Why I’m Writing Again

A chef-founder’s journal on restaurants, grief, sustainability, burnout, sandwiches and finding my way back to long-form writing.

Hi, I’m Radhika.

Or Pandoodle, depending on how long you’ve known me on the internet.

I used to blog years ago before restaurants, burnout, algorithms and life got in the way. Recently, I found myself missing long-form writing again, so this feels like the right place to restart.

This won’t just be about food.

It’ll be about restaurants, ingredients, sustainability, hospitality, travel, ambition, failure, dogs, tiny sandwich shops and everything else that comes with building things while trying not to lose yourself in the process.

So here we are again.

There was a time when I wrote all the time.

Long before algorithms, trending audio, “creator economy” and the pressure to turn every thought into a 12-second reel with subtitles and a hook in the first three seconds.

Back then, the internet felt slower. Kinder, maybe.

People wrote long rambling blog posts about meals they ate in tiny towns, terrible dates, burnt cakes, strange ingredients and restaurants they loved enough to miss. Food writing felt human. Messy. Curious. Nobody was trying to become a brand every second of the day.

Then somewhere along the way, I stopped writing.

Partly because restaurants consume you whole. Partly because grief does too.

After my mother passed away, I buried myself in work because it was the only place I felt remotely in control. I took on more than I needed to.
More restaurants. More responsibility. More pressure.
More noise.
Anything to avoid silence.

I moved to Goa angry with Delhi itself. Angry that everyone still seemed to have their mothers while I didn’t. Somewhere in my head, I think I believed my grief would transform into this beautiful ode to her through a restaurant. I poured everything into it. Every bit of energy, creativity, money, emotion, hope.

And I still failed.

People talk about Goa like it heals you.
For me, it was firefighting every single day.

There were moments I loved though.

My dogs had space there. Real space. Not Delhi space.

I miss my neighbour’s pink guava tree that would lean into my backyard every season. I miss early morning plant shopping as though fish mint, garlic vine, love apples and tiny ceramic pots could somehow fix grief. I miss slower mornings before service swallowed the day whole.

The last few years have changed me completely.

I became quieter. Calmer. More ambitious, weirdly enough. I fought depression. I gained weight. I burnt out spectacularly. I learnt that ego is often the loudest ingredient in the room and that food becomes far more interesting when you let ingredients speak for themselves.

Ingredients became more important than performance.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, the internet changed too.

Everyone became content creators.
Restaurants became content factories.
Hospitality became thumbnails and transitions and dancing reels.

I still can’t dance to market my restaurants.

And honestly, I don’t want to.

Apparently the solution to surviving hospitality now is pointing aggressively at sandwiches while music from 2007 plays in the background.

I know that sounds bitter.
Maybe it is a little.

But I’m also tired of pretending everyone in hospitality is thriving right now when most of us are quietly exhausted. Tired of performative sustainability. Tired of aesthetics without substance. Tired of trends moving faster than people can think.

And despite all of that, I still deeply love this world.

I love ingredients.
I love tiny sandwich shops.
I love luxury hotels and roadside fruit vendors in equal measure.
I love dogs sleeping under restaurant tables.
I love the chaos of service.
I love the emotional drama of feeding people for a living.
I love communities who have been cooking intelligently long before sustainability became fashionable vocabulary.

And I think I miss having a space where thoughts could exist before becoming content.

So maybe this blog becomes that again.

A chef-founder’s journal.
A notebook.
A corner of the internet for recipes, failures, restaurants, travel, sustainability, tiny dining rooms, ambition, burnout, sandwiches and whatever else I find myself obsessing over.

Maybe nobody reads blogs anymore.

Maybe attention spans are too broken for long stories about hospitality, grief, dogs and pink guava trees.

But somewhere between losing parts of myself and trying to build them back again, I realised I missed writing because it was the one place where things didn’t need to perform.

So here we are again.

Pandoodle.

Slightly older.
Slightly burnt out.
Still ambitious.
Still curious.
Still incapable of dancing on the internet for restaurant marketing.

And finally writing again.

If you made it this far, thank you.

I genuinely don’t know if people still read long blogs anymore, but I’m excited to return to writing things that don’t fit into captions and reels.

More soon:

• chef-founder realities

• ingredients I’m obsessed with

• restaurant stories

• sustainability without buzzwords

• tiny dining spaces

• recipes

• travel notes

• whatever chaos I find myself in next

You can subscribe if you’d like to follow along.

— Radhika / Pandoodle