DFZ Originals
Zayka-e-Dilli: The Season Delhi Cooked for Itself
For twelve months, hundreds of home kitchens across Delhi NCR cooked for an audience bigger than their own dining tables. This is what happened, from the first entry to a winner still cooking in her prize a year later.
Fourteen newspapers covered Zayka-e-Dilli before a single dish had been cooked.
That is a strange thing to write about a home cooking competition with no venue, no television slot and no entry fee, run entirely inside a Facebook group. But it happened in June 2023, and it is the first clue that this was never only a cooking competition.
Delhi Foodiez had been running for years by then. Thousands of people who cooked at home, posted what they made, and argued cheerfully about where to find the best nihari. What Zayka-e-Dilli did was give that room a stage, a panel of judges, and something to play for.
What follows is what actually happened over the next twelve months.
June 2023The press arrived before the cooking did
In the fortnight after the announcement, fourteen publications ran the story.
Covered by
- The Pioneer
- Dainik Bhaskar
- Zoom Delhi
- Samachar Post
- Pragati Express
- Amriti India
- Samachar Nirdesh
- Veer Arjun
- Navdrishti Times
- Business News Week
- Smart Business News
- Chalte Firte
- Media Bulletins
- Mind Plus News
The Hindi coverage ran under the headline Dilli Foodiez dwara aayojit kiya gaya Zayka-e-Dilli tough cooking battle. The English pieces ran as Acknowledgement to scrumptious mouth-watering Dilli Zaykas.
Every one of them was writing about a home cooking contest organised by an online community, with prizes worth up to fifty thousand rupees and free registration for anyone who wanted in. Not a restaurant launch. Not a brand campaign. A Facebook group.
July 2023Round one: what Delhi actually cooks
The first round opened in July 2023. Members posted their dishes with the recipe, the process shots, and their own name on it.
The range was the whole point, because nobody was cooking to a brief.
Anamika Arya made bharwa mirchi. Tanu Gulati posted a bhuna chicken masala one day and dahi meat with jeera rice the next, describing the second as her own take on mutton with a curd-infused gravy. Deepika Jain made a smoky veg angara.
Kavita Goel plated hers on a red printed cloth with a handwritten entry card propped beside it, the hashtags written out by hand in ballpoint. That detail says more about who entered this competition than any statistic could.
Then the desserts arrived. Craving Bites made a kunafa sitting in rabri, finished with rose petals and pistachio. Kalpana Rai made mawa jalebi, the Purani Dilli version, shot on black slate.
None of this came out of a studio. It was cooked and photographed on kitchen counters across Delhi NCR, in daylight, by the people who ate it afterwards.
The judges
Zayka-e-Dilli ran a two-tier panel of seven.
Chef Nishant Choubey
Special judge
He started at the Oberoi, went to Dubai on the pre-opening team at Madinat Jumeirah, and came back to open Kheer at Roseate House in Delhi. He consults for the Michelin-plated Indus in Bangkok, is corporate chef to the Seinan Group in Tokyo, and co-founded Street Storyss in Bangalore, a vegetarian craft kitchen. He won the Iron Chef Challenge in Bangkok in 2018. For a man who spent years cooking Italian, Spanish and Pan-Asian food before deciding Indian was the interesting one, judging a room full of home cooks was closer to the point than it looks. He recorded his message for the group in his whites, standing under a tree, the Michelin badge visible on his jacket.
Chef Dr Izzat Husain
Special judge
A Unani physician turned Mughlai and Awadhi chef, from the royal family of Awadh, author of Izzat Ka Khana, and a name that has passed through the kitchens of the Oberoi, Trident, Radisson and JW Marriott. He is known for cooking without water.
Chef Dominic Gomes
Special judge
A Delhi hotel chef who served his professional apprenticeship at the Hyatt in New Delhi and went on to the kitchens at Taj Mansingh, with later stints across the Intercontinental, Hilton, Holiday Inn and Ramada. He started cooking at ten, taught by his father, who was a professional chef himself.
Sonal Jindal
Special judge
She founded Medusa in 2014, in her mid-thirties, after an MBA and a fashion label of her own that did not survive. Her first exhibition was budgeted for four hundred visitors. Fifteen hundred turned up. Medusa now runs curated shows for Delhi designers and has put Indian work on runways in London, New York, Milan and Paris. She knew, better than most people on the panel, what it looks like when a room fills up for talent nobody had heard of yet. She joined mid-season, in July 2023, and recorded her own message to the group.
