Under the semi-lockdown conditions of March and April 2020, Kunwal couldn’t see her friends, or cook for them as she loved to do. So, she started putting together “soup care packages” – four soups and four dressings with a personalised message – and delivering to whoever wanted them. Then came Ramadan, and she branched out a little into light, suhoor-suitable meals.
Word of her culinary prowess spread, and by August, when restrictions eased a bit, she was able to engage face-to-face with the base she’d built. “That’s when I became really addicted to feeding people,” says Kunwal, having parleyed that compulsion into a supper club she calls Moreish by K, set snugly into the warm, creative atmosphere of her art-filled home.
“The people who come, the stories we share, the way we bond… it’s such a nice vehicle to connect.”
While the supper clubs are a roaring success, deliveries are still the major part of Moreish By K. In the last 10 months, Kunwal has fed over 4,000 people and will be moving her set up to a professional kitchen in May.
A British Pakistani raised in London, Kunwal has no formal culinary training and is largely “self-taught”, except for what she learned from the combined influence of her mother and grandmother. Her mum is a true Londoner and would take Kunwal to try new ingredients in markets and food halls. Her grandmother had come to the UK from Lahore.
Pistachio milk cake
Roasted cauliflower florets on a herb and labneh base
“She had all these traditional recipes and every time she made something she’d tell a story connected to it. I was fascinated.” Further back, her family had migrated from Persia to the Punjab, and food has been a means of connecting to those roots. “There are seven or eight Persian dishes I make; they’re my only link to that heritage.”
Mixing her gastronomic inheritance with personalised flourishes, she produces variations on classics like haleem. “It’s Persian and also Punjabi, brought down by the Mughals. I do my own rendition, make my own oils, play around with it. I’ve glammed it up.” This goes down especially well in the modern melting pot of Dubai, according to Kunwal.
“I don’t cook Punjabi food, I cook contemporary dishes that have Punjabi flavours. That’s what I’m known as, the flavour queen. And everything I cook is wholesome. No sugar, no white rice. If I make biryani, it’s with quinoa. I make my own rye bread, and roti or chapatti with coconut flour. If I fry anything it’s in walnut oil.”
The supper club works off a changing, evolving menu as Kunwal tries out different flavour profiles, responds to feedback and “evolves with the food”. She’s got her own preferences – “my favourite thing is slow cooking meat, putting a lot of trust in one pot for nine hours” – but the pleasure still comes from feeding other people, and the soups that she started with remain a core part of her offer.
“The people who come, the stories we share, the way we bond… it’s such a nice vehicle to connect”
“Soup is such nice, underrated food, such a heart-warming dish. The expression that I see on someone’s face when they have a good bowl of soup, it’s all the emotions at once.”
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Kunwal is indeed the queen of flavours. And we became increasingly convinced of this throughout our eight-course dinner, from her addictive yakhni chicken bone broth (cooked for 12 hours) to her pulled slow-cooked beef samosas with goat cheese and acacia honey, or her delicately roasted tamarind salmon to a rich and dreamy nihari with succulent beef shanks and rye croutons. Her experimental nature really shone through in her haleem, which was comforting and hands-down the fanciest version of this thick porridge we’ve ever seen. Her homemade oils, which include basil, chilli, berry or coriander concoctions, are lip-smackingly good. We’re also happy to say that her take on a pistachio milk cake is the best we’ve had in Dubai.
