Ashwin Vilkhu

Coming Up

Ashwin Vilkhu is today Co-Executive Chef of Saffron NOLA (since 2018), Head Chef of Saffron, and Chef of The Kingsway (since 2025). Together, those roles trace a career that has grown in layers rather than leaps, each post extending the same throughline of family influence, local grounding, and a steady confidence in his own evolving point of view.

Where They Are Now

Today, Vilkhu is Head Chef at Saffron in New Orleans. He is also Chef and Owner of Saffron NOLA in New Orleans, where the menu’s best-known examples show Indian cuisine meeting the city’s own appetite and memory. The work has the feeling of an ongoing conversation between inheritance and place. Family catering gave him the first vocabulary; the University of New Orleans helped widen the lens; and New Orleans itself, with its rich culinary identity, became the setting in which those influences could be sharpened into a distinctive restaurant voice. Taken together, the roles form a compact map: family hospitality, local education, and a restaurant identity built through Indian technique and New Orleans reference points, sustained in the same city orbit.

Signature

Ashwin's signature dishes include Oyster Bed Roast, Bombay Shrimp, and Chicken Biriyani. Each sits comfortably in the terrain he has made his own—dish names that suggest both movement and memory, with a balance of familiarity and surprise that has become part of his signature.

In Their Words “My parents wanted to make people happy. It was a tiny house, but they were doing five-star entertaining.”

Honors

Ashwin's honors include James Beard Foundation Award nomination for Best Chef: South and James Beard Foundation Award nomination for Best New Restaurant. Those recognitions mark the broader reach of a career that began in a family kitchen but has since taken on a wider resonance, reflecting the care, discipline, and imagination that continue to define his cooking.