Tell My Mother I Like Boys

A Powerful LGBTQ Memoir by Chef Suvir Saran | Indian Food Writing, Identity, Belonging & Life Across Continents

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Tell My Mother I Like Boys is a memoir of appetite—for food, for love, for belonging. Suvir Saran,
one of India’s most celebrated chefs, traces a life lived between continents and cultures, where the kitchen becomes both a sanctuary and a crucible. From the spice-laden streets of New Delhi to the pressure-cooked world of Michelin-starred New York dining, he reveals how cooking is never just about taste but about memory, survival and the making of the self.

Saran writes of the exhilaration of opening Devi, the first Indian restaurant in North America to earn a Michelin star, and of the loneliness that trailed even the brightest success. In his hands, food becomes a vocabulary: the slow patience of a biryani, the intricate layering of a galouti kebab, the quiet comfort of dal simmered at home. Each dish carries a memory and meaning, stitching together the fragments of exile, grief, desire and return.

At once an intimate kitchen story and a reckoning with identity, Tell My Mother I Like Boys is about the hungers that shape us and the meals—lavish and humble—that teach us how to live.