Ritesh Bhagwati is a Mumbai based Food Blogger by chance. His journey is fascinating in itself. Being a big-time foodie and a tech-savvy guy, he was always trying out various food at places and obliviously would post pictures of the places he visited on Facebook and Instagram, use Foursquare (tagging feature, now owned by Snapchat) and share his personal views on Zomato from its early days.
In 2018, while he was on Zomato Level 8, he was discovered by one of the food bloggers cum PR (of that time) on Zomato. When that PR called him for the first time and invited one of the esteemed restaurants for a food review, he was clueless about this whole industry. But from then onwards, his passion for food was expanded through food blogging. His work (reviews) has been one of the unique ones and his page (Instagram & Zomato – @imdnextbuffet) is filled with mouthwatering foods from local restaurants to five-star ones.
Being a foodie his motto is “if you have a passion and love for eating good food, then you should be equally passionate in terms of cooking them too”. After all, food is one of the universal languages of love.
He thinks off late the food blogging industry in India has been polarized where on fag end there are few authentic genuine food bloggers who actually understand the concept of food blogging and do the job with earnestly and objectively whereas on another end there’s a flock of the crowd led by selective PRs who control these non-food bloggers to malign the authenticity of food blogging through malpractices.
Many ask him as to how to be a food blogger and his only standard answer is “for anyone to start something in any field, the most basic prerequisite is to have a genuine affection and passion for that field and walk the path on its own instead of taking anyone’s help (guidance is okay). There will come a time when your honesty will be recognized and such recognition will stick with you forever”.
