by David Sax
Under the name brand Sukhi’s, the Singh family began knocking on the doors of specialty shops and farmers markets in nearby Berkeley, where many Indian graduate students lived around the University of California campus. Sanjog and her brother Dalbir would arrive after school to pack up bottles of the sauces their mother had made until one in the morning. Then, on weekends, the family would split up, each member taking a different grocery store or farmer’s market in the Bay Area, where they would man a demonstration booth and try to entice shoppers to taste their product. “We were one of the first selling a branded ethnic product,” said Dalbir, who began hawking Sukhi’s sauces at farmers markets when he was twelve years old. More than half the people would turn away when they found out the product was Indian food, without even giving it a taste. “People would literally spit it out in front of me,” Sanjog said.
Then came the Internet—not the contemporary web of ideas and commerce that has propelled ethnic food brands through social media but rather the technology that transformed Silicon Valley in the 1990s and ushered in an immigrant wave of Indian engineers and computer scientists who powered much of this innovation. America’s Indian-born population ballooned from 450,000 in 1990 to over 1.6 million in 2008, making them the third-largest immigrant group in the country after Mexicans and Filipinos. In areas such as Silicon Valley and San Jose, Indians and other South Asians became a significant minority community in a relatively short period of time. While this was happening Sukhi Singh was doing her best to grow her fledgling business, adding cooked meals to her repertoire of sauces. “Life was tough for us then,” Mrs. Singh, who was dressed in a sari, told me one morning in the company’s drab office in the industrial suburb of Hayward, across the bay from Silicon Valley. “It was a big decision if we were going to spend three hundred dollars.”
But in 1995 she got a call that would change her life. Marriott Catering was servicing the cafeteria at Hewlett Packard, and the woman in charge wanted to know whether there was a way she could rent a tandoor oven because the company was losing business with all the Indian workers who refused to eat the company’s American cafeteria food. Singh somehow talked her way into a contract as Hewlett Packard’s Indian food service manager and began selling food to the tech giants in the Valley, including IBM, Dell, Oracle, Cisco, and Intel, all of whom were struggling to keep Indian-born engineers happy at lunchtime. The funny thing was that even when these companies all regularly featured Singh’s Indian lunch specials, the most enthusiastic customers weren’t Indian expats. “They thought they’d get all the Indian brown baggers to eat lunch,” Singh said, “but they weren’t getting that. The Indians were saving money for back home, and they brought last night’s leftovers. The clientele mostly ended up being Americans.”
Though her catering to dot-com business fell away when the web bubble burst at the end of the decade, Sukhi’s had already built its core as a business, so it simply expanded horizontally. Sukhi’s Gourmet Indian Foods began selling frozen meals to Costco, catering educational institutions from kindergartens to graduate schools, and supplying frozen samosas and hot curries for buffets to Whole Foods stores, first along the Pacific Coast and then in other regions. Though Sukhi’s has targeted a mainstream customer, the company is careful to stay close to its ethnic base. “A lot of [Indian] grad students go to middle-of-nowhere universities in Ohio, and their taste in food spreads out to the surrounding population really well,” Dalbir said, noting how it is impossible for others to ignore their cuisine. “If someone’s eating Indian food in your office, you can smell it ten cubicles down.”
Around the same time that Sukhi’s gained traction, Sushil Malhotra had his own important decision to make. Dawat was a critical and financial success, but he wanted it to reach a greater audience, to emulate what was happening in the UK, where curry had outpaced fish and chips as a national food. In 1998 his solution was the first Café Spice, located near New York University. It was revolutionary in its design and simplicity: a modern Indian bistro, positioned between the familiar curry houses and the upscale experience of Dawat. The food was served thali style, with a partitioned plate that featured a selection of curry, rice, daal (curried lentils), and naan bread for a set price. A year later the company opened a Café Spice Express, a takeout counter in the renovated food hall of Grand Central Station, spearheaded by Sushil’s son, Sameer, who now runs the company’s day-to-day operations. Most of the food was made on site, including naan bread baked in a gas-fired tandoor oven, but Sameer quickly saw the potential to scale up production and put these takeout kiosks in places where Indian restaurants had never ventured. Outlets like Hurley Medical in Flint were the result of that, as the Malhotras brought Café Spice curries into supermarkets, hospitals, colleges, and corporate cafeterias across the nation. Today there are Café Spice kiosks on the campuses of MIT and NYU, USAA military insurance, and the New York headquarters of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. The company’s food is sold without the brand name in another four hundred cafeterias and on the Indian hot bars and grab-n-go meals at hundreds of Whole Foods stores nationwide. In 2011 alone Café Spice’s business grew 40 percent, to some $20 million in sales. Malhotra’s Café Spice is the chief rival to Sukhi Singh’s company, competing for the same accounts and customers—the East Coast Hindu Biggie Smalls to Singh’s West Coast Sikh Tupac.
