A recent news article, reported in several newspapers and websites, referred to a 2016 interview with Google’s CEO, Sunder Pichai, whose breakfast habits were mentioned. Chai, toast, omelette: according to The Economic Times, a ‘combination which reflects both his Indian roots and a global influence in his food choices’. Pichai’s chai-toast-omelette breakfast is a domestic one, of course; and thousands of urban Indians probably do eat something similar, whether at home or at a commercial establishment.But the vast majority of Indians in cities may not consume eggs, bread or tea in any form. Breakfasts for them may run the gamut from appams to meat curries, millet porridge to steamed rice cakes, whether eaten at home or outside.Food writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee’s First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India (Speaking Tiger Books, 2026) sets out to examine the idea of breakfast across ten Indian cities. Not so much domestic breakfasts – though they do have their place, especially in the chapter on Kolkata, Chatterjee’s hometown, where she reminisces about home breakfasts when she was growing up – but breakfasts in commercial places.Not the sleek cafés, either, which serve up avocado on toast and versions of English fry-ups, but the thelas and the hole-in-the-wall eateries, the khomchawallahs and even the iconic restaurants that may have now gained cachet with the hip crowd, but started off basic.First Bite: Breakfast Stories from Urban India, by Priyadarshini Chatterjee, Speaking Tiger Books, 2026.The ten cities Chatterjee covers are Amritsar, Delhi, Varanasi, Kolkata, Shillong, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kochi and Hyderabad. Each city has a chapter devoted to it, a chapter in which Chatterjee wanders around the city, often with local experts for company, exploring that city’s food. She eats, she describes the food and writes about those who make and/or sell it. Equally importantly, she delves deep into the social, cultural and historical aspects of these foods.In city after city, for instance, she talks of the migrants who arrived there, and not finding familiar food (or sensing a business opportunity), setting up food stalls. Partition refugees in Delhi selling chhole-bhature; or Brahmins from Udupi in Bengaluru, setting up ‘hotels’ that served pure vegetarian food.There are further strands woven into even just this single idea of migrations. Who migrated, to where and from where, has as much bearing as why they migrated, what social class and caste did they belong to, and so on. Chatterjee’s research into history, society and politics – in addition to the food of these ten cities – is both wide and deep, and she manages to show how foodscapes in cities have been affected by migrations.How, for example, unexpected foods (very North Indian puri-aloo in Shillong, Bengali nimki in Varanasi, to name just two) have been widely adopted. Or even, on the flip side, the negative consequences of culinary migrations: talking about Mumbai, Chatterjee mentions how, during the 1960s, Udupi restaurants (run by Kannadiga migrants) became the target for the Shiv Sena’s ‘Idli dosa bhagao’ campaigns.The friction around breakfast foods, in fact, seems to be as important a part of the conversation as the iconic foods and the cult-status eateries. As Chatterjee wends her way across India, her narrative encompasses a wide range of discriminations, some part of the past, some alive and kicking. In addition to the identities attached to state and region, there is also – inevitably in India – the sense of religion and caste. Chatterjee’s book goes into these as well: through, for example, discussions on Jain eateries in Ahmedabad and military hotels in Bengaluru, the presence of both underlined by religious or caste-based food restrictions.Her writing is immensely readable, and the sheer scope of the backdrop to her breakfast journeys across India is impressive. There are deep-dives here into everything from colonial breakfasts (as also the grand breakfasts laid out by the maharajas of yore) to the very basic breakfasts, often a repurposing of leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.There are interesting, often witty anecdotes: about Mumbai’s Irani cafés, about Bengaluru’s quirky habit of splitting coffees. There are inspiring stories of entrepreneurs who built up breakfast empires. There are Chinese breakfasts in Kolkata’s Tangra and Luso-Indian ones in Kochi.Of course there is the food, described in mouthwatering words:‘… there’s turmeric-tinged sukhi bhaji, a dry potato curry peppered with bits of chopped coriander and curry leaves; vatana, or green peas cooked with potatoes; eggs tossed in chilli-red masala; and a steel canister full of watery lentils and shingala amti – a thin curry made with small darnes of giant river catfish…’Through her wanderings in search of breakfast, Chatterjee ends up creating an informal and indirect breakfast map for each city, with recommendations. But First Bite is much more. It shines the light on how breakfast has evolved (nahari, the long-simmered meat curry so popular in several cities, was originally only served early in the morning, but now is often an all-day offering). On how, too, local economies play a part in breakfast foods: for example, the dairy farming in and around Varanasi means that milk, ghee, cream and yogurt play the starring role in a lot of the city’s favourite breakfast foods. Or how gender comes into play in the whole process of preparing and selling breakfast.First Bite is a tribute to the culinary diversity of India, but it is also a fine example of what good food writing should be all about: firmly rooted in the culture it looks at, insightful, thought-provoking, and a documentation of the many ways in which food intersects with society.Madhulika Liddle is a writer.