Vikas Khanna On His TIME100 Moment

For years, Vikas Khanna was the only Indian chef in the Western world with a Michelin star.

And yet, he was miserable about it.

He had done everything the guidebooks asked of him — the single drop of sauce, the engineered bite, the one-hour story served in a single mouthful. By every industry metric, he had made it. Then his mother flew in from Amritsar, sat down at his restaurant, and didn't finish her food.

"Yeh toh khaana humare country ka nahi hai," she told him. This isn't even food from our country. Whose food is this?

Khanna, 54, who has just been featured on the TIME100 List in 2026, is telling me this a few days before the TIME100 Gala on April 23rd. He has just been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world, profiled in the magazine by chef Eric Ripert, who called him "a man of extraordinary heart." The recognition is seismic — in the chef world, he says, TIME sits above even the Michelin Guide. "If your name comes in the Michelin guide, then also you're hoping you get featured in TIME magazine. This is the peak."

And yet, the first thing he wants to talk about isn't the list. He wants to talk about his mom, his sister, and the years he spent, as he puts it, with his back turned to the people he was supposedly cooking for.

The broad strokes of his story are familiar by now. Born in Amritsar with a clubfoot, he couldn't run until he was 13. He learned to cook beside his grandmother, sold chole bhature outside a local school, and ran a small banquet operation called Lawrence Garden out of the back of the family house. In 2000, it was demolished. He left for New York with almost nothing. He cleaned apartments, sold food on the streets of TriBeCa, slept at Grand Central, spent nights in shelters. On the subway, strangers called him "Curry Boy."

Eventually, he landed at Junoon, earned the Michelin star, wrote more than 40 books, hosted MasterChef India, and made a film. The résumé is impressive on paper. But Khanna says the Michelin years were hollow in a way he didn't fully understand until his mother's visit.

"Sab kuch inspectors ke liye ban raha tha," he says. Everything was being made for the inspectors. "The inspectors are trained in a way that only French cuisine is superior. And that's what I did. I was walking with that in my head."

His older sister Radhika, a fashion designer and yoga author who lived for years with lupus, was the one who pointed it out. "She made me realise that you think wearing the Michelin crown on your head is the peak. But it's not." She told him his art form had no language, and that he had forgotten who he was cooking for.

Then the pandemic hit, then came lawsuits over his name, and then Radhika's organs began to fail. From her hospital bed, she kept dreaming up a restaurant with him — the carvings on the walls, the lines down the block, Durga Pooja for nine straight days. She texted him décor ideas until the end. After she died in his arms in 2022, parcels kept arriving in New York under her name — things she had ordered for a restaurant she would never see.

Bungalow, which opened in the East Village in 2024, is that restaurant. It's a tribute to Radhika, and it runs on her logic. During Ramzan this year, 100,000 people were on the waitlist. There are bhangra dancers at 4 p.m. There was a nine-day Durga Pooja. There was an iftar for Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor who was named to the TIME100 list alongside Khanna. "The Michelin inspectors were confused," he says, laughing.

When the TIME news broke, the first person Khanna called was his mother. She doesn't really follow these things. "Mera toh koi rishtedaar padh nahi raha TIME magazine Amritsar mein," he says — none of my relatives in Amritsar are reading TIME magazine. The second message he got was from Priyanka Chopra. “She’s just made different,” he said. "She's walked down this road. She knows what it's like."

He also mentions, almost in passing, a compliment he's never forgotten: Shah Rukh Khan once told him his food tasted like home, and that means the world to him till date.

"This validation has come at a very different time," he says, "when I'm not seeking any validation or any fame or awards, but I'm grateful."