Café Spice’s food is prepared in a fifty thousand–square foot industrial kitchen in New Windsor, New York, just up the Hudson River from West Point, about an hour north of Manhattan. Inside over a hundred workers (almost all Latinos) fold samosas using empanada dough, fry potato pakoras, grind spices, and stir giant vats of curry. “At the end of the day I’m not making a batch for the University of Massachusetts, one for Goldman Sachs, and one for Whole Foods,” said Sameer as we walked through the kitchen. “It’s all the same three hundred–pound batch, and the Indian grad student at Georgia Tech is getting the same spice level as someone in Tulsa.”
Spice is a delicate issue when it comes to Indian food. It’s the main reason Americans will or will not try it, and criticism is unavoidable. “If I don’t spice it enough,” said Sushil Malhotra, “some guy who’s been to India will call me up and say ‘You fucking bastard, this isn’t a vindaloo!’ If you say it’s a vindaloo, it better damn well be hot.” So rather than mute the spice level on all its dishes, Café Spice’s menu features a range of dishes with different heat levels. Within the range of the company’s four main simmering sauces, 90 percent of diners can find a spice that suits them. For those who want to make their own adjustments, the company launched a chutney bar at its outlets, featuring a variety of condiments (including a sriracha-spiked tomato chutney) so diners can add more heat if they wish. The curries and sauces made for Café Spice are also ghee-free. This gives the food a longer shelf life, lower cost, meets the low-fat requirements of Whole Foods, and opens up more sales to vegetarians and vegans, a key demographic for Indian food sales. It’s one of several adjustments the Malhotras have had to make in order to broaden the food’s appeal and to streamline production. Whereas traditional Indian restaurants bake naan breads and roast meats in cylindrical tandoor ovens, the skill required is too difficult to teach the plant’s workers and nearly impossible to scale at multiple retail locations. Instead, frozen naan is imported from Toronto, and the chicken tikka, the key component in the company’s most popular dish, chicken tikka masala, or CTM, is baked in a convection oven rather than roasted in a tandoor.
Lately the company’s chefs have begun experimenting with less-traditional fare, such as a line of pressed naan sandwiches, that they sell at Whole Foods and on college campuses. “It’s catered to the global palate,” said Sameer Malhotra’s wife, Payal, who works in the business as well. She described the naan sandwich as Café Spice’s entry-level item, something that curious curry virgins might be willing to try. “To the consumer it’s just another flatbread sandwich with a different filling. People eat it and then say, ‘This sandwi
ch had chicken tikka in it, and I like that, so what else is comparable?’ ” While taste testing several new flavors of the sandwiches one morning, including crumbled paneer with Monterey jack cheese, potato with turmeric, and chicken tikka, Payal picked a chunk of green chili out of the paneer sandwich and made a note to have the plant workers dice the chilies into smaller pieces. “If someone bites into that, they might be put off our food for a while,” Payal said, shaking her head.
The Malhotras also own Junoon, a lavish, multimillion-dollar, Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant in the flatiron district of Manhattan, the jewel in their curry empire’s crown. With two hundred seats, hand-carved latticed screens of imported khadd-apa stone, a gleaming open kitchen, rolling wine carts driven by stewards, and a dedicated spice grinding room, it illustrates Sushil and Sameer’s multipronged approach to propel Indian food into a viable mainstream trend. Café Spice’s cafeteria food can convert multitudes and masses one meal at a time, but the prestige and exposure a place like Junoon can generate through reviews, articles, and word of mouth from well-connected, wealthy tastemakers has the same multiplier effect that Ricardo Zarate’s success has generated for Peruvian ingredients. Although Café Spice customers at Hurley Medical will likely never get to taste tequila with muddled tandoori pineapple or monkfish tikka with a mango and mustard chutney, those flavors may eventually trickle down through other chefs, trend forecasters, and supermarket products, thus becoming less foreign and more familiar to Americans. This is the chef-driven approach, and though Sushil Malhotra has tried it time and again since the 1970s, no Indian restaurateur or chef in America has yet succeeded at elevating their cuisine into a trend.
