Chand Sahrawat: Come to India with me. January 2027

In January 2027, chef and restaurateur Chand Sahrawat will lead a small group of travellers through India with Good Food Journeys, tracing a route through Mumbai, Amritsar, Jaipur, Agra and Delhi.

Across 13 days, the journey brings together five-star stays, extraordinary dining, private cultural experiences and some of India’s most unforgettable places, from the Golden Temple at dawn and the candlelit splendour of Amber Fort to sunrise at the Taj Mahal and the spice-filled lanes of Old Delhi.

Here, Chand shares why returning to India is never simply a holiday, and what makes this journey so personal.

I left India at 17. I have been returning ever since.

There is something about going back to the country you grew up in as an adult, through different eyes, with a different life behind you. The aromas hit you first. Then the noise. Then something quieter and harder to name: the feeling of a place that is still yours, even after all these years in New Zealand.

I have partnered with Good Food Journeys, a Kiwi company with deep roots in India, to host a 13-day small group journey through Mumbai, Amritsar, Jaipur, Agra and Delhi. I grew up in India. I speak three of its regional languages. I carry its stories in my bones: the India of my childhood, of my grandmother’s kitchen, of streets I knew before they had traffic lights. And I also love the India that exists now: fast, modern, ambitious, and completely electric. One of my greatest joys on these trips is watching our guests see both at once, the ancient and the brand-new sitting side by side and feeling that same wonderful disorientation, I feel every time I land.

Amritsar will be new to me too, and I cannot wait. The Golden Temple at dawn is one of those experiences that every person I know who has been there has struggled to describe. We will share a meal at the Langar, the vast community kitchen that feeds tens of thousands of people daily without charge, and that evening lose ourselves in the streets for the Lohri festival: bonfires, music, smoky tandoors, fresh jalebis straight from hot syrup.

We begin in Mumbai, staying at the St Regis. Mumbai is a city that looks the world in the eye and dresses for it, and The Bombay Canteen captures that energy perfectly. Playful, nostalgic and inventive, it is contemporary India on a plate: regional flavours reimagined with wit and confidence. From there, north to the warmth of Punjab. Then Jaipur, where we stay in an 18th-century palace, dine by candlelight inside Amber Fort, and spend private time with master jewellers whose craft has been handed down through generations. Cooking classes. Block printing. A palace kitchen where Rajasthani hospitality feels untouched by time.

Then a sunrise at the Taj Mahal. Lunch at a café run by acid attack survivors. And Delhi: old and new colliding gloriously, rickshaws through Chandni Chowk, Asia’s largest spice market, and a farewell dinner with celebrated chef Manish Mehrotra at Nisaba.

What I bring to this trip cannot be written in an itinerary. I bring the nostalgia and the navigation, knowing when to linger and when to lean in, when a moment needs context and when it simply needs silence. I can translate not just the language but the feeling of a place. And I genuinely love watching New Zealanders fall for India the way I fell for New Zealand.

The trip departs 10 January 2027. Thirteen days. Five cities. Five-star luxury hotels including the St Regis, Taj Jai Mahal Palace, ITC Mughal and The Oberoi. Prices and payment plans are available on request.

Spaces are limited and this will fill.

If India has been on your list, come properly. Come with someone who knows it, loves it, and cannot wait to share it with you.

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