Chef Ashwin Vilkhu is a stylish man with a calm, measured energy. When he and his longtime partner, Tina Anand Vilkhu, married and bought a stately home in the Irish Channel in 2020, she trusted her husband with most of the home’s design decisions.
“We are remarkably on the same page with these things,” said Ashwin Vilkhu of his wife, a pediatrician and native of Alpharetta, Georgia.
“We were picking out the flooring for the house when Tina was in labor,” he said.
Along with his father, Arvinder Vilkhu, Ashwin Vilkhu was a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef: South award in 2024 and 2025 for their work as co-executive chefs of Saffron NOLA, which was also a semifinalist for Best New Restaurant in 2018…