The Physics Student Who Quit to Make Cakes

Some careers make sense in hindsight even if they looked like a detour at the time. Bani Nanda's path from a physics classroom in South Delhi to running one of the city's most respected French patisseries is that kind of story, a series of pivots that looked risky one by one, but turned out to be a straight line toward exactly where she needed to go.

A Gargi College Student With an Unusual Hobby

Bani Nanda was studying physics at Gargi College, Delhi University, when the trajectory changed. She was a genuine lover of the subject. She's said in interviews that she still loves physics but she couldn't figure out what an honest career in it would look like. In the meantime, she was doing what a lot of quietly restless students do: watching cooking shows as a way out of her coursework.

She watched Nigella Lawson and Bobby Chin with her grandmother, and something about those two, specifically the way they cooked and talked about food as pleasure rather than performance, lodged itself in her mind. Her mother baked at home. The kitchen wasn't foreign to her. But baking as a profession wasn't something anyone in her immediate circle was doing, and it wasn't something she'd seriously considered as a path until a single internship made it unavoidable.

The Internship That Made Physics Feel Like the Wrong Room

In her second year at Gargi, Bani interned at The Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri, Delhi. It was there, as she's since described it, that she discovered she had a creative side she hadn't known existed. For someone who'd been moving through science coursework without any particular sense of destination, that discovery hit hard.

Finishing the physics degree after that internship was, by her own admission, genuinely difficult. She knew where she wanted to go. The degree became something she powered through rather than something she was engaged in. The moment it was done, she moved.

Her parents' response to the switch deserves to be noted, because it shaped everything that followed. They were startled of course they were but they weren't obstructive. Progressive by her own description, they accepted that she'd made up her mind and focused their energy on helping her pick the best culinary school available rather than talking her out of the idea. That support sent her to Paris.

Le Cordon Bleu, Then The Oberoi

Bani trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, learning classical French pastry technique from some of the most rigorous kitchens in the world. After finishing her studies in France, she returned to Delhi and joined The Oberoi as a pastry chef in October 2013.

The Oberoi years were formative in a way she's been specific about. The work was demanding and genuinely creative, and it was there that she first started developing her own cake and macaron flavour combinations rather than simply executing other people's recipes. Her seniors pushed her hard and she credits them with real growth. But there was a ceiling she kept pressing against not in the work itself, but in the structure around it. Long hours for low pay. Workplace politics that wore her down. The feeling, persistent and difficult to ignore, that she was capable of more than the institution's hierarchy allowed her to show.

She stayed at The Oberoi through February 2015. Then, a shoulder injury forced the question she'd been circling.

A Grandmother's Wish and a Sudden Opening

The shoulder injury that ended her time at The Oberoi wasn't planned, but it created the pause she needed. She quit in January 2015 and spent the next several months recovering — and deciding. Her grandmother, who had passed away not long before, had always wanted Bani to start her own patisserie. That wish had been sitting with her, and the sudden absence of a job to return made it feel less like a distant ambition and more like a now-or-never moment.

Miam Patisserie launched in June 2015. She was 25 years old.

The name is straightforwardly French "miam" means yummy and it announced immediately what kind of patisserie this was going to be. Not a cupcake shop. Not a fondant cake operation catering to the mass-market party circuit. Bani was explicit from the start: she was done with what she called the run-down American style of baking that dominated Delhi's dessert scene at the time, and she was going to do French entremets layered, glazed, technically demanding cakes with bold and unconventional flavour pairings, regardless of whether Delhi was ready for it.

She started small, with minimal overhead, which she's identified as one of the biggest early advantages. A small operation meant she wasn't beholden to commercial pressures that would have forced her to stick to safe, popular flavors. She could experiment.

Going Wild With Flavour: Before Knowing If It Would Work

What Miam brought to Delhi in 2015 was genuinely unusual. While the rest of the city's patisseries were doing fairly classical presentations, Bani was pairing dark chocolate with salted caramel, building kaffir lime and coconut cakes, working jasmine tea into layered desserts, and bringing back yuzu and matcha from personal travels to Japan. Her cake designs, too, were unlike anything else in Delhi at the time deeply French in structure and finish, but flavored in ways that were entirely her own.

She's been candid about the fact that she didn't strategize this carefully. She just decided she was tired of making things she found boring, and leaned hard into what she actually wanted to make. The gamble paid off. Her dark chocolate and salted caramel entremets became her signature still the bestseller years later and customers who came in for the familiar flavors gradually became the adventurous ones suggesting new combinations.

Within eight months of opening, her team had grown from three people to eight. A loyal customer base formed quickly, and word spread in the way that tends to happen when a city realizes something genuinely new is available.

Delhi

Previous slideNext slide

Ten Years, Sixty People, Still Independent

What Miam looks like a decade later is worth noting for what it isn't as much as what it is. It's a sixty-member team, the majority of whom are women, operating across kitchens in Delhi-NCR. A new west Delhi outlet is open. In 2023, Bani launched Atelier Miam, a project dedicated to working with India's hyper-local produce and seasonal ingredients to prove that world-class pastry doesn't have to depend on imported ingredients that Indian harvests are more than adequate raw material for serious pastry.

And through all of it, Miam has remained family-owned, self-funded, and independent. There's been no outside investor, no franchise rush, no rapid scale at the cost of the product. She and her husband Akshay run it together. Growth has happened kitchen by kitchen, not because scaling slowly is the fashionable thing to say, but because she's been genuinely protective of the culture and the craft that made the brand worth building in the first place.

What the Story Is Really About

It would be easy to reduce Bani Nanda's story to a clean narrative physics student discovers her true calling, goes to Paris, comes home and builds a patisserie. But the actual shape of it is messier and more interesting. There was a detour through a degree she finished anyway. A false ceiling at a prestigious hotel job. A forced stop from a shoulder injury that became the opening she needed. A grandmother's wish that became the push.

The patisserie she built reflects all of those layers. It's technically rigorous in the French tradition she trained in, but it refuses to be just an import. It's ambitious about flavor without being precious about it. It's grown steadily without being in a hurry.

For a business that started with one person in Delhi going wild with flavour pairings and hoping the city would keep up, that's not a bad place to be.