Today we’d like to introduce you to Mona Jaisinghani.
Hi Mona, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Nirvana started in my home kitchen a few years back. I was just testing the waters — cooking for other people the way I had always cooked for family, and seeing if anyone wanted more of it.
I get my love of cooking from my mom. Feeding people is how we show love in our family, and it is honestly my favorite thing to do. I have a full-time corporate job, but cooking was never just a hobby on the side for me. It was the thing I looked forward to.
People did want more of it. Word spread, and a small home-kitchen experiment turned into a real business. When I made it official, I started promoting and marketing Nirvana properly, and soon I was catering weddings, birthdays, parties and events. It grew bigger than my kitchen table conversations ever suggested it would.
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 not been a smooth road. Building a food business alongside a full-time IT job meant long days and longer weekends, and everything people don’t see — kitchens, permits, packaging, consistency — had to be figured out while the orders were already coming in.
Then life changed. When I became a mom, I pressed pause on Nirvana.
What I learned in that pause is that I could stop taking orders, but I couldn’t stop being a person who feeds people. I missed cooking for other people. I missed serving my community. So I started again — this time building it properly, with a clearer focus and a website where ordering is simple.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Nirvana Catering & Tiffin Service is a family-run kitchen serving homestyle Indian food in St. Louis.
We do two things. Nirvana Catering offers vegetarian per-person catering for gatherings of 25 or more, plus boxed meals, Celebration Boxes, Bites Boxes and wedding-style chaat cups for parties. And Amma’s Tiffin by Nirvana is our weekly vegetarian tiffin service — dal, sabzi, jeera rice and fresh rotis, ordered Monday to Thursday and delivered Friday or Saturday. My mom is my partner in Amma’s Tiffin. The woman who taught me to cook is now cooking alongside me, and that means a lot to me.
What sets us apart is that this is food the way we eat it at home — homestyle, made fresh, and packed carefully so it arrives the way it should. I’m most proud that people trusted us with their family events before, and that so many of them came back and asked us to start again.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Start where you are. I started in my home kitchen, cooking for a few people and paying attention to whether they came back and told their friends. Let people taste the food. And build the boring parts properly as you grow — permits, packaging, pricing, a simple way to order — because the cooking is only half the business. Most of all, if it’s something you love, don’t expect that love to go away just because you pause. Mine didn’t.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nirvanacateringstl.com
