CHEF PROFILES | KELOWNA
Wildling’s Sai Batta Is Just Getting Started
At 28, the Kelowna chef has already cooked across continents. Now he’s using Wildling to turn all that motion into something lasting.
By Eric Barton | June 26, 2026
Pistachio phyllo
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
The thing Sai Batta remembers about Delhi’s street vendors isn’t the theater of it, exactly, or even one perfect plate. It’s what happened when he returned.
“You go to a spot, come back two years later, and their flavour is dialled in exactly the same,” Batta says. “They sell one thing, and they’ve perfected it completely. That kind of mastery, that consistency, I found that really powerful.”
That memory explains something essential about Batta, the 28-year-old chef at Wildling in Kelowna, British Columbia. He’s not trying to cook as if he has arrived from one place. His food has picked up ideas in Delhi, Germany, Switzerland, and the Okanagan, and now he’s using his restaurant as a place to put those ideas in motion.
Batta
Batta grew up in Delhi, where there were street vendors, new restaurants, international cuisines, and the long echoes of colonial and regional influence. “There’s just so many people, and new restaurants opening every week. It’s an incredibly diverse food culture,” he says. “Different cuisines everywhere you look.”
At home, the first teacher was his mother. Both of his parents worked, and Batta would come home alone and start cooking for himself. It didn’t begin as ambition. It was more basic than that, and maybe more useful: hunger, curiosity, and the discovery that a few ingredients could become something. “I just loved that you could create something out of nothing, and it would actually taste good,” he says.
As a teenager, Batta traveled to Europe and worked at his cousin’s restaurant in Germany during summer holidays. He was 16. The staff spoke German. He didn’t. The pay was poor. The hours were long. None of this seems to have discouraged him. “Intense,” he says of those days and nights. " I won’t pretend otherwise. You just keep your head down and grind.”
Tartare
What he found there was the thing many cooks spend years chasing and many never find: the feeling that a kitchen can become a chosen family, even when it’s hot and underpaid and slightly absurd. “It felt more like family than anything else I could imagine doing,” Batta says. “In a kitchen, everyone looks out for each other. That’s the dream, really, and I found it early.”
Hokkaido scallop crudo
Charred cabbage prosciutto XO
From there, Batta left India for culinary school in Switzerland. The country was expensive. The languages were difficult. The competition was severe. “You genuinely have to prove you’re better than the local candidates just to land a job,” he says.
He did it anyway, working in Michelin-starred restaurants and absorbing a culture where hospitality carried real professional weight. Switzerland surprised him, not just for the food but for the respect around the work. “Hospitality, at its core, is about nurturing people, and I learned that there,” he says.
Eventually, the road brought him to Kelowna. Before Wildling, Batta led the kitchen at Krafty. Now, on Richter Street, he’s working with Tyler Smith on a restaurant that gives him room to cook from the full map of his life. “Tyler and I think very similarly,” Batta says. “A wine bar, small plates, the freedom to build a menu around my own journey, that was exciting to me. There’s no pressure to fit into a box.”
That freedom shows up most clearly in the Carte Blanche tasting menu, which changes constantly and lets Batta pull from wherever the kitchen is that week: the Okanagan, Delhi, Europe, the people on his team. Some are from Vietnam, some from Canada, and Batta talks about them less like employees than co-authors. “I want the food at Wildling to carry a little bit of all of that,” he says.
For now, Batta’s ambitions are both local and not. He wants people to travel to Kelowna to eat well. He wants to help build a food culture there. He’d like a star one day, sure, but even that sounds like less of a destination than a mile marker.
Gnochetti
“There’s never a moment where I feel like that’s enough,” he says. “There’s always something further out worth chasing.”
Wildling’s dining room
Batta with his Wildling team
Perhaps that goes back to Delhi, to the vendors who made the same thing every day and somehow made it worth returning to years later. Batta has traveled farther than most cooks his age, but the lesson he carried with him was simple: pick a thing, keep working, make it better, and give people a reason to come back.
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