Gaurav Saria, Founder, Chef & Tea Master, Infinitea studied Computer Science in Australia. He came back to Bangalore in 2003 and opened a restaurant. Not because he had trained for it, but because he could not imagine doing anything else. He had never worked in a professional kitchen. He had no culinary education, no apprenticeship, and no mentor. He was also, until the age of 25, a strict vegetarian.
Today he runs a full non-vegetarian kitchen, a working bakehouse, an in-house fermentation program, and a recurring fine-dining event series called The French Palate, where every course is paired with a Darjeeling tea. The guest chef is Michelin-starred. The concept is entirely Gaurav’s.
Everything on the Infinitea menu came from obsession, not a syllabus. The prawn thermidor, the sourdough, the flourless chocolate cake, the kombucha brewed from Darjeeling teas, the sauces and flavoured butters made in-house. He developed all of it through trial, failure, and the kind of uncompromising curiosity that no culinary school can teach or replicate.
Gaurav has run Infinitea for twenty-two years without a single investor, without formal training, and without changing what the restaurant fundamentally is. That kind of staying power in one of India’s most competitive food cities is not an accident. It is the direct result of building a kitchen entirely around a personal point of view, with no framework telling him what was or wasn’t possible.
The story is not about whether formal training matters. It is about what happens when someone refuses to let the absence of it become a limitation. And what happens, it turns out, is that the restaurant is still standing.
Read the full story that first appeared in The Global Indian here:
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