Kainaz Contractor, 28, a B.Com graduate by education, restaurant manager by training and food writer by profession always wanted to run her own restaurant, ever since she could remember. Her dream of running a restaurant made her decide that she would “Spend her 20’s learning about all aspects of a restaurant. The idea was to learn as much as I could before I could start my own place,” tells Kainaz.

Of the three non-hotel management graduates to be selected for the management training programme at the Taj Group of Hotels, she was one. Usually trainees aim for the front desk but Kainaz’s focus was on Food and Beverage service and managing restaurants. She used her time training constructively with the Vietnamese restaurant Blue Ginger in Bangalore and finally as a restaurant manager at Pure in Land’s End, Mumbai learning the ropes. Post her training, she moved to writing about food and after a series of writing stints with TimeOut Mumbai (as an intern) and working with Burrp on a new editorial driven website, she became the Assistant Food Editor at BBC Good Food magazine. BBC Good Food opened up a lot of avenues for her, like access to a test kitchen, experimenting with relatively unknown ingredients, writing about local and sustainable food producers, creating her own recipes and interacting with and interviewing people in the food space from across the world. And this expanded her horizons. … read more on her.yourstory.com