“If I’m going to eat this dish, how can I elevate it visually? How can I make it interesting? How can I make it fun?” asks Pooja Raheja, owner of Bare Bombay and the catering company Eat Drink Design, which she runs with her husband, Neeraj Sharada. The answers can be disarming. A toastie arrives filled with crab and shaped like one. A chip and dip platter lands on the table looking uncannily like a painter’s palette, colours dotted with deliberate flourish. The question of fun, it’s clear, is taken seriously here.

At Bare, led in the kitchen by head chef Aman Singhal, flavour and form are imagined together. The plating is sparse, almost understated, with the real design folded into the food itself: its shape, structure, and the moment of theatre when it first appears. Pooja calls the philosophy “fun dining” – looser and more playful than fine dining, but just as thoughtful. After more than a decade in catering, Bare is her space to experiment, collaborate, and deliver the thrill of the unexpected.

Unexpected is very much her instinct. Part dreamer, doer, and designer, her team jokes that she’s a “conceptual chef” – one who wakes up with unusual flavour pairings already forming, such as seafood and vanilla. Those ideas spill quickly into the kitchen, sparking long conversations and the occasional friendly debate with the chefs, as concepts are tested, pulled apart, and rebuilt, and ingredients revisited in new textures and forms: whipped into foams, folded into purees, or transformed entirely.

For Pooja, that back and forth is essential. “Collaboration has always been my guiding philosophy,” she says. “There is a power and energy in it that is hard to beat.” At Bare, that spirit is by design, turning it into a culinary playground where the best dishes are cooked up together.

Dish Notes: Chip and Dip Platter
It started on a monsoon drive. Pooja and Neeraj were deep in discussion over the menu when they decided to get out of the city for a breather. En route, they pulled over at a roadside bhajiwala for palak patta chaat – spinach leaves dipped in batter and fried until crisp. As Pooja ate her way through, an idea came to her: a chip and dip platter built around the edible leaves most people ignore – bok choy, shiso, betel, sage, culantro, whatever the season offers. In this dish, they are fried into thin, crackling chips and arranged beside the dips in a custom matte-white bowl – its rim intentionally uneven, leaf textures pressed into the clay. At Bare, the tableware is sometimes made to serve the dish, in whatever material or form best highlights its qualities.

The dips are as considered as the chips: sea buckthorn, carrot, and ginger; green garlic aioli; tomato, rhubarb, and nigella seeds; purple cabbage; strawberry and rosemary; black lemon ketchup; lemon gel; and lavender vinegar gel. Dotted around the bowl in bright, jewel-like pools, they turn this dish into a palate teaser – and a preview of everything that follows.

Dish Notes: Black Pepperfry Crab Toastie
What if a toastie looked exactly like what it held inside? That’s what Pooja and Aman asked themselves. Still golden and crisp-edged, but shaped like a crab. Once the idea was out there, Neeraj ran with it – the challenge being exactly the sort he thrives on. What followed was three months of research and development – studying the proportions of a live crab, building a 3D model, then a wooden one, before finding a die maker willing to try turning it into a sandwich mold. They tested four versions before the shape was right, and then a toasting specialist was brought in to make sure it actually behaved like a sandwich in the pan.

The time and effort invested paid off – the result is a puffed, bronzed crab shell filled with gooey black pepper crab and served with coconut yogurt drizzled with curry leaf oil. When it arrives at the table, it brings a smile. That, for Pooja, is always the point. “People often assume my food will be fancy or formal,” she says. “But actually, some dishes should just make you smile.” Next in development: a chili cheese toastie shaped like a smiling face. @bare.bombay