Rising Stars: Meet Shuba Shekar of Detroit

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shuba Shekar

Hi Shuba, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My background is in architecture and I’ve studied & worked in India and the US (California), before moving my home base to Detroit, where my husband worked with an automobile company. I’ve been in the US for about 7.5 years now, and lived in San Francisco before moving to Detroit in 2021. Leaving my home country (Bombay/Mumbai) and shifting between cities here made me feel very nostalgic of spaces, cities and people that make a place home. I was also missing the food I grew up eating, every city I moved to. This made me want to talk about food and cook more of the food I grew up eating, which I couldn’t easily find in restaurants. In September 2023, I started pursuing a project (that brewed for a long time in my mind) with Room Project on Woodward Avenue. The project titled Kitchen Table, was asking the community living in Metro Detroit to share some recipes and memories of their home-cooked meals. I wanted to engage in these conversations as I realized I was not alone in this feeling or sentiment of leaving home to make way to a new home. What started as a small passion project, opened up into engaging conversations with many people across Detroit and beyond, and I started collecting recipes and childhood memories on food and their lived spaces from various cultures and regions. The designer in me wanted to know more about the kitchen and dining spaces- what did they look like, what colors were the floors and walls etc.
I also started collaborating with people on their pop-ups across the city and, what I initially wanted to do at home by hosting friends over a nice meal of Indian food, got the opportunity to cook Indian food at pop-ups. I now try to work on my own food menus and often collaborate with a passionate group of foodies who run Detroit Dinner Club.
I am also close to wrapping up my book, which is now an anthology of over 50 recipes and stories. My aim is to continue having these conversations around food, people and community, and delve further than Detroit, learn more about people and their lived spaces across the country and, one day, the world!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been an enriching one for sure. I knew very little about book making (not outside of school projects), let alone recipe books! I went through numerous recipe books to understand layouts structures and formatting. Since this was also a self-published book, learning ways to come up to a layout that would work for a recipe + story format, in a price range that could work for me was a long process, but I learnt a lot. Since the project was also being undertaken at a time when conflicts in the world were impacting everyone, it was hard to talk about memories of home and lived spaces. But I also gained so much from the community of Detroit that I owed it to them to see it to the finish line. I would receive emails or messages from people asking on the progress of the book, also really moving notes from people who, through this project, connected with their families on memories of their kitchen etc., and come back and share it with me. It was ver inspiring.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I believe I have always gravitated towards a form of story-telling that invites people to share about their memories of spaces. My thesis project during grad school was about recreating a certain cafe typology that existed in Mumbai in early 20th centtury, and defined the space of public dining for the city. In my school, I reconstructed this space with audio sounds, large scale projections of cafe interiors, and had booklets tracing the journey of people and objects from around the world into the cafe. This project also had a component asking people to share how they felt in the space. I think I love listening to how people perceive spaces, their memory of it, how it makes them feel.. and I continue to search that via food and spaces associated with food. I also enjoy consciously combining two contrasting spaces and time to create a different experience. Like I displayed parts of the cafe project in a dive bar once, to set this history of a certain type of cafe against the real space of a bar that had people and different sounds in it, contrasting the two and seeing what comes out of it.
I definitely want to continue conversations around food, spaces and memories in different capacities with people coming from various backgrounds and parts of the world.

Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
It can be a lonely space, to pursue a passion project that only you can envision. I think reaching out to people multiple times, and at different settings, helped making sure others saw the vision of what I was trying to create. As for mentors, I think breaking down the categories you are seeking advice for is helpful- so you can ask specific questions to the people whose expertise is in one of the areas, and ask more people for others. Like I worked with my commercial printer on the paper thickness and color options etc., but approached someone else for creative formatting and book layout design. I typically try to break down all the parts I need to make the whole, and work part-wise.. this also helps with balancing the parts that work out exactly the way I want and the parts that I had to make tweaks with, if it makes sense.

I also just believe in asking for what you’re looking for, as only you can advocate for yourself. Be it food events, pop ups or any new opportunity to collaborate. If it doesn’t work out, at least I tried. People are always open to new, fun ideas and may not have the time, but if the right thing comes along, they are always willing to help. Just be sure to ask and not to too disappointed when it doesn’t work out the first time.

Pricing:

• Kitchen Table Recipe book priced at $30
• Hand-bound special limited edition of the book priced at $38 (this is in collaboration with a local bindery from Hamtramck)

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kitchentablethings/