What do India’s cities eat when they wake up, and what do those first bites reveal about how we live?

In First Bite, journalist and food–culture writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee travels through ten Indian cities—Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Amritsar, Varanasi, Shillong, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad—to explore breakfast as history, habit, and everyday necessity. From temple offerings and home kitchens to roadside stalls and century-old eateries, she follows the morning meal into lanes, markets, and workspaces, uncovering the rhythms that bring a city to life at dawn.

Neither a recipe collection nor a list of must-eat addresses, First Bite instead uses breakfast as a lens to understand how cities function: who wakes early and why, who cooks, who eats out, and how foodways are shaped by labour, migration, caste, class, faith, colonialism, and capitalism. Drawing on archival sources, literature, and years of on-the-ground reporting, Chatterjee traces the evolution of India’s morning meals, from ancient texts and ritual offerings to working-class sustenance and the rise of public eateries in urban India.

Written with warmth, rigour, and a reporter’s eye for detail, First Bite blends food history with cultural reportage. It is a book about ordinary meals and the extraordinary stories they carry, and about cities coming awake, one breakfast at a time.

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