The Tastemakers (30 page)

Motivated to undo this, Sushil Malhotra opened Akbar in 1976, a fine dining restaurant on Park Avenue that would showcase the untapped potential of Indian cooking. But the public still associated Indian cooking with cheap eats, and the restaurant struggled. In 1984 he tried something different further uptown with Dawat, offering a more regionally focused take on India's varied cuisines. He brought in food celebrity Madhur Jaffrey to help design the menu and head up the kitchen. A beautiful actress originally from Delhi, Jaffrey had gotten into cooking when she was performing in London and continued to cook in New York, where, eventually, Craig Claiborne, the influential
New York Times
food critic and journalist, profiled her as he enthusiastically embraced global foods. Although Claiborne's story was more focused on the stylish novelty of Jaffrey being an actress who could cook, in 1973 it led to Jaffrey publishing
An Introduction to Indian Cooking
, an instantly classic cookbook that established her as the Julia Child of Indian food, demystifying it and bringing it to the West.

“My job was to introduce real authentic Indian food, and that's what I tried to do at Dawat, to great resistance initially,” Jaffrey said. Customers expected certain dishes that they knew from cheap curry houses, like spicy chicken vindaloo and saag paneer, and both Jaffrey and Malhotra had to struggle to keep things authentic and regionally varied. “Several things were happening at the same time,” said Jaffrey. “Cookbooks were coming out, and we used to sell them in the restaurant. I had cooking shows on TV. It was this combination of things. Dawat was only in this part of this world. It began to change all over in America. Sushil was one of the first to present authentic Indian food in the US.”

Despite Jaffrey's own success and the role Dawat and similar high-end restaurants played in trying to elevate the cuisine in New York and other cosmopolitan cities, Indian food never fully blossomed as a North American trend. Each year the food industry forecasters would call for its imminent crowning—“1987 will be the year of Indian food!”—and each time they would be proven wrong. Neighborhood curry houses grew and spread out, but their appeal beyond a core of South Asians and adventurous eaters never materialized. Fear was a big reason for this. Indian food was perceived
as dirty, heavy, and a recipe for gastrointestinal trouble. I never ate Indian food as a kid because my family was too afraid of it, and the first time I tried it, as an eighteen-year-old backpacker in London, I chewed each bite like it was a live grenade. It took years for me to shed this fear, but not without learning why it existed in the first place. I have indeed gotten sick numerous times from Indian restaurants in Canada and the United States, ranging from food comas induced by ghee (the clarified butter bad Indian food is drenched in) to marathon bathroom sessions. Friends who ventured to India fared much worse. Their stories of the country's culture and beauty were always laced with the punch line about horrendous stomach ailments, and more than a few were hospitalized with E. coli and other parasites, some suffering permanent damage. Indian food can often be overwhelmingly spicy, so much so that a chicken vindaloo is almost impossible to eat without shedding tears and drinking gallons of cool yogurt lassis. To some people this is an attraction, but to the majority of North American eaters, raised on a fairly bland European palate, it's enough to prevent them from coming in the door.

Tariq Hameed knows this all too well. As one of the most famous Indian restaurateurs in New York—he owns Shaheen Sweets, in Queens—he has struggled for forty years with the North American fear of spice. When he first opened a Manhattan outpost in Curry Hill in the 1970s he toned down the spice significantly, and still American diners complained. “Oh, I don't like the spicy,” they would say with wrinkled noses when he tried to coax them in from the sidewalk. “Too spicy.” As in the UK, which saw a nativist anticurry backlash back in the 1970s and similarly to the early fearful reception of Chinese food in America, Indian food was derided as spicy, stinky, and gross. “Our windows were broken every single day,” recalled Hameed of the first years in business. “Kids used to throw firecrackers inside the restaurant.”

T
he turning point for Indian food's fortunes in America came in the early 1990s. Sukhi Singh was an Indian Air Force officer's wife who had operated various food businesses while she followed her
husband to postings around India and the world. She had run ice cream trucks, hamburger stands, and thrown dosa parties on bases, but when her husband left the military and the family immigrated to Oakland, California, in the late 1980s, she found herself working at a small sandwich shop her husband had purchased in an office building. Because her time was spent working at the deli and raising her kids, Singh didn't have the same time to prepare her curries each night from scratch, toasting and grinding the spices and simmering her sauces for hours. She worried that her kids would be totally lost to pizza and other American foods, so she began making condensed curry pastes, which she kept in the fridge. Now she could toss a spoonful in with vegetables, water, and other ingredients to make a quick dinner for the family. On Wednesdays she sold some Indian meals at the deli, and when customers asked about the recipes, she offered hand-packed jars of her sauces for sale. After the devastating 1988 earthquake forced them to close the sandwich shop, her husband switched to the dry cleaning business, and Singh decided, at forty-five years of age, to try selling her sauces full time. “We were already at rock bottom,” her daughter, Sanjog Sikand, said. “It couldn't get much worse.”

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.