Huma Qureshi: From Saleem's Kitchen to Tarla Dalal

Huma Qureshi grew up around a Delhi restaurant business and later played one of India's best-known cookery writers on screen. Her Wikipedia biography ties those threads together, and this piece follows it to see how a restaurateur's daughter became an actress.

A restaurant family in Delhi

According to the biography, Qureshi was born on 28 July 1986 in New Delhi. Her father, Saleem Qureshi, is a restaurateur who runs a chain of 10 restaurants called Saleem's, and her mother, Ameena Qureshi, is of Kashmiri descent. She has three brothers, including the actor Saqib Saleem. The family moved to Kalkaji in South Delhi when she was a child. She completed a bachelor's degree in History with Honours at Gargi College, University of Delhi, and joined the theatre group Act 1, where N. K. Sharma was her mentor.

In an interview quoted in the biography, she described her father's restaurant, Saleem's in Kailash Colony, when explaining that being Muslim in India never made her feel different.

Auditions and advertisements

In 2008 she moved to Mumbai to audition for a film, Junction, which was never made. She signed a two-year contract with Hindustan Unilever for television advertisements, and promoted products including Samsung Mobile with Aamir Khan, Nerolac with Shah Rukh Khan and Pears soap. During a Samsung shoot, director Anurag Kashyap was impressed with her acting and promised to use her in a film. "I didn't believe him then," she recalled. He kept his promise with a three-film deal with Anurag Kashyap Films.

She had been due to debut in the Tamil thriller Billa II, after an audition among 700 candidates, but left when the film was delayed.

Wasseypur and the early films

Her feature debut was a supporting part in Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), where she played Mohsina, the wife of a criminal played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Both parts of the film earned her Best Female Debut and Best Supporting Actress nominations, including at Filmfare, and she called it "life-changing". She completed the deal with Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012), a romantic comedy about a quest for an ancient family dish, which was a financial success. Next came Ek Thi Daayan (2013), D-Day (2013) and Dedh Ishqiya (2014). She received a Filmfare nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Badlapur (2015).

Wider roles

She appeared in Jolly LLB 2 (2017), Viceroy's House (2017), which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Kaala (2018) with Rajinikanth. She played the title role in the Netflix series Leila (2019), and in Maharani (2021) won the Filmfare OTT Award for Best Actress (Critics) in a Drama Series. In 2021 she made her Hollywood debut in Army of the Dead and hosted the Zee Cafe reality show Fit Fab Feast.

Playing Tarla Dalal

In April 2022 she signed to play the chef Tarla Dalal in the biopic Tarla, produced by Ronnie Screwvala, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and Nitesh Tiwari and directed by Piyush Gupta. It was released on 7 July 2023 on ZEE5. The biography does not say whether her family background influenced the casting, and this article does not suggest it did.

Recent work

In 2026 she starred as a deaf and mute assassin in Baby Do Die Do and in Toxic, directed by Geetu Mohandas.

A note on sources

Biographies of working actors can mix reviews with opinion. The quotations from critics here are theirs, and the box-office remarks are as the biography states them. Reports on her private life are not repeated here.

Sources

*Cover photo: Gabriel Hutchinson, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).*