In the span of a year, Malhar lost his job and both his parents, walked away from two decades in food service, and came out the other side with a financial advising career he hadn’t planned for. And finally, the freedom to put real time into the food tours through India he’d already been quietly building since 2019.
He wears two hats, and he’s upfront about which one pays the bills.
“I am a financial advisor, and that’s my primary source of income,” he says. “Good Food Journeys is basically what I call it, my passion project. I love doing what I do. It takes me to a happy place.”
Running two completely unrelated businesses isn’t always tidy. “You can easily get pulled in three different directions,” he admits.
Weekdays belong to Vega, where clients expect answers. Good Food Journeys gets the gaps: evenings, weekends, the hours he spends planning next year’s itinerary, unless there’s a tour on the ground in India and someone needs help.
Malhar didn’t plan this career change. By 2025, there wasn’t much of his old life left to return to.
“It was quite a pivotal year for me,” he says. It was also the year he decided to leave food service behind entirely and start again. Rather than looking for similar work, he went back to study, completed his Level 5 certification, and joined Vega in October 2025.
First in residential lending, now closer to an even split between residential and business finance. That side of the job, he says, is where he finds the most satisfaction at Vega.
“I can put myself in their shoes,” he says of the small business owners he works with now. “I was one, once.”
Even his son asked what kind of midlife crisis prompts a total career change. Malhar laughs about it now. “I’m a free bird to do what I want to do, basically.”
The Business North West board seat too came the same way most things seem to arrive for Malhar.
Unplanned.
“I got a call from Danielle saying, ‘We’ve got a vacancy for the Riverhead region. Would you like to take it up?’”
He joined on 1 July, calling it “training wheels” for governance work he’d wanted to do for years.
Good Food Journeys, however, goes back further, to 2019, and almost didn’t survive its own timing. The first tour was booked for April 2020, ‘The Cricket and Curry Tour’ to catch the IPL in India. Then COVID came in uninvited, cancelling everything. It wasn’t until 2023, the so-called ‘revenge travel era,’ that Malhar tried again, this time with Sid and Chand Sahrawat of Cassia and French Café hosting on his behalf, a tour every year.
The first tour drew four people. Then, it grew from there: twelve, then fifteen, then twenty on the most recent trip.
It’s where he can break stereotypes.
Malhar likes to point out that Mumbai’s largest slum sits barely an hour from some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, and that guests who’ve braced themselves for chaos and hardship often end up staying at the Oberoi, or in a palace in Udaipur that once belonged to royalty.
“That disparity, I don’t think you can ignore that,” he says.
The tours are luxurious and deliberately unapologetic about it. “There’s a perception that India is poor,” Malhar says. “When you stay in the Oberoi, or in the palace in Udaipur, it’s eye-opening.”
Each itinerary is built around an Indian festival: Holi in Agra this year, with a private celebration at the chief minister’s son’s home; an upcoming Lohri tour to Amritsar, timed around the Golden Temple.
The next departure, Flavours, Festivals and Gems of India, is set for January 2027, with a handful of spots still open.
Diwali, however, is off the list for now, after a 2025 tour ran into Delhi traffic jams and a security lockdown caused by a foreign head of state staying at the same hotel.
“Lesson learned,” he says, smiling.
Luxury isn’t the whole story, though. Every tour builds in a moment of contrast. A meal at Sheroes’ Hangout in Agra, a café run by survivors of acid attacks, or simply time spent somewhere the wealth on show elsewhere doesn’t reach.
It’s part of why every trip includes something given back to a community there, in line with what he says is the Good in the name actually about: doing good, in communities, in India.
Before every departure, Malhar gives travellers the same briefing:
“We’re not travelling through Europe, where everything runs to the minute.”
It’s advice that doubles as his philosophy generally, one he traces back to a year that upended his own plans and forced him to start again.
Asked what he’d tell himself a decade ago, he doesn’t think twice: “Change is the only constant. Expect the unexpected.”
Two businesses, one instinct: find where someone’s stuck, and do something about it.
Malhar just happens to call one of them a mortgage and the other a trip to India.
Either way, he shows up for people when it matters, and that part was never really unplanned.
Business:
Vega (financial advising), Good Food Journeys
Location:
North West Auckland
Contact:
malhar@vegalend.co.nz
021 587 336
What they do:
Business and residential lending advice; luxury, festival-themed food and cultural tours through India, with a focus on community give-back alongside the experience.