FOOD

ing on it. Dabbawalas tend to develop close friendships with their clients because they sometimes work the same route for years.”

Sheth, who’s 39, grew up in Bombay (before it was Mumbai), but from an early age she began to accumulate knowledge of India’s vastly di erent regional cuisines. Summers were spent at farmhouses on agricultural land her father, a civil engineer, helped develop, or taking long family road trips. “I had a ton of cousins all over India,” she says. “Visiting them over vacation really exposed me to di erent cuisines. Cooking and feeding people was a way to connect with folks, and no matter where we went, food was the central experience for us.”

She learned that from her mother. “I remember standing by her side, asking a million questions. She is very much an eyeball type of cook. You smell it, and you see the texture and the color, and you determine if it needs anything else.” year before taking a tour of the Boka Group, with managing stints at GT Fish & Oyster, GT Prime, and Swift & Sons, and then settling in at Momotaro for a year.

Meanwhile, early last year she launched the Chicago chapter of the community-driven Queer Soup Night fundraising series, and in October, worn out from the restaurant business, she left Momotaro and took a more lucrative job in management consulting, with the aim of supporting a return to pop-ups and more intimate and community-oriented cooking.

But “when COVID hit, I obviously couldn’t host, or gather large amounts of people. I had been wracking my brain thinking about what I can do. It was such a challenging time for a lot of people, and what brought me a lot of comfort was speaking to my family, cooking my family recipes every day, and eating my own comfort food.”