When I called Asad Monga an influencer, he laughed and flatly refused the label.A freelance chef, Monga made his name as the sous chef at Test Kitchen, the younger, hip cousin of Okra, an institution in Karachi fine dining

More recently, he is known for his viral short form videos that capture him foraging seaweed off the Karachi coast to picking cherries in the mountains of upper Hunza.

I first met Monga in spring 2023 at Bohra Dastarkhwan, a Karachi-based supper club hosted by couple Maria Ajmerwala and Muffadal Moiz. Monga had recently left Test Kitchen and taken up freelance corporate work.

“I was going through a severe transitional phase in my life. I left Test Kitchen after three years of working there. I was in that uncertain zone of life: didn’t know where I was going essentially, but bills needed to be paid, and was taking up whatever gig I got.”

Monga has come a long way since our last meeting. He is now immersed in multiple streams of work that include food retreats, catering, food service consulting, and content creation that is helping him amass a growing social media following, and landing him prestigious gigs, including leading a team to cater the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit attended by officials from 11 countries.

“Since we last met, I feel I grew more confident in the things I wanted to do. It was one of those push-comes-to-shove moments for me. If not now, then when?” Monga recalls, I was always interested in trying to explore and understand the terrain in Pakistan and the ingredient profiles throughout the seasons…I had visited forests when I was younger, and later, as an adult, so I had a fair idea of what was happening, but I didn’t get to explore that, and that was making me really sad.

After spending 12 to 14 hours a day at a restaurant kitchen, Monga was ready to create a new life that gave him the time and space to explore and map local ingredients based on the terrain and seasons.

Monga met Sobia Maq, one of the co-founders of Silk Route Lodge, a newly opened boutique resort in Gulmit in upper Hunza, the same night as me. Maq had relocated to Gulmit and was desperate to find a chef that could train her staff to bake good bread. Monga was open to the idea. He was excited about the opportunity to refresh his canvas as a cook, and find a way to make people more mindful of how they nourish themselves. Fast forward to winter 2024, Monga now hosts three seasonal culinary retreats a year in partnership with Silk Route Lodge.

The retreats span over five days, and the activities are dictated by whats in season: cherry picking in the spring, foraging for wild herbs during the summer, and digging out fresh pumpkins in the fall. Participants gather fresh ingredients under Monga’s guidance, and learn to incorporate them in seasonal dishes, such as cherry orchard cakes, sea buckthorn tarts, and pumpkin focaccia.

Despite spending most of his life in Karachi, Monga feels much more at home in Hunza. “Karachi…is my own hometown, and I’m much more shy when it comes to expressing myself here,” Monga tells me, “In Hunza, it felt very natural to me because I saw all these ingredients for the first time in their natural habitat. The space and the people made it a very conducive dreamscape for a cook.”

Monga reveals glimpses of these retreats through reels on his Instagram page. While they have helped Monga land freelance work and promote his retreats, he insists that they are another creative outlet, kind of like a recipe.

“It’s just like cooking,” Monga says, “I have all the ingredients, the shots, the themes. What am I going to make with it?” At a time when short-form food videos feel formulaic and underwhelming, Monga’s reels are original, tasteful, and life-affirming.

They offer snapshots of the landscape in upper Hunza - fruit laden branches, freshly picked apples and apricots, and rolling cliffs lined with wild herbs – as well as the Karachi coast where he free dives to understand coastal seasonality of not only fish and seafood, but also more novel ingredients such as fish eggs and seaweed.

After leaving Test Kitchen, Monga would prepare and sell items like seaweed pakoras or clam mayonnaise out of his home. But between Karachi’s nonstop commercialization and rapidly growing pollution, the quality of the catch has deteriorated to the point that Monga can’t offer them anymore. Shifting seasons due to climate change has also made this work unpredictable. This December, for example, he found that he could no longer source the seaweed that he was able to find easily last winter.

He had come back to Karachi after completing culinary training in Malaysia and France, and was deeply affected by the recent death of his first culinary mentor, his grandmother. “I didn’t get to say goodbye,” Monga remembers, “It was a very void-like situation. I was pretty down, like the odds were stacked against me.” He tried working at a few restaurants but the terrible working conditions made him question his decision to become a chef.

He decided to step away from the kitchen, and focus on other creative outlets like photography. During this cooking sabbatical, he decided to travel to Chitral with a group of strangers to attend the Chilam Joshi spring festival in Kalash Valley on a whim. After the festival, Monga struck off on his own, backpacking and hitchhiking across upper Chitral. He found himself overwhelmed by the beauty and diversity of natural ingredients: high-quality wheat, capers, wild rhubarb, subliminal apples and mulberries, walnuts the size of his fists. Monga’s trip was cut short when he was intercepted by ISI agents who sent him back to Karachi. While the ending of the trip was abrupt and scary, Monga’s travels through Chitral brought him back to life.

“After that trip, I was like, get your act straight. You need to put in the time, you need to earn your badges, you have to work in kitchens throughout the city. You need to suck it up, pull up your socks and just do it. Monga recalls. He resumed working at restaurants, doing menial work alongside peers who were from all corners of Pakistan.

“I wanted to let these guys know that I’m not a punk, I mean business. I’m here to learn, and I’m here to help you, and here to support you.” He slowly built his repertoire that included stints at KUDU, Marcel’s, The Patio, and even a failed attempt at starting his own restaurant with a friend. Monga finally got his big break in 2019 when he joined Test Kitchen.

Over the past eight years, Monga has not only evolved as a chef, but has learned to confront the challenges of working in the Pakistani hospitality industry. “Even now, with so much education and awareness, there are times when people feel a certain entitlement dealing with people servicing them,” Monga laments.

He also feels the pressing need for a more open and collaborative space for cooks to get together, share their love of Pakistani food, and ignite a sense of discovery. “The camaraderie around cooking is very low.

Because of old systems, there is a divide between service staff and employers, but the boundaries and forms are now changing,” Monga tells me. “The new chefs coming in now are educated, they know what they are talking about and want to know about their craft.”

This includes two emerging stars, Rabia Shakeel from Lahore and Ramsha Khurram from Karachi, who Monga tapped as part of his core team to cater the SCO Summit.

So, whats next for Asad? He still finds things to be uncertain.

“The question I’m asking myself now is: should I be planning my own restaurant, or am I okay with this nomadic setup that I have laid out for myself? Monga wonders. “Another question is: how do I automate my systems (in Karachi) in a way that I can step away when I need to [for other projects]?”

He dreams of organizing a mega culinary tour, all the way from Karachi to the Karakoram, in which cooks collect ingredients along the way, and use them to prepare the ultimate Pakistani menu at the end. “What is Pakistani cuisine? Don’t Pakistani ingredients make Pakistani cuisine?” he asks. “And what does it mean to be a Pakistani chef? With Asad Monga, Pakistan may finally be getting its answer.