On an unhurried evening in Aurangabad’s New Osmanpura area, the clatter of steel thalis spills onto the street outside Pratham Swayampak Ghar, a modest eatery tucked between a pharmacy and an electrical shop. Inside, the air thickens with the scent of frying thalipeeth, slow-cooked aloo sabzi and the unmistakable intimacy of a home kitchen. Saree-clad women move briskly between stoves and tawas, but without the dramatics of restaurant showmanship. Their pace is practised, the unspoken choreography of those who have cooked for a lifetime.
“People can’t eat hotel food every day,” says Nandini Chapalgaonkar, the 80-something matriarch who co-founded the enterprise. “Home-cooked meals bring a different calm.”
She recounts a story that begins in 2002 when she and her friend Jyoti Kawar first began the venture, unsure whether anyone would be willing to pay for domestic-style meals. “I wondered if people would even like it,” she says. Her husband, then a sitting judge of the high court, surprised her. “He congratulated me and gave me full permission.”
The early days were bleak. “For six months, not a single person came,” she recalls. She and her partner would buy “ten rotis and a little sabzi” to start the day. The breakthrough came when a friend, faced with guests at home and a sick wife, asked them to prepare food for six. “After that, we never looked back,” she says.
Today, Pratham Swayampak Ghar employs around 30 women, many of whom rely on the income to support schooling for their children or to supplement erratic agricultural earnings. “A woman cannot truly be confident until she earns her own money,” Nandini insists. Past Dev Deepawali, three women bought scooters. “Their joy is my joy,” she says. “They feel proud. They feel seen.”
Her enterprise remains a modest operation without any glossy signage, no elaborate branding, and yet it embodies something far larger, how women-led self-help groups are reviving regional cuisines and serving success stories, one eatery at a time. It also marks the slow but resolute shift of women from domestic kitchens to formal workplaces, especially in smaller cities where women’s employment remains among the lowest globally.
Across India, similar initiatives are beginning to alter the landscape of opportunity for women who have long been excluded from professional culinary spheres. Their motivations differ, some born from necessity, others from activism or entrepreneurial instinct but they converge on a common axis: women finding visibility, income and identity through food.
A kitchen in the woods
A very different scene plays out in the dense, teak-lined wilderness of Tipai, a nature-focused retreat straddling the borders of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Here, the kitchen at Palaash opens out into the forest rather than shutting it out. Cooking happens over open fire, in underground pits, on chulhas and sigdis; pots are made of cast iron, bamboo and stone. The pace is almost ritualistic, as vegetables pulled from a garden ten feet away move from soil to plate within hours.
Overseeing the space is national award winner Chef Amninder Sandhu, a pioneer of slow-fire cooking. Her team comprises five women from the local community, all of whom once worked in housekeeping or staff cafeterias at the Tipai property.
“These are the ladies who used to bake 400 chapatis a day,” Sandhu says. “They’ve been cooking for 20-25 years. Their sincerity, their consistency, that’s what made us bring them in.”
This women-led brigade now executes a seven-course degustation menu that draws from the culinary footprints of the surrounding region. One course may involve vegetables flash-fried tempura-style, another might be a slow-roasted root, glazed with roselle from their own garden. A delicate marigold sorbet arrives last, its flavour bright but restrained.
When the women first stepped into the kitchen, they had never worked in a fine-dining environment; some had never plated a dish for a guest. Today, they weigh ingredients, taste sauces, adjust seasoning, and discuss textures with the poise of experienced professionals.
“They even have passports now,” Sandhu says. “We want them to travel, to run pop-ups, to see the world.”
The project is wrapped in a deeper social urgency. Tipai lies in Yavatmal district, a region with one of India’s highest farmer-suicide rates. “About 80% of people who work at Tipai are from the village community,” Sandhu explains. “We wanted to uplift the local community.”
The women, she says, have gone from treating local ingredients casually to presenting them with pride. “They grew up taking these ingredients for granted. Now they see how guests appreciate them and it makes the ladies genuinely happy.”
A photograph taken in the kitchen shows the five women in bright orange aprons, leaning against a stone counter, smiling shyly, one flashing a peace sign. It is a portrait of quiet revolution, one built on daily labour, skill and dignity.
Chefs, not just cooks
In the bustle of Delhi’s Amar Colony, Anahata Cafe offers a strangely gentle refuge. Its founder, Meenakshi Kumar, was once a lawyer, then a chef, and then a reluctant farmer. After moving back to India from Thailand in 2020, lockdown forced her, like millions of others, into a slower, interior rhythm. “I had a lot of time and a piece of land, so I started organic farming,” she says. “After 3-4 years, I felt the urge to do something again, even considered returning to law.”
Her pivot came unexpectedly when she noticed a vacant storefront in GK’s N-Block Market, where she initially began Roots Cafe. The plan began modestly: an organic vegetable and coffee shop. But the cafe grew beyond that. “I used my cooking skills, created recipes, and everything came together,” she says.
The cafe has now been rebranded to Anahata Cafe, a Sanskrit word meaning “heart chakra”. “I started this cafe not to just cook great food, but to create a space where people can pause, breathe, and reconnect, with themselves, with others, and with the present moment. Here it is a small sanctuary of stillness and soul,” she says.
Kumar’s workforce today is a team of 10 women, none formally trained, many of whom had been rejected from other cafes because of weak English or lack of experience. “All I wanted was the right attitude and basic cooking skills,” she adds.
The training was intensive: table service, cutlery etiquette, hygiene, how to wear aprons, how to keep hair and nails clean, “all the things usually learnt in culinary school.” Most had never worked with lettuce or feta cheese. Now they can cook pho, Thai curries and “healthy, organic and global” plates that have become the cafe’s signature.