To be fair, there are several successful, highly praised Indian chefs and restaurants around the continent. In Vancouver Vikram Vij is one of the most respected Indian chefs working globally today, and he runs two of that city’s arguably hottest restaurants. In Los Angeles the Indian-style gastropub Badmash (which means “naughty” in Hindi) opened to great fanfare in 2013, and San Francisco’s DOSA is consistently packed, serving updated South Indian crepes in a space that feels like a nightclub. The one Indian chef who has achieved celebrity status in North America is Floyd Cardoz, who lives in New York. A native of Bombay, Cardoz quit a master’s degree in biochemistry to enter hospitality school with the prestigious Taj Group. He trained in global cuisines, including French, Italian, and classical Indian, but he drew his biggest inspiration from his family, who came from the province of Goa, which has strong Portuguese roots. In 1988 Cardoz moved to New York and cooked at the type of cookie-cutter Indian restaurant that made one pot of curry in the morning and spread it out over all their dishes. “These owners were farmers and truck drivers in India,” Cardoz recalled when we spoke at his restaurant North End Grill, an American brasserie in the financial district. “The cuisine was like a game of broken telephone, until these restaurants got diluted down to what they were.”
At the time there were several fine dining Indian restaurants in the city, including Akbar, Bombay Palace, and Raga, though each was a model of traditional service and dishes, with little distinction in the kitchen. Replace their copper serving pots with cheap dishware, and they were no different from the curry houses, right down to the old sitars hanging on their walls. Cardoz wanted to do something different. He ended up in the kitchen of Lespinasse, an innovative French restaurant whose chef at the time was interested in global flavors and let Cardoz integrate Indian influences into several dishes. He made a duck curry; lamb with eggplant caviar, cumin, and ginger; and a dish of soft shell crabs breaded in a cream of wheat crust like he had known back in Goa. All of it was very restrained and understated, but it helped establish Cardoz’s reputation among chefs and diners in the city and caught the attention of the powerful restaurateur Danny Meyer, who approached him to open an Indian restaurant. “I was twenty-seven at that point, and I didn’t want to do just another Indian restaurant,” Cardoz recalled. “I convinced Danny we had to do something different. I knew there’d be pushback at another upscale Indian place. People had preconceived notions: it was too spicy, too dark, they won’t understand it, etcetera. But India had to be more than chicken tikka masala and saag paneer. There were various different flavors from around India that never got used and local produce you could use.”
Starting with a local, seasonal approach to ingredients and a restrained flavor profile, Cardoz and Meyer build the foundation for what would become Tabla, which, in 1998, opened to great reviews. Cardoz took some of his favorite dishes from back home and deconstructed them for a more Westernized dining experience. He fried skate in a semolina crust, then served it with a Goan curry and tamarind paste, but with the heat turned down so the contrast of sour, bitter, sweet, and spiced flavors was more pronounced. He braised, steamed, and glazed oxtail so it was candied on the outside, resulting in this tender, unctuous piece of meat when you bit in. The biggest hit was the crab cake, an American spin on the fresh crab dishes he’d grown up with in Goa, served with a tamarind chutney. “After we did that you saw crab cakes in Indian restaurants all over town,” Cardoz said. Every dish was plated individually rather than served in the family style (as was traditional in Indian cooking), and Cardoz refused substitutions and special requests. “I wanted to showcase the food in the best possible way,” he said, “so you had no choice but to enjoy it.”
