It's hard to get Tara Deshpande to talk about herself. She has so much else to share — about a cookbook from the 1900s, an untraceable Bengali lady called Mrs Dey whose book is nothing short of a slice of culinary history and about how you should avoid the New Jersey airport if you're looking to smuggle kadi patta into the US. "It's filled with Indians, so they will have stalks of kadi patta at the customs desk, wave it at you and ask if you're carrying it. You heard about that man who got caught trying to get paan into America, no?" she asks, breaking into an unembarrassed giggle.

Sitting across from her in her neither-sprawling, nor-ostentatious-space, which overlooks the pristine streets of Nariman Point, we are trying to get the actor-turned-chef to speak about the genesis behind her eponymous culinary studio, which has been in the works for more than a year ("You know how it gets with permissions," she says) and will open doors to the public today. But her mind wanders, to times long gone. She starts by telling us how it all can be traced to wanting a space for her vintage cookbooks, a 15-year-long passion/obsession that began with discovering culinary relics at yard and estate sales in the US, where she lived in the 2000s.