The transformation, says Kumar, has been remarkable. “They’re earning, supporting their husbands. They feel proud.” In October, the women travelled together to Goa. “For some, it was their first flight. They were intimidated on the first day, but now they are confident.”
She notes that Delhi society can be conservative, and its cafe culture quietly unforgiving. One employee joined Roots after leaving another cafe where she “was looked down upon because she couldn’t speak English.”
At Anahata, they are asked to claim space rather than shrink from it. “I ask them to call themselves chefs, not just cooks,” Meenakshi says. “I tell them to see themselves owning a cafe of their own someday.” Her ambition for them is not purely culinary, it is structural, aspirational, long-term.
Scaling up on street food
Street food is one of India’s strongest cultural currencies. It’s democratic, omnipresent, relentlessly inventive. But it is also a male-dominated domain. Chatpata Affair, the brainchild of Shiju Pappen, attempts to critique and redesign that.
Launched in 2020, the brand grew quickly from two outlets in Gurugram to a franchise model that now includes nearly 100 outlets, about 40-45% of which are run by women. After rising through Pizza Hut and Papa John’s to CEO-level roles, Pappen wanted to “do something on an Indian scale,” celebrating the diversity of regional street foods. “Whenever we think of street food, it’s always something chatpata,” he says. “That’s how the name came.”
His most ambitious idea, however, is Chatpata Affair Nukkad, a kiosk model launched in September 2025 and run exclusively by women. The kiosks are placed in residential colonies for proximity and safety. “This is to give women the opportunity to become entrepreneurs,” he explains.
The company provides training, some handholding, team members if needed, the kiosk itself, marketing support and raw materials. “Whatever profits come, they stay with the women,” he says. They are encouraged to create new dishes, allowing them ownership of the menu and minimising failure risks. Two Nukkad outlets, in Gurugram and Bengaluru, are already operational.
Pappen holds personal stakes in the question of women’s professional mobility. His wife was selected twice for MasterChef India but withdrew, first when their baby fell ill, then when a school exam intervened.
“Women put family first and their passion second,” he says. “If community and family become flexible, women can balance both.” His kiosks are built around that principle: low-barrier entrepreneurship for women who cannot afford to travel far, pay high rents, or battle unsafe conditions.
Sanctuary for survivors
If some initiatives began from opportunity or entrepreneurship, Sheroes Hangout was born from devastation. In 2017, Alok Dixit, then serving in the Indian Air Force, met an acid-attack survivor during a morning walk. She told him she could not find a job anywhere. That single conversation pushed Dixit to quit his job, launch a campaign in Delhi and create a space where survivors could work with dignity and community. The first Sheroes cafe opened in Agra, painted with bold murals and protest-art, a place that declared visibility rather than concealment.
Today, there are four Sheroes cafes. Agra, Lucknow, Delhi and Noida. Across them, more than 40 women are employed. At the Lucknow outlet, nine women run the cafe.
“Whenever we find out about someone who has gone through an acid attack, our team reaches out,” says Nitin Yadav, manager. They offer medical assistance, help with police cases and legal procedure, and then extend an invitation: visit the cafe, feel the space, decide whether they want to work there. “If they like the place and feel comfortable, they are offered a job.”
The shift in women has been profound. “Earlier, the ladies hesitated,” Yadav says. “They didn’t want to come out of the veil. But now they’re confident, they don’t hide. They speak confidently, and financially as well they feel good.” In a society that routinely erases survivors from public life, Sheroes performs the opposite act, it turns invisibility into participation, silence into employment, and stigma into solidarity.
Food for thought
Taken together, these spaces complicate conventional narratives about women and kitchens. For decades, Indian women have cooked at home but have been underrepresented in professional cooking. Estimates suggest that women make up only 10–15% of India’s formal restaurant workforce, and an even smaller fraction of head chefs. Social norms, household duties, mobility constraints, expectations of childcare limit women’s access to flexible, safe and paid work. Food, ironically, becomes both a barrier and an entry point: women are expected to cook at home, but rarely offered opportunities to monetise that experience.
Yet Pratham Swayampak Ghar, Palaash, Anahata Cafe, Chatpata Affair Nukkad and Sheroes Hangout point to a different possibility: the kitchen as a platform for reimagining work, identity, even community.
At Pratham Swayampak Ghar, work is steady, unglamorous, but deeply empowering. At Palaash, the kitchen becomes a site of artistic expression and cultural preservation. At Anahata Cafe, it becomes a school, a studio, a training ground. At Chatpata Affair Nukkad, it is the smallest unit of entrepreneurship. At Sheroes Hangout, it becomes a place of refuge, protest, and rebirth.
These spaces challenge the assumption that formal employment must always be urban, corporate, English-speaking or male-dominated. They operate instead in the idioms of local culture, community economies, handmade skills, and interpersonal trust.
These efforts come at a time when women entrepreneurs are playing an increasingly significant role in the economy. As per statistics ministry, female labour force participation rate has recorded a sustained increase since June 2025 and stood at 35.3% in December 2025, marking the highest level observed during the year.
According to a NITI Aayog report, credit for financing business purposes witnessed about 37 lakh new loan accounts opened by women, with disbursement totalling Rs 1.9 lakh crore. While the number of accounts opened for business purposes has grown 4.6 times since 2019, these loans constitute only 3% of overall loans availed by women borrowers in 2024. Shares of loan originations to women in semi-urban and rural areas are higher for business purposes (65%), and gold (70%) than for personal finance loans.
There is a notable rise in popularity, with 16% of women borrowers holding a loan to finance business needs in their portfolio as of December 2024, compared to just 9% in December 2019.