The Tastemakers (32 page)

So far the most successful Indian quick-service restaurant concept is Amaya, based in my hometown Toronto and run by Hemant Bhagwani, who has opened, operated, and often closed nearly every single type of Indian restaurant over the past two decades, first in Dubai and Sydney and most prominently in Toronto. Bhagwani, who has the laid-back demeanor and slick fashion sense of a professional cricket player, made his name in Toronto when, in 2007, he opened Amaya: The Indian Room. It was a modern Indian bistro that broke the mold of the city's numerous Indian buffet-heavy restaurants (South Asians are one of Toronto's largest ethnic groups) by pairing modernized curries and dishes with fine wines, all at a reasonable price point. The Indian Room became so popular that Bhagwani soon opened up a second restaurant, Bread Bar, on the same block to handle the overflow from the Indian Room, but he was surprised when the Bread Bar's takeout business dwarfed what they were doing in the restaurant each night. People wanted high-quality Indian food, but they wanted it quickly, Bhagwani realized. So he launched the concept of Amaya Express, which was primarily takeout and delivery focused, and it began rolling out different locations across the city.

“When I started Amaya in 2007 I just wanted to make a bit of money and survive,” Bhagwani told me from behind the wheel of his Mercedes with its vanity AMAYA license plate as we drove to several of the chain's dozen-odd locations one day. “Then I opened two more, then one more, then wrote a new business plan. In five years we'll need one hundred Amaya Expresses in the city. That's my benchmark,” he said, adding, “I want to have everybody.”

At its core Amaya's food isn't revolutionary. The chain serves traditional North Indian fare made from scratch at each location, with higher-quality ingredients and far less ghee, and in settings that are modern and design conscious. “Even in food courts we serve from pots, not steam tables,” stressed Bhagwani, who has stood at other restaurants with a stopwatch to time how long a typical order takes. “What you're eating here is the same recipe, sauces, and ingredients as Indian Room and Bread Bar,” Bhagwani said as we sat over a Styrofoam container of chicken tikka masala and spiced
lamb from Inde by Amaya, one of his company's concepts, which is located in an office building's food court in downtown Toronto.

Bhagwani was quick to point out that Indian food contains certain inherent challenges that make it difficult to scale across a large chain. First, there is the problem of consistency. Indian cuisine isn't hemmed in by strictly defined recipes. It's a pinch of turmeric here and a dash of nutmeg there, all of which makes controlling twenty different chefs spread across a city a logistical nightmare. Second, the mainstays of popular Indian cooking in the West are largely curries and stewed dishes, foods that require eating with cutlery and discourage dining on the go—just try to eat a gooey dish of butter chicken in your car. Finally, Indian dishes are not exactly the most visually appealing sights. Compared with a brightly layered sandwich, a pot of chicken tikka masala just looks like a wet orange mess. Curry is essentially stew, and no one has ever built a mass-market restaurant empire on stew. Stew isn't sexy. Stew is actually the polar opposite of sexy.

To counter this, Bhagwani has dabbled in cross-cultural culinary experimentation. Over the years he has put a number of items on Amaya's menus that bridge the divide between Indian flavors and Western formats. There have been chaat tacos covered in spiced chickpeas and chutney, korma chili hot dogs (called a Slumdog), cheeseburger samosas, butter chicken–topped pizzas, and poutine. Although all of these are based in some sort of traditional dish or flavor profile, they're as much an exercise in marketing as they are in culinary achievement. “It's still Indian food,” Bhagwani said, noting that these types of modern fusion dishes are what you will find if you eat in Mumbai or Delhi today. “I can either call it naan bread or a taco.” Others have gone this route as well. In Baltimore, Naumann Hameed, nephew of the pioneering Queens restaurateur Tariq Hameed, took things one step further with his concept Krazy Kebab, which mixes Pakistani-style kebabs and curries with burritos, made from fresh naan wraps, and nachos. “I'm serving traditional food in a nontraditional fashion,” Hameed says. “It makes so much sense. Changing the way you serve something can attract a vast majority of people.”

Over time Bhagwani hopes that diners will come to embrace Indian food as it is. This is what happened with Benito's in London. Initially Fordham decided to describe the carnitas burritos as “braised pork” because he feared the Spanish word may have placed a barrier in front of British customers unfamiliar with Mexican food. Now that the Mexican trend has been established across London, Fordham describes the pork burrito as “our version of carnitas” on Benito's latest menu because the British public is now familiar enough with the cuisine that they are ready to accept it.

