An edible lotus and snacks from six regions await the BRICS leaders
Delhi’s hotels have built menus that double as national presentation — and one dessert carries three different symbolisms at once.
An edible lotus made from rose, saffron and cardamom will be put in front of visiting heads of state in New Delhi this weekend, alongside spiced walnuts from Kashmir and snacks pulled from five different Indian states.
The leaders of eleven BRICS member countries, their partner delegations and outreach invitees are staying in Delhi's luxury hotels for the summit at Bharat Mandapam on 12 and 13 September — and those hotels have designed menus for them that function as a piece of national presentation in their own right.
Snacks as a map of the country
The Taj Mahal in New Delhi is greeting VVIP guests with what it calls Tradition to Table, a collection of recipes curated by the hotel's chefs and drawn from their earliest culinary mentors: their mothers.
The selection reported by NDTV reads as a deliberate tour of the country rather than a chef's showcase — spiced walnuts from Kashmir, Purani Dilli Maida Kaju, Bhakarwadi from Maharashtra, mini kachori from Rajasthan, Bengal's Kucho Nimki and Tamil Nadu's Murukku.
Six items, six regions, no single cuisine dominating. For a summit whose theme is Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability, a plate assembled on the principle that no region speaks for the whole is a reasonably pointed piece of hosting.
"Reflecting the diversity and richness of India's culinary legacy, this memento embodies the warmth, care, and spirit of connection that define the Taj experience," Dr Anmol Ahluwalia, area director of operations and general manager at the Taj Mahal, New Delhi, told NDTV.
The lotus, and what it carries
The Leela Palace, also hosting VVIP guests, is offering a handcrafted edible lotus.
Its construction is the straightforward part: rose, saffron and cardamom, paired with indigenous Indian fruits. Its meaning is where it gets layered.
The lotus is India's national flower. It is also the symbol reflected in the visual identity of BRICS India 2026. And it is the election symbol of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Those three facts sit on the same plate. Whether any visiting delegation reads past the first of them is another matter, but a summit logo, a national emblem and a governing party's symbol converging on one object is the kind of detail that makes state hospitality worth paying attention to.
The hotel describes its offering as a curated culinary experience celebrating the country's heritage with a contemporary sensibility.
Why hotels do this at all
Summit catering is not a footnote to diplomacy; it is one of the few parts of a state visit a host controls completely.
A leader arrives with an agenda set by their own government and departs with a communiqué negotiated by officials. What happens in between — what they eat, what they are shown, what they are given to take home — is the host's to compose. It is the reason the Taj is framing its selection as a memento rather than a menu.
The Taj Mahal, The Leela Palace and The LaLiT are among the hotels accommodating delegations, offering a mix of Indian dishes with contemporary and international influences.
The practical constraints nobody mentions
Feeding eleven national delegations in one weekend is a logistics exercise before it is a culinary one.
The menus have been curated to account for guests' nutritional preferences and cultural backgrounds — the polite formulation for a genuinely complicated problem. A guest list including delegations from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Ethiopia, Brazil and China spans several sets of dietary rules, and getting one of them wrong is a diplomatic incident rather than a service failure.
The hotels are also operating inside the same restrictions as the rest of the city: more than 35 roads under traffic control, around 120 trains altered, and non-scheduled flights barred from Delhi's airspace between 7am and 11pm across the three days. Supply deliveries to a Chanakyapuri hotel this weekend are subject to the same motorcade windows as everyone else.
Wellness, and five delegations in one hotel
The lotus is not served alone. It is complemented by millet cookies, handmade granola bars and wellness infusions from Aujasya by The Leela, described by the hotel's executive chef Karan Thakur as combining Indian ingredients with a more contemporary approach to nourishment.
Aujasya is the group's holistic wellness programme, developed with the food and nutrition consultant Dr Ankita Jalori and built around two ideas — Restore, meaning nourishing the body, and Renew, meaning mindfulness.
The Leela Palace is preparing to receive delegates from five countries, according to general manager Preeti Makhija, who described a hotel working on every part of the encounter at once.
"Our team is excited for it, and the entire hotel is prepping for it," she told ANI. "From security measures to the welcome at reception, special menus are also being planned for them."
A note on sourcing
The menu details come from an NDTV report. Mint, which carried the account, states plainly that it has not seen the menu itself.
That is worth knowing before treating any particular dish as confirmed. What is not in question is the approach the hotels are taking — regional breadth, heavy symbolism, and a great deal of effort spent on the part of a summit that produces no paragraph in any declaration.
