Chef Shamsul Wahid isn’t trying to impress you with theatrics. He’s trying to feed the country the way it actually eats, on impulse, on nostalgia, on mood swings. As Group Executive Chef at Impresario, he’s the mind behind SOCIAL’s menus, including The Big Drop, which doesn’t read like a culinary experiment as much as it feels like a late-night group chat that accidentally went to print.
“The idea wasn’t to create something new for the sake of it,” he says. “It was about putting together dishes people were already craving, just not always finding on the same table.” In his universe, khari and chai at 4 PM coexist with ramen at dinner and burgers at midnight, without apology or explanation.
Unlike chefs who test dishes in hush-hush tastings, his first filter is frontline instinct. “Always the team on the floor,” he says. “Servers, managers, the people who watch plates come back clean or untouched—they’re the real barometer. If they believe a dish will land, chances are it will.” In his kitchen, silence is a compliment. “Sometimes I’ll share something with my chefs’ crew during a shift meal. If they go quiet and keep eating, I know I’m onto something.”
Some dishes are engineered. Others just… happen. The Nihari Prashant Croissant is his favourite mistake. “It started as kitchen mischief, stuffing slow-cooked nihari into a buttery croissant. I thought it was too wild. Instead, it became one of the loudest cult favourites of The Big Drop.” For him, that’s proof of one thing that people don’t just want fusion, they want familiarity with a swagger.
He treats the SOCIAL menu like a playlist. Comfort classics sit next to experiments that shouldn’t work but do. “You always want your all-time favourites like Khichdi, Nina Aunty’s Dhansak, Aroraji’s Kadhi, but alongside them you’ll now see Pepper Chicken Congee, Bhai Benedict, or a Tokyo Pinja Meringue Sandwich. The balance comes from listening: what guests keep coming back for versus what new cravings are bubbling up. The classics anchor us, the new dishes push us forward.”
At the centre of it all is a collaborator who doesn’t cook, but curates culture—Riyaaz Amlani. “He has this uncanny ability to sense when something feels SOCIAL. He’s not looking at the dish technically, but emotionally; does it spark conversation, will people instinctively share it, does it belong on a SOCIAL table? His feedback helps us cut through the noise.” Sometimes the note is barely a sentence. “‘This is fun, this is SOCIAL.’ That gut check is invaluable.”
Of all the dishes he’s created, there’s one that mirrors his own culinary DNA. “The Toast-e-Galawati,” he says without hesitation. “It takes something steeped in legacy, Lucknow’s galawati kebabs and lands it in a crisp, modern format on toast. It’s heritage meeting cheek, tradition meeting play. That’s how I like to cook: respecting memory but not being afraid to have a little fun with it.”
Nothing at SOCIAL lands on the menu by accident, but also rarely by straight-line planning. “It starts with an instinct; maybe a shift-meal experiment, maybe a guest hack. We’ll try it out, tweak it, scrap it, bring it back. The floor team weighs in, the kitchen team pokes holes, we plate it a dozen ways.” One of his favourite examples is Dunkables. “It started as a nod to the way people dunk khari at railway platforms. We prototyped it, served it in team meals, then placed it quietly in a few outlets. Once we saw guests instinctively dunking, smiling, and reordering, it passed the SOCIAL test. It’s less about perfection and more about honesty.”
For a chef who loves to play, there’s still one non-negotiable. “The SOCIAL Khichdi,” he says, when asked about the one dish he’d never pull off the menu. “It’s humble, grounding, and has comfort written all over it. No matter how much we experiment, there will always be someone who walks in looking for that one plate that feels like home. Khichdi is that plate.”
And if the brand itself were edible? He doesn’t miss a beat. “It would taste like the Dessert Nachos. Messy, fun, a little over the top, but undeniably comforting when you dig in. It’s familiar yet unexpected, built to share, and always leaves you smiling. Basically, it would taste like belonging.”
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