It is a rare thing to be asked to speak, rather than simply to serve. In its latest issue, Brides Today invited our founder, Puneet Sikand, to The Chef's Table — a long conversation on the craft of catering a wedding, and on the nearly thirty years that have carried the house here.

"Good food translates to positive energy at weddings," he tells the magazine. "You can get away with bloopers here and there, but the food, coupled with the service, makes or mars everything." It is a sentence we have quietly built the house around.

The feature traces the arc of it — from a young cook trained at The Oberoi and Hyatt Regency, hand-writing menus and carrying trays of sandwiches in a Maruti 800, to seated dinners and destination weddings across Florence, Barcelona, Milan, Phuket, Monaco and Ibiza. Along the way, the celebrations of Isha Ambani and Anand Piramal, Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas.

What he keeps returning to is the tension the house lives inside — nostalgia for the seniors who crave a flavour that returns them to a memory, and novelty for the young couples who want a table worth photographing. A warmed mawa cake on a caramel base, finished with pulled sugar, that once made an elderly guest teary-eyed. A masala raan shredded into a panini slider. Litchis spiked with wasabi. "The trick," he says, "is to floor them with surprises."

"It's not just about the food — the presentation and service are intrinsic to the theatrics involved. Guests should drool in anticipation, even before the food reaches their palate." We are grateful to Brides Today and to Sharmi Adhikary for the telling, and quietly glad the answer, after all these years, is still the same one: thank you for making this special.