curry, an unexpected combination of food that enthrals your senses.

The dishes did not make it to the menu without any trial and error. Neither Aditi nor Anubhuti were trained at a culinary school. They both learned from their mothers and grandmothers — before starting to cook under pressure once they left home.

“The first thing I ever cooked in my life was mutton,” Aditi says. Setting up the cloud kitchen required learning everything from scratch: standardising recipes for their chefs to follow, working out the preparation schedules, figuring out what could be frozen and portioned and what they absolutely could not.

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There have been some “missteps” too. One early experiment saw them plating chhena poda with maple syrup and pistachio. “It tasted very nice to us,” Anubhuti admits, “but it may have alienated the audience… as that is not how [it’s traditionally eaten].” It taught them where the line sits between authenticity and accessibility.

Aditi’s food memories trace back to her grandmother, who passed away two years ago and who, she says, built the family’s reputation one meal at a time. “She fed people amazing food. Anybody who `knew us and our family would know us because of that.” Much of what ‘Rosei Ghara’ serves today comes straight from the recipes she once cooked.

Anubhuti’s food memories are less about the kitchen and more about street food. She remembers eating adhi bara aloo dum between tuition classes.

As for what’s next, both are wary of scaling too fast.

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They would rather, as Aditi says, “do it at a smaller scale and do it well” than dilute the idea by becoming a franchise.

For now, the plan is more supper clubs, more collaborations with chefs working on other regional cuisines, and slowly making true their “ultimate dream” of an Odia restaurant in Delhi.

They, however, aren’t alone in this. Delhi does have a handful of other spaces serving Odia food. There are ‘Dish of Odisha’ in Lodhi Colony; ‘OriBonng’ in Gurgaon’s Sushant Lok; ‘Odisha Hotel’ which has opened in Sainik Farm, and the ‘Odisha Bhawan’ in Chanakyapuri.