Whether that majority is prepared to embrace Indian food as the next great North American food trend is another question, however. For that to happen it will need to move beyond curries and naan sandwiches to the point at which Doritos is selling masala-flavored tortilla chips and Burger King features a spicy chutney Whopper. That reality seems distant now, but these things can gather steam very quickly. In a video posted in 2011 on the blog of the Private Label Manufacturers Association, Brad Edmondson, a demographics consultant, laid out why Indian food will be the next big hit for the American market. “Ethnic food is successful when immigration combines with international travel and restaurants to create a buzz loud enough for food manufacturers to hear,” Edmondson said, holding up a plate of samosas. “The number of people from India in the US shot up nearly seventy percent just in the last decade and is now well over two-point-eight million. If Indian Americans keep growing at this rate, they will soon surpass Chinese Americans to become the biggest Asian group in the country.”

Indian-born Americans, along with their American born children, are today working beside many more Americans than they were just a decade ago. They go to school with other Americans, play on their baseball teams, treat them in hospitals, and marry into their families. Americans laugh at the jokes of Indian American comedy stars like Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling, make the novels of Jhumpa Lahiri and Salman Rushdie best sellers, and watch food celebrity Padma Lakshmi judge contestants like Floyd Cardoz on
Top Chef Masters
. Indian accents, faces, and foods are appearing in lunchrooms and living rooms, and this creeping social exposure
has directly affected America's acceptance of Indian culture and, in turn, their food. Both Sameer Malhotra and Hemant Bhagwani cited the film
Slumdog Millionaire
as the most significant tipping point for the industry they have ever encountered. For Bhagwani, the night that film won an Academy Award for best picture was Amaya's busiest night ever for takeout orders, inciting a demand that led to his decision to pivot from fine dining to a quick-service format. He uses the terms “before
Slumdog
” and “after
Slumdog
” to mark the eras both in his own business and in the public's perception of Indian food. All of this happened during a decade when India rose from abject poverty to become a symbol of emerging market power and economic sophistication, a place to be envied rather than pitied.

The market may finally have begun reflecting these changes. According to research provided by the Mintel Group, 13 percent of American consumers surveyed in 2010 prepared Indian meals in their homes at least once a month. In the past decade the number of Indian restaurants in the United States has increased 30 percent according to numbers compiled by the NPD Group, whereas a 2011 Technomic survey found that 46 percent of Americans would likely order menu items with typical Indian flavors and ingredients. Still, it is decidedly an uphill climb. In a 2013 National Restaurant Association survey of chefs, curries ranked all the way down at number 161 as a hot food trend, surpassed even by foam/froth/air, the molecular gastronomy fad that was the food world's equivalent of snap bracelets. Indian food, which had previously appeared as a category, didn't even make the list.

“I haven't seen our efforts being all that fruitful,” said Madhur Jaffrey of the four decades she has been evangelizing about Indian food to Americans. “I've watched it over the years, and I keep saying, ‘Next year will be the year for Indian foods!' Look at supermarkets. There's very little of Indian food. True, on the campuses it is changing. You do see it in the big cities and in Whole Foods, but if you go to the ordinary supermarket and to the ethnic section, you'll see Thai, Japanese, and Mexican, but very little Indian.”

The Malhotra clan, however, keeps pressing on, opening up new fronts to bring Indian food to Americans, wherever they are.
In the fall of 2012 they unveiled the latest evolution of the Café Spice empire: the Dosateria. Set in the middle of a Whole Foods store in New York's posh Tribeca neighborhood, the Dosateria was the Malhotra's own Chipotle-style entrant into the race, with a distinctly Southern Indian spin. Dosas are large crepes made from a fermented batter of rice and lentils that are then filled with a variety of toppings. In the center of the large kiosk, cooks ladled out dosa batter onto large round cooktops, rotating and flipping them with long spatulas until their fragrant smell filled the air and the dough puffed up crisp and golden. The dosas were available in signature combinations with names like Bollywood Chicken and Good Korma, and the meals were fully customizable in the QSR tradition as either dosas, uttapams (thicker breads, served open faced), frankies (a grilled roti flatbread), or rice bowls. Customers picked their format, selected a chutney, and then added additional toppings for an extra charge. They could also select a fresh yogurt lassi, in flavors ranging from traditional (cucumber with mint or mango) to imaginative (salt with cumin or chile with avocado). I had a small asparagus uttapam, filled with freshly chopped asparagus, cooked in a spicy sambal sauce, and an amazing shrimp dosa, with a tangy batter crisp as an army bed sheet and plump shrimp nestled in with a heap of caramelized onions that had been stewed in coconut milk.

