Food tripping Bihar - When a cuisine comes of age
Regional cuisine has always had a flair for the theatrical, but its latest venture, Food Tripping at Le Meridien New Delhi, elevates that instinct into something genuinely compelling. This exclusive pop-up dining series launched in May 2026 with an ambitious promise: to transform dinner into a cultural odyssey. Having followed the inaugural chapter closely, one can say the hotel largely delivers on that lofty ambition.
The concept is elegantly simple yet richly layered. Each chapter of the series is conceived as an intimate, reservation-only evening where food, music, visual art, and storytelling converge to evoke a specific place and its culinary soul. Rather than merely plating “regional cuisine,” the team at Le Meridien has deliberately chosen authentic voices - home chefs rooted in their native traditions - to anchor the Indian chapters, lending each menu a credibility that hotel dining rarely achieves.
The inaugural chapter, Soul of Bihar, ran in May at Eau de Monsoon, and it set a remarkably high bar. Curated in collaboration with Shacchi Anand, founder of Baghar-e-Magadh, the menu was a confident, deeply personal exploration of Bihari cuisine - a culinary tradition too often overlooked on the national fine-dining circuit. Ancestral recipes were presented with quiet elegance, never losing their soul to unnecessary modernisation. Dishes arrived carrying layers of memory and regional identity, the kind of cooking that makes you pause mid-bite and reconsider your assumptions about a cuisine.
What distinguishes Food Tripping from similar hotel pop-ups is its insistence on atmosphere as an equal partner to the food. Regional music drifted through the space, visual storytelling framed the walls, and the overall sensory design felt considered rather than decorative. You weren’t merely eating Bihari food - you were, however briefly, inhabiting a version of Bihar itself. Meena Bhatia’s vision for the series - that every flavour should carry a memory and every evening should feel like a journey — is no mere marketing language. The execution reflects genuine curatorial intent. That said, the true test of any dining series lies in its consistency across chapters. The format, however polished, must keep reinventing itself to sustain anticipation. With plans to span Indian regional cuisines alongside international editions, Food Tripping has real potential to become one of Delhi’s most distinctive dining destinations. For now, on the strength of Soul of Bihar alone, it earns a warm thump up!
