Goa's famed chef Bawmra Jap was in town last week to spruce up the menu at Colaba's Miss T. If he had been perturbed by allegations made in November that his Goa outpost Bomra's was serving dog meat — Mariketty Grana's Thalassa also shut down — he showed no signs of it. "I don't know the impact [of the allegations]," he says when we ask, "But there's an inside joke around this because this season, we did better than last year!"

Jap, then, seems the epitome of what we understand as a "no-nonsense guy". "I should have dressed better," he quips, garbed in a comfy T-shirt and shorts. He is here to ascertain the menu's future, fine-tune dishes and conjure new ones to keep SoBo's fine-dining crowd engaged.