In its first year of business a large percentage of Tabla’s clientele were curious Indians and Indian Americans who often resisted what Cardoz was doing. “How dare you!” they told Cardoz. “Where’s my free papadum? My buffet? The chicken tikka masala?” Nevertheless, the restaurant was a success, both critically and financially. Then 9/11 happened. “We got hammered,” Cardoz said, noting how Tabla’s drop in business had more to it than the citywide recession that hit other New York restaurants following the attack. “People associated [Tabla] with the Middle East. People didn’t want to eat ethnic or Indian food at that time. All the other restaurants in the Union Square Hospitality Group [Meyer’s company] were doing fine, but we saw a sixty percent decline in business from before nine-eleven.” Tabla took a full two years to return to its previous pace, but it never recovered the energy or buzz that it had when it first opened. Though Tabla remained profitable until 2010, the size of the large restaurant and the cost associated with running it led Meyer to close Tabla down at the end of that year—his first failure in an otherwise perfect streak of opening restaurants. Cardoz went on to win Top Chef Masters a year later and opened North End Grill, also with Meyer, shortly after that.
“I think high-cost Indian food will almost never be accepted,” Cardoz said with a sigh when asked about his thoughts on Tabla’s impact. “The hard part is there are still so many people afraid of those flavors. It’s halfway where it needs to go.” Cardoz now felt that a big-name chef, such as himself, couldn’t pave the pathway to locking in Indian cuisine as a trend; it had to be something targeted at the average American. “The day it’ll become popular is the day you have a fast food concept. It needs to be more mainstream so people can hang their hat on it.” It needed to have presentation that was clean and fresh in a format that was easy to relate to and eat by hand, Cardoz said, adding that it needed names that don’t require explanation and translation—do you know the difference between aloo gobi, rogan josh, and chaat papri?—at a price point that was accessible. In other words, Indian food needed its Chipotle.
To North American diners Chipotle Mexican Grill is a place to get delicious, fresh burritos and other quick Mexican foods, but to aspiring restaurant tastemakers looking to turn a global cuisine into a widely accepted trend and profitable business model, it is nothing short of the holy grail. Founded in Denver, Colorado, in 1993 by chef Steve Ells, Chipotle’s concept was based on the idea that fresh, quality Mexican food, similar to what Ells had eaten in San Francisco, could be served in a standardized, highly replicable quick-service format without turning to the processed glop that was found at Taco Bell. I
nstead of premade meals waiting under a heat lamp, assembled from outsourced products, Chipotle offered a selection of freshly cooked proteins, toppings, and entrée formats that could be combined to make any variation of burrito, taco, or salad on an efficient assembly line. The chain’s success, with over a billion dollars in annual sales at more than fourteen hundred stores (serving 750,000 customers each day), did more to bring fresh Mexican flavors, such as chipotle peppers and chopped cilantro, into the American mainstream than the great Tex-Mex chips-and-salsa boom of the 1980s and 1990s.
Two major trends emerged from Chipotle. First, it helped Mexican food spread to far more places, both in North America and abroad. In London, England, Mexican food previously had a limited presence. “Taco Bell had tried and failed in the UK,” said my friend Ben Fordham, who operates the London quick-service Mexican chain Benito’s. What was typically found in the city were small chains like Chiquitos. “It was the worst Tex-Mex stuff; coated in cheese and tasteless,” Fordham said. “That became what was known as Mexican food. All were places called Amigos or Desperados and had walls littered with sombreros and donkeys.” In the early 2000s, when Fordham was in law school, he spent a year on exchange at the University of Texas, in Austin, where he fell in love with both his future wife and Mexican food, especially Chipotle. Years later, after a miserable stint practicing law at one of the top firms in London, he struck out to open Benito’s and brought Chipotle-style quick-service Mexican to the United Kingdom. Several other entrepreneurs were launching similar concepts at the time, and a Mexican food trend hit London like the blitz. “The boom of Mexican food is incredible. It’s all the food trade has talked about,” Fordham said. “It’s gone from not being on the radar to a central part of what they’ll put on the high street.” One of the reasons Fordham credits for Mexican’s success in the United Kingdom is the cuisine’s similarity with aspects of Indian food, which is firmly wedged into the mainstream of British eating culture. Both cuisines share a diverse spiciness, a mix of textures—stewed and grilled and fried, all together on one plate—and a colorful palate, all of which is why American entrepreneurs betting on Indian food believe they can ride the coattails of the Mexican boom stateside to great success.