Collective Studios has partnered with True Story Films, founded by filmmaker Hansal Mehta and producer Sahil Saigal, to announce Khana Dil Se- An AI Journey Through India’s Kitchen. The newly released teaser offers a first look at a distinctive episodic series exploring India’s culinary heritage through the lens of artificial intelligence.
For Mehta, Khana Dil Se marks a return to the terrain where he first made his mark. In the early 1990s, he created Khana Khazana, the pioneering cookery show that turned Chef Sanjeev Kapoor into a household name and changed the way India thought about food on screen. Three decades later, Mehta returns to food, this time with AI as his collaborator.
Joining him in this new endeavour is Indian Master Chef Shamsher Ahmed, who comes on board as subject matter expert and culinary consultant. Ahmed’s decades-long experience across Indian regional cuisines will lend authenticity and rigour to the series as it navigates the country’s vast and varied food traditions.
At its heart, ‘Khana Dil Se’ is a cultural exploration of India through its kitchens, tracing stories of migration, memory, and identity through recipes passed down across generations. What distinguishes the series is its use of AI, not just as a visual and imagination tool, but as a collaborator in the storytelling itself: helping trace culinary lineages, uncover regional influences, and follow the journeys of dishes as they have travelled and transformed across communities and centuries. Khana Dil Se reclaims food as a living cultural heritage.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Hansal Mehta (@hansalmehta)
Speaking about the show, Hansal Mehta said, “Food is memory. When you cook something from another culture, you’re not just following a recipe, you’re stepping into a piece of someone else’s life. A recipe carries within it an entire history: of land, of migration, of a grandmother’s hands. These are probably humanity’s most durable cultural documents, passed down through generations, across borders, surviving when almost nothing else does. That’s what makes food such an honest way to look at people and who they really are. With Khana Dil Se, we want to use every tool available to us, including AI, to trace those stories before they disappear.”
Producer Sahil Saigal, a hotel management alumnus of Les Roches, Switzerland, and a restaurateur himself, added, “Khana Dil Se gave us a chance to ask what food television could look like if AI were part of the process – not replacing the human story, but helping us reach deeper into it. There are culinary traditions across India that have never been documented. This is our attempt to find them.”
Vijay Subramaniam, Founder and Group CEO of Collective Artists Network, said, “At Collective, we’ve always believed that storytelling evolves with the tools available to us. India’s culinary traditions are among the richest cultural archives in the world, yet so many of these stories remain undocumented. Khana Dil Se brings together creators, filmmakers, and technologists to surface those stories in a way that hasn’t been attempted before.”
Produced by True Story Films in collaboration with Collective Artists Network’s Collective Studios, Khana Dil Se – An AI Journey Through India’s Kitchen is a first-of-its-kind series that brings together culinary heritage and artificial intelligence to tell the story of India through its food.
Also Read: Abhay Verma begins shooting for Dilkashi with Lijo Jose Pellissery, Hansal Mehta and A.R. Rahman; calls it a ‘destiny moment’
