Grief and Garlic

When I left my restaurant, I didn’t just walk away from a business.

I walked away from an identity I had built for years.

From the outside, it looked like a pivot.

But on the inside, I was collapsing under the weight of two silent griefs.

One was the grief of losing my mother, the kind that reshapes the architecture of your soul, slowly and without permission.

The other was the grief of feeling like a failure, a chef without a restaurant, a man without momentum, someone who had poured his entire being into something… only to leave it behind.

And maybe worse than the grief was the silence that came after.

The silence in the kitchen.

I couldn’t cook.

Not really.

I could sauté. I could prep. I could survive.

But I couldn’t feel food anymore.

The act that had always grounded me, the ritual of peeling garlic, the hiss of onions meeting ghee, the joy of plating, felt completely hollow.

I didn’t hate food.

I just didn’t know where I belonged in it anymore.

One day, I was listening to a podcast.

The Real Food Podcast by Vikram Doctor.

And on it was Dr. Kurush Dalal, an archaeologist and culinary anthropologist from India.

I can’t tell you the exact quote that changed me, because it wasn’t one sentence.

It was something deeper.

It was how he spoke about food, not as content, not as business, but as memory, history, and truth.

It was how he talked about how Indian food couldn’t be separated from the land, the people, the rituals, the ghosts.

That’s when something clicked.

Food wasn’t meant to be escaped from.

It was meant to be grieved through.

In that moment, I felt the spark.

Grief and food are more alike than we admit.

When I started cooking again, I didn’t aim for perfection.

I didn’t chase creativity.

I started with garlic.

I peeled it slowly.

I let it hit hot oil.

I listened to the sizzle, not just with my ears, but with what was left of my heart.

And over time, the food started talking back to me.

Food talks to us if we listen. This was a lesson I learned from Indira many years ago.

In that moment, it didn’t say, “You’re healed.”

It said, “You’re still here.”

And that was enough.

Cooking through grief isn’t about distraction.

It’s about transmutation.

It’s about honoring what you’ve lost by turning it into something that feeds others.

It’s about peeling garlic in a quiet kitchen and realizing that somehow, somewhere, you’ve come home to yourself again.

– Keith

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