Adit Kohli, Jyoti Kohli and Mickey Murtaza Khan
DFZ judges
Judging from inside the community rather than from outside it. Three of the seven people scoring these dishes already knew what the group cooked, what it argued about, and who had been quietly brilliant in the comments for years.
Hundreds became ten
Semi-finalists were announced in August 2023. In September, the field closed to ten.
Anjali Saxena, Leena Ghosh, Sumanjli Meshi, Hema Banare Shet, Daisy Ahmed, Laddi Dhingra, Khyati Dhaval, Rajan Kumar, Sudha Agrawal and Preeti Singh. Each announcement post filled with congratulations from people who had not made it through.
October 2023The finale, on a Navratri table
The final round landed during Navratri, so the brief was festival food and all of it vegetarian. Nobody stopped at one dish. The finalists posted several entries each across the days the round stayed open, which is why the finale reads less like a cook-off and more like a week of festival cooking happening in ten kitchens at once.
Hema Banare Shet posted three, on three consecutive days. Her Navratri special thali came out on a banana leaf with kuttu puris, a blue-swirled kheer, and marigolds ringing the edge of the frame.
Sudha Agrawal's spread ran to more than a dozen separate bowls on one banana leaf. Her post drew 174 reactions and 300 comments, making it the most discussed single entry of the entire season. Three hundred comments on a photograph of someone's Navratri lunch.
Anjali Saxena built a platter of vegetarian kebabs, heart-shaped patties over lettuce with chutney in a black bowl, laid on red block-print.
Then the judges had to choose between them.
7 January 2024The winners
The results came at a virtual award ceremony on 7 January 2024, across a sixteen-slide reveal posted to the group.
Mallika-e-Zaika
Laddi Dhingra
Philips digital WiFi-enabled air fryer with touchscreen and seven presets, plus DFZ merchandise.
Golden Zayka
Hema Banare Shet, second. Anjali Saxena, third.
A Wonderchef Nutriblend Thunder mixer grinder for Hema. A Wonderchef Crimson Edge oven toaster griller and a Tivoli cookware set for Anjali. DFZ merchandise for both.
Golden Plate
Khyati Dhaval and Sumanjli Meshi
Izhaar merchandise.
Special mention
Preeti Singh, Leena Ghosh, Rajan Kumar, Sudha Agrawal and Daisy Ahmed
Gift vouchers each.
Audience special participants
Manas Kohli and Augustine Maben
Amazon vouchers, for turning up to everything without ever entering a dish. In a community, the people cheering are part of the event.
The prizes were delivered by hand
Most competitions end when the certificates are printed. This one carried on for another five months, because nobody couriered anything.
Every winner was either visited at home or invited over, and the prizes were handed across in a living room with tea going.
Hema Banare Shet received her Nutriblend in March 2024 and posted about it herself the following day, unprompted.
Anjali Saxena came over at the end of March with her husband Rahul. There were pakode, cucumber sandwiches with pudina chutney, and several rounds of chai before anybody mentioned the oven toaster griller.
Laddi Dhingra collected hers in April with her family in the room, and stayed for the afternoon. Sumanjli Meshi had her Golden Plate certificates framed and posted them in May.
You cannot courier that. It is slower, it does not scale, and it is the reason the winners are still in the group.
June 2024A year later
More than a year after the season opened, Laddi Dhingra posted again. She had made oats veg cutlets.
Nobody asked her to post it. No campaign was running, no brand had briefed her, there was no deadline and no prize.
She was showing it to the people who had put her name under a laurel, then spent a Sunday evening with her and her family over chai and snacks. In the caption she thanked Adit ji and Jyoti ji by name, counted herself lucky to be in this group, and told everyone the next season was on its way. Then she signed off the way she always does.
Hope you like it!
More than a cooking competition
Zayka-e-Dilli was never about finding the best cook in Delhi.
Most of the people who entered had never cooked for anyone outside their own family. They fed the same four or five faces every day of their lives, and nobody had ever asked them to write the recipe down, or scored what they made, or printed their name on a winner's card. Season One handed a stage to cooks who had spent years performing for an audience of four at a dining table.
That is why the newspapers picked it up before the cooking started. Not because a Facebook group ran a contest, but because the idea of a home kitchen being taken seriously turned out to be news.
The winners were not chefs. They were members of a group who cooked dinner and photographed it properly.
Registration will be free again, and it opens inside the Delhi Foodiez group first. Season One found its winners among people who had never cooked for anyone outside their own kitchen. That is still who this is for.
Season Two is your turn
It does not matter how many followers you have. It does not matter how big your kitchen is. If your food has a story behind it, we want to see it.
Delhi Foodiez is now over 51,000 members. Join the group and you will hear the moment registration opens.