Celebrity chef Vikas Khanna has revealed that what gave him ‘perspective’ on his New York restaurant, Bungalow, which recently won the Michelin 2024 Bib Gourmand Award, was not his Michelin star but his beloved late sister Radhika Khanna.

In a candid chat with CNN host Julia Chatterley, Khanna discussed how she inspired him to dare to dream.

“SHE taught me… not my degrees and my Michelin stars, or what I was wearing on my head… She taught me a whole new perspective on a restaurant,” Khanna said.

“She taught me that this is not the food business. You can elevate people out of their pain and loneliness, nostalgia. This is what food has to do,” he added.

Radhika, a prominent fashion designer, author, and entrepreneur, had passed away in 2022 after battling lupus for several years.

A promise

Reminiscing on his 2003 birthday in New York, Khanna shared that his sister had taken him to an expensive restaurant hoping the chef would come and meet him.

However, she was disappointed to learn that the chef only meets those who order “tasting menus.”

“I failed,” Radhika had told Khanna, who thought it was his best-ever birthday.

On her deathbed, Khanna said, Radhika took a promise from him to “never be like that chef.” “We had great food in that restaurant, but we were made to feel less.”

“‘Un-restaurant’ yourself,” she said, adding that the Indian chef was gifted.

Khanna shared that his sister wanted him to welcome everyone the way he did when he was a “cook” and never let his chef life make him arrogant.

The chef said it is times like these that he misses her the most. “I would call my sister when something big happened, and she would go, ‘Mera sher! You’re gonna show the world!’”

Khanna, who was unsure if he wanted Bungalow to be successful or a big one, shared that Radhika wanted it to be a “deeper restaurant.”

‘It’s my daughter’

When the CNN host tried calling Bungalow Khanna’s baby, he said, “It’s my daughter,” and associated it with the word ‘shakti’ which means ‘women power’.