From AI Entrepreneur to Plant-Forward Restaurateur, Meet ICE Alum Kiran Narayanan
Chef and owner of Bangalore’s Mamacoco Hospitality Group, this Plant-Based Culinary Arts graduate is committed to bringing his passion for micro-cuisines and local, vegetarian dining to the masses.
LEDE Kiran Narayanan
With the sale of his AI manufacturing company, Unit X, Chef Kiran found himself with the opportunity to launch an entirely new career but lacked a sense of specific direction.
He knew he wanted to focus on bettering the planet, but didn't know where to begin. Though Chef Kiran was unsure, his wife Ankita steered him in the obvious direction.
“At some point, Ankita [said] ‘anything you watch is about food, anything you read is about food,’ and there it was,” Chef Kiran says.
Looking back on Chef Kiran’s life up to that point, a career in food was always the answer. As a boy in India, he loved to roast garden vegetables in the residual heat of his mother’s coal-fired oven. Every time the family moved — which was frequently due to his father’s job — Chef Kiran’s first order of business was befriending the local "aunties" so he could learn everything he could about how to prepare their local cuisines.
“There are so many different kinds of sauces and local vegetables that they would prepare, so that's where I started picking things up — I would learn from them,” he says. “So by the time I was in high school, my knowledge of Indian cooking was solid.”
This habit of learning from the matriarchs is something Chef Kiran took with him throughout life. An avid traveler, some of his fondest travel memories are of chatting with strangers, which once led to his traipsing to rural Italy to learn how to make pasta from the grandmother of someone he met in a bar in Rome the night before.
“He was bragging about his grandmother's pasta and I was like, ‘I need to learn how to do that, and I need to go see her do it,’" Chef Kiran says. "It's amazing what happens when you just ask…and that's how I learned how to make pasta and marinara sauce.”
As Chef Kiran started focusing on his professional life, his love of food and hospitality looked different — he found himself hosting large backyard parties and learning as much information about chefs, food and recipes as he could. The other interest he always held high was his commitment to health: both for himself and the planet.
It was the combination of these two things that ultimately led him to ICE’s Plant-Based Culinary Arts program.
Chef Kiran approached this new phase of life with vigor and a clear plan of attack. He planned a month in New York to try out eateries and visit culinary schools, all in an effort to start building a basis for the hospitality group he hoped to open in Bangalore.
The strategy was simple: find the best plant-forward culinary program to get vegetarian cooking experience and then open a fully-vegetarian fine dining restaurant. If the venture succeeded, it would allow him to expand into casual dining and quick-service establishments, and eventually shift the way people eat at home.
“Once that happens, then I can actually achieve my vision of changing the way people eat — making it more vegetarian, or veg-centric,” Chef Kiran says.
Chef Kiran was drawn to how efficient and focused ICE's Health Supportive (now Plant-Based) Culinary Arts program was.
“If you read enough about the program [you realize] it’s the most advanced plant-forward program there is," Chef Kiran says. "Also, the location was pretty much in the heart of Manhattan, which gave me the opportunity to work in places nearby.”
As a student, Chef Kiran was an avid volunteer at the ICE New York Campus' hydroponic farm, and within weeks of starting school found himself working the line at Amanda Cohen’s one-Michelin-starred vegetarian restaurant, Dirt Candy. Initially connected to the restaurant through his Chef-Instructor at ICE, he credits that experience as a transformative moment of working in the hospitality industry — and he was hooked.
“It was my first day in a professional kitchen and they decided to put me on the pass for dinner service,” Chef Kiran says. “I thought ‘Is this really happening?’”
Chef Kiran didn’t have the luxury of second-guessing himself for long, as Dirt Candy’s open kitchen meant he was face-to-face with actual customers.
“I looked at the tweezers in my hand and realized my hand was shaking,” he says. “At that moment these two women sat down right in front of me and I was like ‘You know what, I need to take three deep breaths and really look like I know what I’m doing.’ Then a few minutes later I heard one of them say, ‘That guy looks like he knows what he’s doing.’ This was at the time when we were still wearing masks, so I don’t know if they saw me smiling behind my mask but I was.”
Between the confidence gained from working on the line in front of customers and the excitement of being at Dirt Candy when they were awarded their first-ever Michelin Star, Chef Kiran was hooked on the thrill of working in fine dining. It was this experience that he took with him when he moved back to India to launch Mamacoco Hospitality.
As Chef Kiran got ready to launch his fine dining endeavor, there were some key factors he knew he needed to focus on. One was the holistic approach to running a restaurant he garnered from his time at ICE.
“The biggest lesson I learned was that it’s not just about getting the skill to cook, it's also about the soft skills of working with people," he says. "If you want to set up your own business, trust matters a lot, so you need to have a helping mentality.”
When it came to help, Chef Kiran also knew he couldn’t go into the endeavor alone, so he turned to his most valued teammate: his wife.
“No story of mine is complete without her…we've always worked and lived together,” he says. “So this wouldn't have been realized without her in it.”
Even the name of the restaurant, Moglu, and the restaurant group, Mamacoco Hospitality, are homages to the couple.
“Mamacoco is what I call her. And Moglu is what she calls me,” he says.
While Chef Kiran holds the role of Owner, Executive Chef and Creative Director, his wife Ankita is the Managing Director of the group.
Moglu opened in Bangalore in 2024 to rave reviews, including a write-up in YS Life, which called the restaurant a “celebration of vegetarianism.” This description aligns with Chef Kiran’s own explanation of his vision, too.
“We take [Indian] micro cuisine, which has amazing vegetarian food, and very deep flavors, usually even Sattvic food, and we showcase it," he says. "[After Moglu] we did a quick service menu format to sort of introduce it to the public all over India.”
The quick-service option is the second brand within Mamacoco Hospitality: Matka Junction.
With these successes under his belt, Chef Kiran is continuing to expand, with two more Bangalore locations of Matka Junction set to open this year, and a plan to take the brand “pan-India” in short order. This success is the culmination of his years of hard work and a clear vision for the future.
“I wanted to be a chef and start a restaurant group because I wanted to emphasize veg-forward eating," he says. "And I couldn’t have done it without the training I received from the experts at ICE.”
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