Parental dreams morph. Ritu Dalmia’s Marwari parents, no doubt, once thought their third child would shun meat and wine, raise children and be happy. Instead, she runs restaurants that serve all kinds of wriggly stuff, has a wine cellar that would have turned Roald Dahl green, and knows words that a sailor would baulk at. And, yes, she is happy.

So are her parents. The other day, when Dalmia’s book, Italian Khana, was launched at the Italian cultural centre where she has a restaurant, her businessman father was strangely quiet through the evening. Later, he turned to her and said: “Everybody earns money — but you have earned a name in the family.”

You can imagine Dalmia as the enfant terrible of the family: a little overweight perhaps, owlish glasses, talkative as hell, and forever up to trouble. Now, at 35, her glasses are trendy. She has lost 24 kilos in the last few years — and gained six since she quit smoking over a year ago. But she can still outtalk anyone. You can sit back, press record on the cassette player, and periodically say “And then?” in between mouthfuls of her ravioli (stuffed with beetroot and topped with goat’s milk cheese). And Dalmia will tell you all.

Some would say that’s what makes her a great chef, for food, in her lexicon, is all about little tales. “Maybe I talk too much. For me, that is food — it’s all about feelings. Everything I cook has a story,” she says.

The book, published by Random House India, demonstrates that. It has Dalmia advising you, with apt stories, on what to cook when you want to woo a lover, impress an in-law, prepare a feast for friends or simply indulge yourself. And, wonder of wonders, it tells you how to do that with ingredients that are easily available. Can’t get the morning dew of an edelweiss bud for a particular dish? Don’t worry; use water instead. Well, almost.

Dalmia, who runs Diva, a successful Italian restaurant in Delhi’s Greater Kailash II market, never actually thought she’d write a cook book. She has always been a writer, though — and has been keeping a journal every day since she was a student in Delhi’s Convent of Jesus and Mary school.

“I have been a closet writer. Forget my grammar, but I always liked writing and made little entries at the end of each day — what you’d call a blog today,” she says. “But did I think I would ever write a cook book? No.”

Publishers and editors had earlier approached her with offers, but Dalmia those days believed that those who could, cooked; those who couldn’t, wrote cook books and anchored TV shows. “I thought when chefs start writing cook books and appearing on TV, they are not cooking enough. Now I have done both, and I am still cooking. So it was my mindset.”

Random House made her an offer that she couldn’t, as the cliché goes, refuse. “Write what you want to, and we will make it the most gorgeous looking cook book,” she was promised. The book — with some mouth-watering pictures by Sephi Bergerson — has also spawned a television show. “But at the end of the day, I am a bawarchi. Everything else comes second,” she says.

Yet Dalmia never really thought she’d be a chef. “I wanted to go to Wharton, do my MBA, run my papa’s empire. But I think that gene escaped me — I wasn’t cut out to be a businesswoman.”

Instead, a culinary gene popped up. Dalmia, her mother holds (and exaggerates, says the modest daughter), first wielded a spatula when she was nine. “My mother can’t cook to save her life,” she says. But she did own a series of books called Pak Pranali which had everything that a Marwari home-maker would like to have known about: from poha to baked Alaska.

Young Ritu pored over the books and once even prepared a three-course meal for her family when she was 13. That was possibly the first time she was paid as a chef, for her brother gave her Rs 50. A couple of years later, she cooked a lavish meal for her school friends, who liked the tiramisu but panned everything else they ate. “My friends used to tell me, you keep criticising the food that you eat elsewhere, so why don’t you start your own restaurant? And I thought, I’ll show you guys one day.”

That’s how she started — with MezzaLuna, a restaurant in a now suitably upscale but then still largely rural enclave called Hauz Khas village in south Delhi in 1993. She set it up with Rs 5 lakh — she earned Rs 10-15 lakh a year those days from her father’s marble and paper business, which she joined when still at school. She loved it, but it didn’t take off.

“It was a terrible commercial decision. In 1993, a fine dining Italian restaurant was ridiculous, with costs higher than those in hotels. It went against every grain possible — no imports, no alcohol licence, in a village with muddy streets and drunk villagers,” she says. “I found it very romantic, very cute, very whatever. But it didn’t work, it didn’t work.” MezzaLuna gave way to Vama in London, where, incidentally, she picked up her colourful vocabulary of Bengali swear words. Her partners were Calcutta boys and knew even those words that had been banned in the outermost rings of impolite circles.

But Dalmia likes things Bengali, even if — make that especially if — it’s a particularly imaginative swear word, or Laker aloo — potato cooked with tamarind and garlic. “I am a Dilliwallah. But I like to pretend that I am a Calcuttan because I think it’s cool.” Her family was earlier based in Calcutta, where Ritu, one of four children, spent the first seven years of her life. “My father is Calcutta fixated, my mother speaks and writes Bengali and my sister speaks it fluently. I speak a smattering,” she says — and adds that Marwaris from Calcutta have Bengali inbuilt in their genes.

“I can even sing Rabindra Sangeet,” she says, and bursts into a lusty, if somewhat pitchy and wrongly worded, rendition of Jodi tor daak shuney… Thankfully, Diva is mostly empty at lunchtime, for its loyal clients — many of whom are regulars from its start eight years ago — go there for dinner.

Diva was set up with her partner Gita Bhalla, “a hugely successful” tour operator. Bhalla, Dalmia says, is the boss. “But she is very indulgent and she lets me do everything.” The most amazing thing about her, she adds, is that she likes to keep out of the limelight. “If I had a partner who was always in the limelight, I would die,” says Dalmia with a shudder.

The chef, indeed, basks in the arc lights; the ordinary is not her. In school, she was caught smoking by her indignant nuns (“Ritu Dalmia, you belong to a government boys’ school,” said her math teacher). When a school team went on an educational trip to Italy, she played cards with the Italian bus driver. And when little girls would drink their Ovaltine, she’d go to a friend’s house to eat — and later cook — something non-vegetarian. Now, because of health problems, she has gone back to being a vegetarian and has stopped smoking.

Once she brought back a five-kilo fish from Italy and stored it in her mother’s strictly-vegetarian refrigerator, hoping to remove it the next morning. “As luck would have it, I overslept, and my mother decided it was the day to supervise the cleaning of the fridge. And then of course there was this huge knocking on my door: COME NOW. The whole house had to be cleaned with Ganga jal,” she recalls.

Today, her mother complains that ever since Dalmia has become a professional chef, she has stopped cooking for them. “I tell her, I still cook — so come to my restaurant. But you have to pay for your meal,” she says and laughs.

The 90-minute tape is almost over, and Dalmia continues to hold forth on life and food as if she has all the time in the world. And, of course, she doesn’t — she has to visit her four restaurants in the city, plan out a special birthday menu for a party of regulars, work out at the gym, dine out with her visiting sister and then finalise plans for a Dharamsala visit. She has to leave her books behind — her Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima and Amitav Ghosh — because her annual meditation retreat doesn’t allow reading. And, no, she can’t talk there either. But she’ll survive — and live to tell the tale.