Dosateria was managed by Sandhya Malhotra, Sushil's youngest daughter, who had recently left the large accounting firm Deloitte to enter the family business. She told me that in Whole Foods the Dosateria had taken the space of the Japanese food station, which had previously cooked tempura, udon soups, and rice bowls and was now reduced to a small sushi counter at the Dosateria's rear. The seats surrounding the dosa cooks were full during the lunch rush with nearby workers from the financial district. Initially, Sandhya said, more than a third of customers were Indian or other South Asians, but that was decreasing daily as word got out, and even the Indians ordered the Bollywood Chicken dosa more than any other item. This was surprising because its combination of chicken kofta kebab, avocado, roasted onions, jack cheese, and a wasabi-avocado chutney was a serious departure from tradition.

“This gives us portability,” Sameer Malhotra said with a smile, showing up to check on how his sister was doing during the lunch rush. Dosas, while traditionally torn and dipped into small bowls of soup, could be folded into cones and eaten on the run, in true American fashion. Café Spice now had a foothold into proper fast food, a way to eat curry and chutney in a car, and although this may not matter to New Yorkers, it would be crucial when expanding into the rest of America, where life was lived behind the dashboard. I asked Sameer why the family chose dosas, and he swept his hand at the men pouring and flipping batter in front of us. “Action! Action!” he said, beaming. “We want to have dosas being cooked in windows. That's what's always been missing from our stuff.” This first Dosateria was a spearhead, an experiment. Sushil Malhotra told his children not to worry whether it made money—it was all about a proof of concept. If it worked here, expansion was next, both within Whole Foods and on its own as a chain, which could one day even go public on the stock market. Whole Foods was already discussing what other stores this could work in. Would it fly in Texas? Or Seattle? There was even talk of Dosaterias replacing the underperforming panini bars in other Whole Foods locations because, as Sameer put it, “paninis just don't sell anymore.”

It was funny, in a way. Twenty years ago, if you had to pick the hot trends shaping North American tastes, paninis and Japanese food would be near the top. Back then you couldn't swing a pot of chai without hitting a place selling hot-pressed Italian sandwiches or cheap California rolls. They were ubiquitous, and they ushered in a profound change in the way we not only ate but also how we viewed the world. Japan went from being the most exotic foreign culture to something of an everyday comfort, and Italy went from grandma's meatballs to a vroom-vroom Vespa with a panini neatly tucked in the basket. Soon we discovered more foods from there: ramen and izakayas from Japan, Neapolitan pizza and prosciutto from Italy. It seemed poetic in a way that Indian food was now taking over the Japanese and Italian stations in the nation's most prestigious and trendsetting grocery chain—their time had come. They had paved the way, the public had embraced those trends, but now
that public was hungry for something else, and Indian food was rising to the challenge, at least in this one store.

It made me recall something Sushil Malhotra said a year before, when we were speaking in his ornate living room. I had asked about all he had done to try to make Indian food a central fixture in America, all his successes and the experiments over half a century, and what they had ultimately accomplished. Making Indian food matter was important for him, as it was for Sukhi Singh, Hemant Bhagwani, Floyd Cardoz, and many others like them, whether it was through fine dining, quick-service takeout concepts, or even food trucks. But with each Indian food entrepreneur I spoke with, I could tell their motivation to keep at it went beyond their hopes for financial reward; they wanted to take things further, to make their company influential enough and get their food into enough mouths that Indian food would finally break through a certain cultural barrier and gain the widespread acceptance that it still lacked compared to other global cuisines. These entrepreneurs were driven by pride: pride in their names, their businesses, and, most importantly, their culture, which they loved dearly and wanted everyone else to love as well. Making Indian food a vibrant trend was the only way to do that, and this is why it mattered so much to each of them. “It's there,” Sushil Malhotra said, a look of gold lust in his eyes, as he held his thumb and index finger just an inch apart to indicate how close that moment was. “It's there!”