Surender Mohan

Surender Mohan is a chef whose cooking draws on Mumbai’s range of flavours and family recipes while working across London and Jamavar. His approach treats food less as a hybrid and more as a method that can hold a home table, a city dining room, and long professional memory without flattening any of them. His career has been built step by step through kitchens where scale, pace, and consistency mattered, and that progression remains central to his identity.

Training at Catering College and Delhi University gave him the foundation for a kitchen career shaped by movement through rank and responsibility. He began as Chef de Partie at Hyatt Regency, then moved to Sous Chef - corporate at The Leela Palaces & Resorts, and then to Sous Chef at Grand Hyatt. Each post extended the scope of his work, from section duties to broader kitchen oversight. Since 2003, he has served as Corporate Chef - Indian Cuisine of The Leela Palaces, Hotels and Resorts, a role that places Indian Cuisine inside a long-running institutional frame with continuity rather than churn.

Since 2018, he has also served as Executive Chef of Jamavar London and Culinary Director of Jamavar and Bombay Bustle, carrying that remit into London while keeping the wider kitchen direction in view. He is also Executive Chef at Bombay Bustle in London, United Kingdom, and Culinary Director at Jamavar in London, United Kingdom. He makes a clear distinction between the restaurants, viewing each as completely separate with menus that are extremely different in look and style.

One is rich, elegant and classical, while the other is modern and slightly more playful. His aim is to preserve that distance so the restaurants do not collapse into a single voice. His signature dishes include dabba dal, Rose Rum Old Fashioned, and Raspberry Cheesecake. The range reflects the breadth of his cooking, from savoury comfort to a more spirited bar-side note and a sweet plated dessert line. The work shows a chef moving across formats while maintaining control of the final sequence.

His first memory of food is “MAA ka haath ka khana”, translated as a hand cooked meal made by mum. That memory keeps his starting point visible, even as his career has moved through larger kitchens and broader responsibility. It also reflects the importance of home cooking and flavour made by hand in the way he thinks about food. Surender Mohan’s biography is marked by progression, discipline, and clear separation of identities across his restaurants.

He works with the memory of home cooking while holding long experience in institutional kitchens, and his career continues to connect family recipes, Mumbai’s flavours, and London dining rooms.