TALENT

Tastes Sparking Joy

Being Neighbourly x Simran Savlani, A Spark of Madness

Author/ Being Neighbourly
5 March 2025

Simran Savlani talks a mile a minute and it’s impossible not to get caught up in her enthusiasm as she relays how A Spark of Madness got started. We’ve been playing email tag, but now Savlani’s back in Hong Kong and we’re on a call (and work out that while we’ve been talking, she’s just driven past me).

“Good things are coming,” she predicts of this year. “I mean, you can put yourself out there, all you like, but what is meant to be, will be there when the time comes,” she says sagely.

In her mid-30s, Savlani is a former sales and marketing employee, Le Cordon Bleu graduate, cookbook author and entrepreneur. Of Indian origin, she was born in Taiwan, lived there a few years, before the family relocated to India, again for just a few years. For the past 25 years, she has called Hong Kong home, and says it’s certainly where she feels she belongs, despite her speaking neither Cantonese nor Mandarin.

She tells me that the last four months of the year are typically really busy ones, so she usually takes a break in January and gets started with work again in February (hence her having been away).

Savlani has always loved food. “I always wanted to work with food,” she says, adding it was “always there”, but, she says, “Asian parents being as they are, they told me not to go into hotel management”, and because her grades were good, she dutifully attended HKU where she graduated with a degree in business management.

“I graduated in 2009, and after working in a sales and marketing capacity for several years, I got back to thinking about food and restaurants”.

Food usually means cooking, but in Savlani’s case, much as she says she likes to cook, she knew she didn’t have the patience or consistency to work in a restaurant, “where diners expect a dish to be cooked in exactly the same way when they return to eat there a few weeks later. So, I decided to go to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and took a one-year course, which included several internships, learning about how to deal with the business side of restaurants. I had my Emily in Paris moment,” she laughs.

In 2017, the Hong Kong scene was dominated by restaurant groups, and there were no real possibilities, she says, so she started up as a restaurant consultant, travelling to Africa and Singapore, and notched up a wealth of experience, being part of the Soho House Bombay launch.

“But when Covid hit, it took all the joie de vivre away, and I wasn’t sure what to do”. She says her sister ended up telling her to put all of her recipes together and make writing a cookbook her Covid baby, which is what she did. “I spent nine months working on it, going the self-publishing route, and, then, while it was at the printer, a process I was told would take six weeks, that was when the Spark sauces were born.”

Both cookbook and the three sauces were launched in October 2021. “I wanted to have something to tie in with the book launch and I didn’t want to do the typical merchandise,” she says.

The book, A Spark of Madness cookbook: An amalgamation of 116 vegetarian and vegan Asian staples, was an intimate journey. “All the cutlery that appears in the cookbook belongs to my parents. Every photo was taken with my iPhone and each of the vegetarian recipes were tested by friends and family,” she delivers, breathlessly.

According to her, the first six months after the launch of the sauces were nerve-wracking and in an ironic about-turn, it is the sauces that have taken centre stage. She ventures that this may be because they’re not just for the vegetarian market, unlike the cookbook; and because they have a one-year long shelf life.

Spark products are now available at numerous outposts in Hong Kong, not to mention stockists in Mumbai, Singapore, Bangkok, Manila and Dubai, for which Savlani says “a lot of effort goes into marketing how to use the sauces,” and she also does food tours and sampan tours in Hong Kong as well, highlighting the cha chaan teng that inspired the sauces and echoing the importance that the city holds for her.

From this year, she is looking to push the brand overseas, beyond the places it already has a presence, letting Spark sauces act as an ambassador for Hong Kong identity, as separate from that of Mainland China, she says.

“I have really enjoyed the journey so far.”

What’s the best work advice you have received?

“I’ve had a couple of role models,” says Simran Savlani, cookbook author and founder of A Spark of Madness sauces. “One was one of the co-founders of Sassy Media, Maura Thompson, who suggested that I should never reply to an email while angry. ‘Come back the next day, and deal with it then’, is what she impressed upon me.”

“Other great advice is to trust that things are as they are supposed to be. Having my own restaurant is still a dream, but it can wait. I’m honestly happy with the things that I’m doing and where I’m at. I can always open a restaurant when I’m 50 or 60… not everything needs to be just this minute.”

A Spark of Madness
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