BAHAR
BAHAR
One long table. Eight to twelve seats. Non-eurocentric food, design and storytelling, cooked, plated and argued over together in Austin, Texas.
Bahar means spring, the season everything blooms at once. We are two desi women who kept meeting brilliant people from design, food and art in Austin who had never sat at the same table. So we built the table.
We start from Pakistan and Bangladesh. From truck art and block prints, from recipes carried in heads and not in books. We treat these as a canon, not a footnote to someone else's. Every gathering seats eight to twelve people, with printed menus, a set-designed tablescape and seating engineered so a chef sits beside a type designer beside a poet.
READ THE FULL STORYFree, under two minutes. We read every application. Designers, chefs, writers, architects, textile makers and curious people who love a long dinner.
Each table holds eight to twelve guests. We engineer the seating on purpose, never beside the person you already know.
Printed menus, one structured ice breaker, and courses that carry the plot. You are not the audience. You are a character.
Each table carries a theme. The food, the reading, the objects on the cloth and the argument we want at the table are all authored around it. The first one is set.
Our first table is a dinner about Islamabad and Dhaka: the capitals of Pakistan and Bangladesh, drawn up by American designers for a very not-so American population. Louis Kahn's parliament rising out of a floodplain, marble modernism on the edge of the Margalla Hills, and the people who made those blueprints their own. Told across courses you eat with your hands and your eyes.
The address is shared with confirmed guests a few days before. Read the full theme.
Up to eleven strangers from design, food, art and architecture, seated on purpose so you never sit beside someone you already know.
Fully in person, here in Austin. A room where difference is the main course, not a networking mixer with name tags.
Printed menus, a themed table, one structured argument worth having, and LUKMA letters between dinners.
Creative Austin is full of networking mixers and eurocentric defaults. BAHAR is a real table where difference is the main course. We kept meeting brilliant people who had never sat together, so we built the place for it.
Between us: design, food, textiles and a stubborn refusal to treat South Asian creative history as a footnote. We plan the menu, the room and the theme for every table.
Dinners run roughly monthly to start, moving through Austin lofts, studios, gardens and borrowed kitchens. Small on purpose, so every seat is engineered.
An Austin supper club for the arts. An intimate dinner series curated by two desi women, gathering eight to twelve people from design, food and storytelling around one long table built from non-eurocentric traditions.
Applying is free and takes under two minutes. We share the seat price when you ask. A seat covers the full multi-course dinner, drinks and a printed program.
Ask for a seat. We read every application and seat each table deliberately. Applicants hear about new tables first.
In Austin, Texas. The venue changes with each table and is announced with the invitation. The exact address is shared with confirmed guests a few days before.
The menu, the objects on the cloth, the argument we had and the one that surprised us. The archive is empty for now, and honestly so, because it begins the night of our first table. Join LUKMA and you will get each field note as it is written.
Our newsletter. Hear about new tables first. What we are cooking, who we are reading, and where the next table is going. Once a month, no more.
