№ 02
The Heritage Fête
A food and craft fête on the Coonoor lawns, built around heritage recipes cooked by the families who own them, with a live stage running all day.
- Where
- Coonoor
- When
- December 2024
- Guests
- 5,000+
- Kind
- Festival
The brief
Put the Nilgiris' cooking on a table and let people eat it. Not a demonstration, not a curated tasting — actual family recipes served by the families themselves, in one place, for one weekend.
The fête had to hold a crowd in the thousands on open ground, run a live stage from morning, and still feel like somewhere you would stop and talk to a stranger.
The ground
Open lawn in Coonoor. Stalls in a broad horseshoe so nothing dead-ends, the stage anchoring the long side, and a marquee for the days the hills decide otherwise.
Each kitchen got its own hand-lettered board — Kutchi Memon, the Heritage Table, and the rest — so a visitor could read the grounds without a map.
The day
Bands from soundcheck to sundown under the inside43 backdrop. A card-writing table that people kept coming back to. Craft stalls, preserves, a tree that filled up with hand-made cards over the course of the afternoon.
What the photographs kept catching was not the production. It was people finding each other in the middle of it.
