It’s only January and 2026’s most exciting food pop-up is here

When chef Niyati Rao unfurls her blood-red Paithani sari—a wedding gift from her father-in-law, its border thick with multicoloured flowers and gold—her mind doesn’t drift to ceremonies or heirloom traditions. Instead, she sees a fruit basket. “My mind goes to food at the end of the day,” she admits. The chef behind Ekaa, Bombay Daak, and KMC Bar & Bistro now channels this instinct into her most audacious project yet: translating India’s textile heritage into edible form.

Next weekend, from January 16th to 18th, Mumbai’s storied Mukesh Mills will host The Gathering, a tightly curated cultural festival spotlighting collaborations between chefs and artists. Building on its successful Delhi debut last year, the festival’s second edition is anchored by five chef-artist pop-ups. They’re intimate, ephemeral dining experiences of five courses or more for just 20 guests per seating, each offering a distinct culinary manifesto shaped by its collaborators.

Besides Rao, other creative collaborations on the table include Goa’s chef Bawmra Jap of Bomra fame with photographer Pablo Bartholomew, who maps the culinary identity of the Kachin people across Northern Burma, Northeast India, and Yunnan, celebrating cross-border flavours through pickled tea leaf salad, Shan tofu, and tamarind pork. Padaria Prazeres’s Ralph Prazeres folds his Goan childhood into his classical European training at ‘The Parisian Fold’, while artist Ankon Mitra interprets this duality by folding shapes into forms where familiar elements become something entirely new. Kolkata chefs Doma Wang and Sachiko Seth, work with artist Udit Mittal to reconstruct Wang's childhood home in Kalimpong for ‘The Noodle Factory’—a living installation where the scent of dough, the rhythm of rolling pins and bamboo presses, and the warmth of steam recreate decades of family craft and care. And at ‘Connective Perspectives’, chefs Priyam Chatterjee and Rishabh Seal join artist Akshita Garud of Two Odd to explore whether home is a place or a feeling—something assembled through people, memories, and objects rather than inherited.

Among these creative pairings, Rao has partnered with fashion designers Abraham & Thakore to create ‘Taste. Terrain. Tapestry’—a meditation on the intimate companionship between fabric and flavour, arguing that what we wear and what we eat are cut from the same cultural cloth. Each course interprets a different textile tradition, transforming the visual vocabulary of India’s diverse weaving belts into something you can taste.

“I just want people to have a great meal, but also have that wonderful wonderment of a child,” Rao tells me ahead of the event. “Maybe the chef thought, what would a sari feel like if she could make it edible—would this be it?”

It’s in the Paithani course that her blood-red sari finds its culinary expression. Rao reimagines Mumbai’s beloved ice cream sandwich—the ‘wafer wala’ that she and her kitchen staff devour regularly—as a multi-layered tribute to Maharashtra’s iconic textile. Koshimbir gel and thecha foam, modak gelato, and a beetroot-forward Bombay sandwich sorbet alongside kokum gel, each element capturing one of the Paithani’s integral colours.

The chikankari-inspired course channels Lucknow’s delicate embroidery. For this, Rao’s kitchen transforms sticky rice into paper-thin mochi sheets, painting them with Nagpur orange blossom-flavoured royal icing in patterns that echo chikankari’s intricate white threadwork. Beneath this edible textile lies a confection made from winter beetroots roasted inside clay masks over coal until they steam without charring, transformed into something that splits the difference between Lonavala fudge and the unusual vegetable-based halwas Lucknow is known for. It’s not Lucknowi cuisine, exactly but it’s Rao’s interpretation of what chikankari would taste like if it could be eaten.

The fabrics provide the visual and conceptual lens, but what reaches your palate is pure geography—the ingredients, techniques, and traditions of that soil.

For Abraham & Thakore, this convergence feels natural. Their work has always been process-driven, shaped by textile techniques such as ikat and bandhani, where the making influences the form. When they heard Rao’s vision—using India’s textiles as metaphors for dishes—they recognized a kindred approach. “She is looking at the terroir, she is looking at local cultural traditions, and that’s informing the way she creates a dish,” says David Abraham, one half of the fashion duo. “It’s driven by the materials. We’re all trying to do things in the same sort of way.”

Their contribution strips textiles down to essential elements: warp and weft, the two perpendicular threads that form all cloth. Working largely in their signature black and white palette—graphic, linear, minimal—the fashion designers have created an environment of layered fabric panels where patterns overlap and intermingle, and are revealed through carefully placed lighting. It’s deliberate restraint. “The food is the hero,” insists Abraham, who has offered table mats, runners, and ceramics from their home collection to the tabletop.

Each course will be cued to visual projections, as the fashion and food creatives bring their complementary contrasts. Rao’s ingredient-forward colourful plates are a perfect foil to Abraham &Thakore’s minimalism. She wants to display diversity; they want to reveal the essential cross-sections that unite everything. “That’s actually a perfect collaboration,” Rao says. “You both bring something different to the team.”

The setting itself holds special resonance for this textile-focused collaboration. These mills once drove Mumbai’s textile manufacturing boom, creating the spaces and character that defined working-class Bombay for generations. “That textile manufacturing history really shaped the city,” Abraham notes. “It’s a fantastic site for this sort of experiment. It sort of represents this whole thing.”

If you don’t manage to get a seat at one of these five coveted tables this month, The Gathering also spills into the mill’s many chambers and corridors. Conversations unfold in The Salon, where food becomes a way of thinking about culture, history and the city. Hands on workshops, music, a speakeasy cocktail bar tucked into the mill and a seaside lounge round out the experience.

But the pop-ups remain the festival’s gourmet, gravitational centre. Across these five collaborations, a common thread emerges: a shared commitment to break down barriers between disciplines. “It’s always nice when we can move out of these little silos that we are in,” Abraham reflects.

Perhaps that’s the real gathering here: not of people around tables, but of ideas around possibilities. What makes it compelling is the dialogue between food and design—the moment where a textile’s character pushes a dish in unexpected directions, or where a childhood memory becomes architectural. The meals are provocations, meant to lodge in memory and shift how those twenty diners think about what's possible when creative disciplines collide.

The second edition of The Gathering is scheduled for January 16-18 at Mukesh Mills, Mumbai. For tickets, click here