Chai by Mira began with a spice blend — my mother's, my grandmother's, and mine, made together in a kitchen in London.

That blend is now used by over 300 cafés and restaurants in the UK and abroad — and it got there by a route I'd never have planned.

I trained as a journalist, not a cook. It was only after years abroad, back in London, that I rediscovered the Gujarati food I'd grown up eating — recipes my grandmother carried from a village in Gujarat to Africa to England, unchanged. Writing about that food became my cookbook Saffron Soul, then supper clubs, then a small Ayurvedic café in Kingly Court, Soho.

When the pandemic closed the café, I put the blend online so customers could make it at home, and began properly supplying the handful of cafés that had been buying it from me informally. That handful is now over 300. The blend itself hasn't changed since that kitchen: whole spices, ground in small batches, sweetened only with coconut sugar — nothing artificial, ever.

Alongside the chai I write and speak on Ayurveda, ritual and heritage food. My third book, The Book of Chai, is out with Headline — a history of the drink woven with my grandmother's stories — and I'm writing the fourth.