In Pune, the quest for a great meal is no longer confined to a table. The city's latest culinary trend involves lacing up your shoes, hitting the pavement, and discovering flavours one step at a time. Food walks, which blend meals, movement, and community, are rapidly becoming Pune's favourite way to dine, reshaping the local food culture by valuing local stories and shared journeys through the city's evolving eateries.
More Than a Meal: The Rise of the Food Walk
Food trends often signal a deeper cultural shift. In today's attention economy, the experience surrounding a meal has become as crucial as the food itself. Sanya Deshmukh, who bonded with her friend Riya Pote over this concept, believes food walks have fundamentally changed how people value eating. The premise is beautifully simple: walk the city and eat where it already eats. Since food is not static, you move along with it—with the street, the residents, and the stories behind each dish.
Unlike traditional dining, these walks do not place the eater at the centre of the experience. Instead, participants become part of someone else's everyday life. Your palate shifts with the changing menus and streets, transforming you from a mere consumer into part of a community. Pune has embraced this shift wholeheartedly, attracting participants from varied age groups, occupations, and lifestyles, with particular popularity among college-going youth and young adults.
Intimacy on Foot: The Heart of the Experience
"What makes walking crucial is its intimacy," says Riya Pote. When you walk with intention, the food arrives slowly. The experience involves waiting, listening, and noticing how a street's character changes with every turn. Conversations with local residents unfold organically, covering topics from the city's quaint past to personal aspirations. Pote describes it as "movement riddled with heat, crowd, standing, waiting, and a shared inconvenience that somehow makes the food taste better."
Jayesh Paranjape, founder of Western Routes (one of Pune's oldest food walk organisers), traces the renewed interest directly to the pandemic years. After long isolation, people sought ways to reconnect socially and spatially. Walking, he notes, allows people to understand a city's heritage at a human pace. "We highlight restaurants serving food for generations. Apart from the food, people usually just come to chat." Since its inception in 2013, Western Routes has seen a significant surge in demand, forecasting food walks as a promising activity in the upcoming year.
Building Community: From Food Lovers to Friends
With more organisers entering the space, the format has evolved. Hungry Food Walk, started in 2017 by food blogger Madhav Dadwe, aimed not to chase novelty but to "experience the lesser-known gems of Pune." This idea was shaped through conversations with chefs from ITC. Dadwe keeps walks deliberately pocket-friendly and intimate because "food tastes different and conversations are real when the group is small."
The routes traverse iconic Pune areas like the Peth neighbourhoods, Camp, Tilak Road, and Viman Nagar, with special festive editions during Eid in Fatima Nagar and Camp. A beautiful pattern emerged over time. "They came for the food," Dadwe observes, "but stayed for the people." Visitors turned into friends, and friends into a growing community bound by a shared fascination with food, its history, ingredients, and stories.
Some of the most famous routes include the Breakfast Trail of Old Pune, the Camp Walk featuring iconic eateries like Garden Vada Pav, Dorabjee & Sons, Husseny Bakery, and Marz-O-Rin, and the Koregaon Park Crawls exploring the area's novel and vibrant offerings. Local eateries have responded positively, welcoming food-loving customers who are likely to revisit.
What unites these initiatives are people who are not just hungry but curious. The community thrives because it is porous, welcoming everyone from tourists and migrants to students, grandparents, and their grandchildren. At a time when eating out is often about being seen in the right place, food walks ask a more profound question: what does it mean to move through a city and be moved by it? The answer, it turns out, is not something you sit down to consume, but something you step out to walk into.
