Food Lovers
Overview
Food Lovers is an English-language food magazine and digital content platform based in Bengaluru, Karnataka. It began as a finely produced glossy print magazine celebrating food, wine and dining in India, and has grown into a multi-platform operation spanning print heritage, a website, social media and, most visibly today, the Food Lovers TV video channel. Its subject is the whole culture of eating well in India: restaurants, chefs, recipes, markets, travel for food, wine, cocktails and spirits.
The platform describes its ambition as becoming India's finest and most trusted content platform in food, wine, spirits and dining. Its guiding credo, repeated across its channels, is truth in food, wine and dining: editorial content kept clearly distinct from advertising, and coverage chosen without commercial consideration from the eateries featured.
The founder: Kripal Amanna's path from hotels to publishing
Food Lovers was founded by Kripal Amanna, who remains its founder, editor and public face, and who describes himself on screen as a gourmet on the road. His route into food publishing ran through professional hospitality. As a young management student in Mumbai, he was struck by the atmosphere of the Taj Mahal Hotel when he visited its lobby, and resolved to work there. After completing his MBA, he joined the Taj Group of Hotels as a management trainee at that same hotel.
A ten-year stint with the Taj Group followed, which brought him to Bengaluru and, by his own account, taught him most elements of the hospitality industry in India. He then left to become an entrepreneur in the same industry. Food Lovers was the result: a magazine written from inside knowledge of hotels and restaurants, rather than from outside observation alone. That insider background still shapes the platform's reviewing, which pays close attention to how kitchens and dining rooms actually work.
The print magazine
As a print title, Food Lovers was an urban-centric glossy magazine. A contemporary description of the magazine lists what a reader could expect in each issue: restaurant reviews, recipes, in-season specials, markets, foodie profiles, chef stories, gourmet travel, food and wine, cocktails and spirits, and special features. It was, in other words, a complete food magazine of the classic kind, built around Bengaluru but looking outward to dining across India.
The magazine drew on established food writers. Accounts of its print years name contributors from within the industry, including well-known food writers such as Camilla Punjabi and Karen Anand. Its early focus was fine dining, featuring food and wine across premium hotels in India, before its coverage widened. Digital editions of the print magazine were distributed through magazine apps, extending its reach beyond the newsstand, and the title later moved with the times from print to a digital platform.
Publisher and editorial home in Bengaluru
Food Lovers is published by Hospitality Initiatives India Pvt. Ltd, the Bengaluru company named on the platform's own support and banking details, with its office contact given through info@foodlovers.in. The operation is headquartered in Bengaluru, in Karnataka, and the city remains its home ground: many of its best-known stories are found in Bengaluru's neighbourhoods, from old Jayanagar eateries to new openings in HSR Layout and Koramangala.
Editorially, the platform is closely identified with its founder. Amanna fronts the video reviews under his own name, gives scores to dishes in a consistent personal format, and writes or narrates the accompanying accounts. That single-editor model gives Food Lovers a recognisable voice: the same palate and the same standards run through a street-side dosa stall review and a fine-dining feature.
From print to Food Lovers TV
The platform's most significant evolution is its move into video. Food Lovers TV, its YouTube channel, applies the magazine's reviewing approach to film: Amanna visits an eatery, shows how signature dishes are made, tastes them on camera and gives an assessment, often with a score out of ten for individual dishes. A second channel carries his vlogs, and the main channel organises material into series and playlists, such as a sequence revisiting Bengaluru restaurants of the 1990s.
The written side continues alongside the video. The Food Lovers TV website publishes dated, written versions of episodes, telling the stories behind eateries: a family-run Karnataka kitchen, a century-old biryani tradition at a Bengaluru hotel, a bakery in Kolar Gold Fields that may be among India's oldest running bakeries, and small entrepreneurs who left other careers to cook. The magazine, in short, did not disappear; it changed its primary medium.
What Food Lovers covers
Coverage spans the full range of Indian eating. At one end are heritage institutions: old hotels, bakeries and khanavalis that have served the same dishes for sixty or a hundred years. At the other are new and small businesses: a street cart selling thatte idli whose owner graduated to his own shop, a couple bringing Pune street food such as vada pav, misal and poha to Bengaluru, and cloud kitchens cooking family recipes.
Recurring strands include the Gourmet On The Road series, in which Amanna travels for food beyond Bengaluru; regional explorations, such as a jolada rotti meal in the Uttara Karnataka style; and community initiatives to highlight unsung eateries doing good work. Recipes, chef stories, markets and seasonal specials, the staples of the print magazine, continue in digital form, joined by wine, spirits and dining coverage consistent with the platform's stated scope.
Editorial values: truth in food
Food Lovers states its editorial policy unusually openly. Its vision statement says that advertising is clearly demarcated and kept distinct from editorial, that the lines between the two are not blurred, and that its content is free of commercial constraints. It says it seeks out deserving stories without financial consideration from the eateries featured.
Linked to that policy is its funding choice. The platform says it has chosen not to put up a paywall, because it wants its content to remain accessible to all, describing its model as independent food journalism that is free for those who cannot afford it and supported by those who can. Viewers are invited, purely voluntarily, to support the work through YouTube channel membership, through Patreon, or by direct contribution to the publishing company. In an Indian food-media market dominated by advertiser-led listings and paid promotions, that declared independence is central to the brand's identity.
Audience and community
The audience is the Indian food lover in the broadest sense: home cooks, restaurant-goers, travellers and hospitality professionals, in Bengaluru first and then across India and its diaspora. The community aspect is not rhetorical. Food Lovers has held in-person fan meetings, including a gathering over a traditional banana-leaf meal in Koramangala that drew, by its own account, nearly 150 participants from across Bengaluru and beyond, ranging in age from a toddler of two to attendees in their eighties.
That breadth reflects the subject. Food Lovers covers inexpensive street dishes and premium hotel dining with the same seriousness, so its community naturally crosses income and age. The comment culture on its channels, and the practice of crediting viewers who suggest eateries, reinforce a sense that the audience helps to map the food landscape the magazine then explores.
Role in Indian food media
Food Lovers holds a distinctive place in Indian food media as a bridge between two eras. It began as a conventional glossy magazine, with commissioned writers, fine-dining coverage and print production values. It then made the transition that many Indian magazines failed to make, rebuilding itself as a personality-led digital and video platform without abandoning its original standards or subject matter.
Its particular contribution is documentation. By filming how dishes are made in old and small eateries, and by writing the histories of the families behind them, it preserves a record of India's everyday food heritage that formal restaurant criticism often ignores. The century-old biryani kitchen and the sixty-year-old khanavali are treated as institutions worth recording in detail, and that archival instinct, inherited from its magazine years, sets its video work apart.
How to read and watch
Readers can start at the official website, foodlovers.in, and at the Food Lovers TV site, which publishes written episode accounts organised by its team. The video catalogue is on the Food Lovers TV YouTube channel, with playlists for series such as Gourmet On The Road and themed collections of restaurant reviews, plus a second channel for the founder's vlogs. The platform is also present on Instagram and Facebook under its Food Lovers handles.
Those who value the work can support it in the ways the platform itself lists: channel membership on YouTube, patronage through Patreon, or a one-time voluntary contribution to Hospitality Initiatives India Pvt. Ltd, with details published openly on its channels. There is no paywall and no subscription requirement: in keeping with its stated model, the magazine that began in print in Bengaluru now gives its food journalism away, and asks its most committed readers and viewers to keep it independent.
