I started my career as a Kitchen Management trainee with Massive Restaurants (a leading group of restaurateurs in Mumbai) and worked with three of their flagship restaurants: namely, Masala Library, Farzi Café and Kode – all among the premier restaurant category and hugely popular. This role primarily required my involvement in day-to-day kitchen operations – including working as a line chef, coordinating with servers and assisting in numerous food preparation activities. I also learned about cross functional kitchen management as well as coordinating between the numerous departments involved in food preparation and service. As a result of my performance, I was promoted to the role of Kitchen Executive after a mere one and a half years. Subsequently, my role expanded to managing the pass-through from the kitchen to the dining space, managing kitchen inventory and hygiene along with assisting the head chef for special orders and participating in new menu curation and testing. This was a great learning experience and taught me to apply the principles I had studied in the classroom in a live restaurant environment as well as how to efficiently manage the challenges one encounters in daily restaurant kitchen operations, especially in high pressure situations.On the strength of these newly acquired learnings, I was able to next secure a role as Sous-Chef with The Habitat at Hotel Unicontinental. In addition to kitchen responsibilities, I additionally learned about food photography, strategy development to revamp the brand and design of marketing creatives and also took on training and team development activities for newly hired staff. A year after that, I was promoted to the post of Executive Chef and F&B In-Charge and thus have been able to add a slew of newer skills to my repository. This has enabled me to take a more active role in inventory management - specifically forecasting seasonal demand to optimize procurement operations, recruiting and training F&B staff (service and kitchen) as well as using historical experience and anticipating customer demand and curating menus as per expected customer preferences. Additionally, I headed the team that developed ‘The Habitat Canteen’, our first cloud kitchen in an attempt to enable the brand to reach a wider audience.