Wilton's Nitesh Pundra spent two decades in tech and a decade in restaurants. His new projects, GrubTok and Kora, sit right where those two worlds meet.

When Nitesh Pundra was running restaurants in Stamford, marketing was the last thing on his list. Not because he didn't think it mattered — because everything else came first.

“You're dealing with staffing, deliveries, the walk-in, the health inspector, the Friday rush,” he says. “By the time you close, the last thing you're going to do is update your Google listing. It just doesn't happen. It didn't happen for me, and I was a technology guy.”

That gap — between what owners know they should be doing online and what they actually have time for — is the problem he's now working on full time.

Pundra's background is unusual. For more than 20 years he worked in enterprise technology, most recently as an application engineering manager at a global insurance company. For ten of those years he also owned and ran restaurants in Stamford. In 2016 he moved with his family to Wilton and started a food-tech side project that has slowly grown into two.

This summer he left the corporate job — after two decades at the same company — to do it full time.

GrubTok: Three Recommendations Only

The first project, GrubTok, came out of a family vacation habit. Rather than scrolling through apps and reviews, Pundra would ask a local where they ate. The answer was always short, specific, and usually right.

GrubTok turns that into a short-form video series with one rule: each guest recommends three places. Chefs, critics, food writers, and people who grew up in restaurant families share their picks, and that's it.