The BRICS gala dinner menu hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned a diplomatic banquet into a viral food story, pairing reinvented classics like Khandvi Mille-Feuille and Shahtoot Phirni with the summit’s usual photo-ops. That’s the short version. The longer version is more interesting, and it says less about food than about why some things go viral and others, despite far bigger budgets, simply don’t.
Key Takeaways
- The BRICS gala dinner menu featured reworked Indian classics, including Khandvi Mille-Feuille and a saffron-mulberry dessert called Shahtoot Phirni.
- The spread leaned on fine-dining technique applied to regional Indian recipes rather than a single “national cuisine” theme.
- It went viral largely because it was unplanned virality, not a scripted marketing push — unlike the heavily promoted G20 millet dinner of 2023.
- The real lesson for marketers is about restraint: understated storytelling beat loud campaign messaging, again.
What Was Actually on the BRICS Gala Dinner Menu?
Reports out of the dinner point to a multi-course spread built around Indian regional recipes, reworked using French plating techniques and modern kitchen methods. The name-check that got the most attention was Khandvi Mille-Feuille — the humble Gujarati gram-flour roll, usually eaten as a teatime snack, stacked and layered like a French pastry.
Dessert closed things out with Shahtoot Phirni, a mulberry-and-saffron spin on the North Indian rice pudding that usually shows up at weddings. Between these two bookends, the BRICS gala dinner menu reportedly moved through soups, tandoor-style preparations, and vegetarian mains designed to work for a room full of dietary preferences from a dozen-odd countries.
A Rough Course Breakdown
| Course | Dish (as reported) | What It Reworks |
| Starter | Khandvi Mille-Feuille | Gujarati khandvi, restyled as a layered pastry |
| Soup | Regional lentil-based broth | Everyday dal, refined into a plated course |
| Main | Tandoor-style vegetarian and non-vegetarian preparations | North Indian tandoor cooking |
| Dessert | Shahtoot Phirni | Classic phirni, with mulberry and saffron |
None of this is molecular gastronomy. It’s Indian home and street food, elevated just enough to photograph well and travel well on a menu card that foreign delegations take home as a souvenir.
Why Did the BRICS Gala Dinner Menu Go Viral?
Here’s the conventional wisdom making the rounds in marketing circles this week: that this was a masterstroke of “soft power branding,” a deliberately engineered PR moment designed to have food writers and diplomats alike talking about Indian cuisine on the world stage. Government communications teams love that framing. It flatters the process.
I don’t buy it, not entirely. Menu cards for state dinners get released after almost every major summit — the G7, the UN General Assembly luncheon, APEC. Most of them vanish into wire copy nobody reads twice. What made the BRICS gala dinner menu different wasn’t strategy. It was specificity. “Khandvi Mille-Feuille” is a strange, funny, oddly poetic phrase that people wanted to repeat, screenshot, and argue about. You can’t script that kind of stickiness from a briefing room.
Compare it to the menu at India’s 2023 G20 Leaders’ Summit dinner in New Delhi, which was built almost entirely around millets, as part of the government’s officially declared “International Year of Millets” push. That campaign had a hashtag, a diplomatic talking point, and months of advance messaging behind it. It got polite coverage. It did not get memed. The BRICS spread, with no comparable campaign machinery behind it, spread further and faster purely on the strength of two odd-sounding dish names.
The Marketing Lesson Hiding in a Dinner Menu
This fits a pattern I keep coming back to: most viral campaigns succeed despite the strategy layered on top of them, not because of it. Brands spend months war-gaming a “moment,” and the moment that actually lands is the unscripted one — a weird product name, an offhand tweet, a dish nobody thought to hype in advance. The BRICS gala dinner menu is the latest data point. Nobody at the Ministry of External Affairs was running an A/B test on dessert names. It worked anyway, maybe because it wasn’t trying to.
That’s not an argument against planning, to be clear. It’s an argument for planning less loudly. The dinner’s organisers clearly thought hard about the food itself — regional sourcing, dietary balance, presentation. What they didn’t do was wrap it in a campaign layer that screamed “notice this.” The absence of a hard sell is precisely what let people notice it on their own terms.
Who Attended the BRICS Gala Dinner?
The dinner was held for heads of state and delegations attending the BRICS summit under India’s current chairmanship, alongside the usual mix of senior ministers, diplomats, and host-country officials. BRICS itself has expanded well beyond its founding five members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — to include newer entrants such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE, which makes menu planning for a room this diverse genuinely tricky. You’re not just picking food that photographs well; you’re avoiding dishes that alienate half the guest list on religious or dietary grounds.
Why the Vegetarian-Heavy Approach Made Sense
- India’s own culinary identity leans heavily vegetarian, giving the host a natural, authentic anchor.
- A vegetarian-forward menu sidesteps most religious dietary restrictions across a multi-country guest list.
- Regional dishes like khandvi are naturally plant-based, so “elevating” them didn’t require reinventing the ingredients — just the presentation.
Does Diplomatic Food Branding Actually Work?
Sometimes. The uncomfortable truth is that most state banquets are forgotten within a week, BRICS gala dinner or otherwise. What tends to survive in public memory is the one strange, quotable detail — a dish name, a toast, an awkward handshake. Brands chasing “cultural diplomacy” campaigns should read this as a caution against over-engineering: the audience remembers the odd, specific thing, not the overarching theme document somebody in a strategy deck labelled “narrative pillars.”
If there’s a genuine India-angle lesson here for marketers, it’s this: hyper-local specificity travels internationally better than generic “heritage” messaging. Nobody outside India needed to be told what khandvi was to find “Khandvi Mille-Feuille” interesting — the specificity did the explaining for them.
FAQ
What was served at the BRICS gala dinner hosted by PM Modi?
Reports point to a multi-course menu including Khandvi Mille-Feuille as a starter and Shahtoot Phirni for dessert, alongside regional Indian mains reworked with modern plating.
What is Khandvi Mille-Feuille?
It’s a reinterpretation of Gujarati khandvi — thin gram-flour rolls — presented in layered, pastry-style plating inspired by the French mille-feuille.
What is Shahtoot Phirni?
Shahtoot Phirni is a version of the classic North Indian rice pudding, phirni, flavoured with mulberry (shahtoot) and saffron.
Why did the BRICS gala dinner menu trend online?
Largely because of the unusual, quotable dish names rather than any coordinated marketing push — a case of organic curiosity outperforming scripted campaigns.
Which countries are part of BRICS in 2026?
BRICS now includes founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, along with newer members such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE.
Strip away the diplomacy and the BRICS gala dinner menu is really a marketing case study wearing a menu card as disguise. The takeaway isn’t “brand India harder.” It’s that the smallest, oddest detail usually beats the biggest campaign built to sell it.