Promoting Local and Regional Haryanvi Cuisine Through Hotels: Stay Connected with Roots

Abstract

Among various aspects food is an important attraction among tourists while choosing destinations for travelling. Indian food has vast and rich cultural heritage. This study is an attempt to identify reasons why hotels are not serving local foods and promoting local cuisine to preserving the Indian food culture. To initiate the study firstly explored the local and regional food of Haryana through conducting interviews with 50 local people. The secondly to identify the local and regional food/ dishes in the menus of hotels and find out the extent local food had been placed in their restaurant’s menus and finally assessed the reasons, why hotels are not serving local Haryanvi foods in hotels of Haryana and Interview of 20 chefs of hotels was conducted in Haryana state of India. Document review method was used for collecting the data from 20 hotels and listed 125 different local and regional foods. Demand and supply factors were identified to get the reasons why Haryanvi cuisines are not being offered in the hotels of Haryana. The results of the study show that respondents are willing to get more Haryanvi foods in the Hotels / Restaurants. Further, findings show that hotels/ restaurants are not adequately represented local food in Hotel menus due to Lack of awareness among the customers, lack of demand for local and regional foods from the customers, incompetent / lack of skills among the hired staff in the hotels, attitudes menu decision makers are important factors for promoting local and regional foods in hotels. The study strengthen the image of Haryana as authentic cultural & culinary destination and suggestions for policy makers and hotel management educational institutes for enhancement of customer experience and promotion of cultural food heritage.

Keywords: Local Foods, Regional Foods, Haryanvi Cuisine, Chefs, Hotels

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