New Delhi [India], September 23: In September 2000, Manoj Kumar joined The Park New Delhi as a commis. His first assignment was room service, the residence lounge and the coffee shop, three outlets with three very different rhythms. Room service demands speed and accuracy with no margin for error. A lounge asks for polish. A coffee shop runs on steady volume from morning to night. For a young cook, moving between them is a demanding way to learn how a hotel kitchen actually works.
Recognition came early. He was named Merit Employee of the Year at The Park in 2004, and in 2005 the hotel sent him to represent it at the Great Indian Culinary Challenge in Mumbai, where he competed in the starters section. Around the same period he contributed to research on North East Indian cuisine and helped organise a festival built around it. It was work that took him beyond the familiar North Indian repertoire and into regional cooking few restaurant kitchens were exploring at the time.
After moving up to Chef de Partie at The Park, his career opened out internationally. He worked in London with Masala World, at Crowne Plaza New Delhi Rohini, briefly as Head Chef at USHNA in Abu Dhabi, at The Saffron Mantra in Portugal’s Algarve, and today at Tamashaa in Washington, D.C. That makes five countries: India, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Portugal and the United States.
What stands out is not the geography but the consistency. Across every posting, the specialty stayed the same: Indian cuisine, cooked for guests with very different expectations, in kitchens with very different suppliers, teams and regulations. Carrying one discipline through that many markets requires a level of adaptability that a single-kitchen career rarely tests.
More than two decades after that first shift at The Park, he is a Sous Chef leading back-of-house operations at one of the U.S. capital’s modern Indian dining rooms. In September 2026 he was also named an Official Executive Member of the World Association of Master Chefs (WAMC), an honour listed alongside his work at Tamashaa.
His trajectory tells a familiar but increasingly rare story in professional kitchens: a cook who started at the bottom rung of a five-star hotel, stayed committed to one cuisine, and built a career that now spans continents.
Please Visit : https://www.instagram.com/manuusa83?stkn=MWczZmtmMjFnYmpwYQ==
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chef-manoj-kumar
If you object to the content of this press release, please notify us at pr.error.rectification@gmail.com. We will respond and rectify the situation within 24 hours.
