Tell My Mother I Like Boys
SUVIR SARAN
A Powerful LGBTQ Memoir by Chef Suvir Saran. Indian Food Writing, Identity, Belonging & Life Across Continents.
Tell My Mother I Like Boys is a memoir of appetite—for food, for love, for belonging. Suvir Saran, one of India’s most celebrated chefs, traces a life lived between continents and cultures, where the kitchen becomes both a sanctuary and a crucible. From the spice-laden streets of New Delhi to the pressure-cooked world of Michelin-starred New York dining, he reveals how cooking is never just about taste but about memory, survival and the making of the self.
Saran writes of the exhilaration of opening Devi, the first Indian restaurant in North America to earn a Michelin star, and of the loneliness that trailed even the brightest success. In his hands, food becomes a vocabulary: the slow patience of a biryani, the intricate layering of a galouti kebab, the quiet comfort of dal simmered at home. Each dish carries a memory and meaning, stitching together the fragments of exile, grief, desire and return.
At once an intimate kitchen story and a reckoning with identity, Tell My Mother I Like Boys is about the hungers that shape us and the meals—lavish and humble—that teach us how to live.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUVIR SARAN made history with Devi, the first Indian restaurant in North America to earn a Michelin star. One of the world’s first openly gay chefs—out since age twenty—he has shaped iconic restaurants such as One8 Commune, Neuma, Bastian, Qora, Murphies and The House of Celeste. A lifelong student of Indian classical music, Saran also paints, stitches, knits, prints, embroiders and gardens. His memoir, Tell My Mother I Like Boys, spans pinnacles of success and depths of illness, exile and homecoming, offering readers an unflinching gift: the courage to break, heal and begin again.
MORE INFORMATION
Imprint: India Viking
Published: December 2025
ISBN: 978-0143478362
Format: Hardback
Pages: 240
Categories: Memoirs