01 Sep 2026 read
At A Dialogue, Prerna Garg carves a dining experience through interpretation and reconstruction of heirloom recipes with comfort and culture being the hero ingredients
Growing up in Mubarikpur near Alwar in Rajasthan, life for Prerna Garg revolved around the changing seasons where summers meant gorging on melons like kachri, foot and arya, while winters brought wild berries, mustard and pearl millet or bajra. A trip to the market with her father meant new ways of looking at local produce, perhaps that's where she first learnt how to identify fresh vegetables and fruits simply by touch and observation.
Much like the meals she prepares today, her life has also been one that is shaped by connection, identity and clarity. She moved from Alwar to Bengaluru before putting down roots in Delhi. Shaped by traditional ecological knowledge and their own personal identities, sometime in 2023, Prerna and her husband Nitin Sisodia launched A Dialogue, where the duo bring heirloom food to city tablescapes. Through curated dining events and meals, A Dialogue aims to introduce city dwellers to family recipes, local, seasonal ingredients and food traditions that have been passed down in kitchens as regular ways of cooking. “What we’re doing is not new, it’s what hunters and gatherers used to do, learn what is growing in their surroundings and convert it into tangible recipes that were then passed down through generations,” Prerna explains.
While she modestly brushes off any mention of the “good” in her work, there’s no denying the fact that A Dialogue has renewed conversations around hyperlocal recipes and micro-seasonal harvest.
Their instagram handle is sepia toned nostalgia coasted with generous helping of local love. Through it you can trace the culinary journey they have embarked on, determined to break stereotypes along the way. “People think Rajasthan is just dal baati churma but it’s not. That's how we want to change the narrative of food in itself. A kind of food is not the only identity of a large region,” says Nitin.
It is this idea that forms the base of their practice. Curiosity to know more, do better, eat clean – all borrowed from everyday living principles of her ancestral family back in Mubarikpur. With no formal culinary training, Prerna turned to research to help understand food better. “When I started researching about them, I realised, this is what I grew up with.”
The work that goes into any culinary project under A Dialogue takes anywhere between a week to 10 days across different regions of the country. Here, the duo spends time working with the local community, understanding not just the regional food vocabulary but also their ways of growing, cooking and consuming it. It’s more about observing than participating. These research trips have taken Prerna and Nitin from Kutch to Sundarbans to Aravalis and Barmer and exposed them to knowledge and seasonal ingredients and techniques that live not in textbooks but in traditions passed down in homes and preserved in families and communities. Like that one time in Barmer, when they found communities growing cumin in seemingly barren landscapes. Or when they found out how pearl millet or bajra remained central to local diets throughout the year despite it being a warming grain. It is also how they discovered local varieties of arugula being grown away from over hyped, chalkboard menus in fabled city restaurants.
It is this discipline and drive to learn, imbibe and then create that has led to some of their most celebrated plates in the past starting with their first dining event in New Delhi, where the focus was on North Eastern Rajasthan cuisine, also Prerna’s native. Borrowing from her family recipes, they served bathua, a winter vegetable, with hung curd, a milk and pearl millet dessert, inspired by Prerna’s mother’s recipe and cocktails that featured marua, widely available in Rajasthan with chandan and fennel.
At the core of A Dialogue is transforming knowledge into an experience, which is reflected in the launch of the Raw Mango store in Kolkata, where they translated Sundarbans into a dinner experience. “It was very new because nothing is available in research papers that you can experience about Sundarbans unless you land up over there and really live there for some time,” Prerna says.
Their Sundarbans research revealed many varieties of rice, leafy vegetables, papaya, mangoes and bananas. So they simplified their discoveries to form a menu that highlighted mustard seeds, locally grown sona moong and starfruit served on a banana stem which doubled as a plate. Gondhoraj lemon, traditionally added to rice for fragrance, found its way in cocktails.
She believes In India, design is mostly spoken about with reference to textiles, fashion and decor but rarely ever in the context of food. With A Dialogues, she is working towards a space where India’s food design has a narrative and language of its own.
Their most recent exploration at Bundi, Rajasthan featured a menu and design inspired by the landscape of the Aravalis with wild berries like teet and lisoda. For teet, Prerna looked at her own family recipe; since it’s bitter when plucked, the berries were added to a clay pot full of water and left out in the sun for a month with occasional stirs. Eventually, the berries lost their bitterness and became sour. Prerna served these with crackers. Additionally, they used the teet shrub, which is grown with thorns as plates to recreate the feeling of eating in a forest. The tables were decorated with flowers from the lanes of Bundi while trees like dhok (which were already cut and) found on the forest floor were used for decor and plating.
Rather than categorising food by geography, A Dialogue questions what happens when you go beyond the usual information you know to be the truth. With each experience, it is their hope that people learn a new aspect of a region that takes them by surprise. Ask them what feeling they want people to leave an A Dialogue experience with and they are quick to say, “A sense of reflection, sense of belonging to the place.”
