- Indian food has changed tremendously
from the time I came 30 years ago to what it is today.
But in my opinion, it hasn't changed enough.
The food that I'd still say 99% of the restaurants
in the United States serving Indian food do
is Indian restaurant food.
None of us eat those dishes at home,
and none of us cook that way at home
or enjoy eating that food every day.
So, people's perception of what Indian food is
is not the reality.
(fire crackling)
I don't eat chicken tikka masala 'til I was over 25.
I didn't eat a naan until I was 18.
I didn't eat a lot of the things
that people think are Indian foods I'd never seen.
I had eaten regional Goan food that my family cooked.
There are still so much more to offer.
There's still so much more
that people can look at and eat and enjoy.
I think we've started to change our perception.
I designed this restaurant into a fun, young,
affordable, accessible, lively, warm,
"you get a hug when you walk in" kind of restaurant.
We made it full of color like India is
and designed it so that you could share
and eat like Indians do.
There is a place for precious Indian food,
but I don't think that I wanted to do it,
because I think I had more to offer.
So India's a very snacking kind of culture,
because we eat our dinners pretty late:
9, 10 o'clock at night.
We need something to tide us over 'til dinner time.
I've done bhelpuri, which is a very common street food
from Bombay that I ate as a kid growing up.
After school, I'd look for the cart,
and the guy would mix it in a newspaper cone,
and we'd eat it up on the street.
Restaurants don't do that,
which I think is kind of unfortunate,
because it's such a cool dish.
Our bhelpuri is made with diced onion, boiled potatoes.
We do mango -- we grate the mango and serve dicing it.
We have chilies, cucumbers, a cilantro chutney.
We have tamarind chutney.
Toss it all together with chaat masala,
add the puffed rice to it and the peanuts.
So when you're eating it, you get the acid
of the tamarind chutney as well as the mango,
but it's so snacky and textural and flavorful
that it kind of makes you salivate,
getting ready to eat dinner.
When I was at school, we had a one-hour lunch break.
We'd eat at home, and then we'd go walk back to school.
My mother, she always says that I had this love for seafood
that none of my siblings had,
and they had to have seafood for lunch,
because if there wasn't, I would cry and not eat.
So this dish reminds me of a dish
my grandmother used to make.
It's got tamarind, it's got coriander, it's got chilies,
and it's a very traditional Goan fish curry using coconut,
but it was always coconut from our fields
that's cooked for awhile,
and we'd get a striped bass off the bone.
Every single time I eat this dish,
I close my eyes and taste it,
it takes me back to my great-grandmother's house in Goa,
and my grandmother would visit us and cook for us.
This curry hits you with the smoothness of the coconut,
and then you get the hit of the chili,
and you get the back end of the tamarind and the sour plum.
There are two acids in there,
so you get sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy at the same time.
In India, there is a dish that I absolutely love
that I don't see in many restaurants.
It's called sarson ka saag and makki ki roti.
It's mustard greens, and it's always served with a cornbread.
It's small like a roti, and when you serve it,
they put a dollop of white butter on top.
I thought, "How do I get people to connect with something
that's so alien to them in a fun format?"
How about pizza?
Because everybody in New York knows pizza.
Everybody knows it's some kind of sauce
on a piece of bread that you eat.
So I decided to make a corn roti and top it with the spinach,
because the mustard greens can be a little overwhelming
for a lot of people.
Instead of putting white butter, I put goat cheese.
And being a little tongue-in-cheek, I called it saag paneer
because saag is "greens" and paneer is "cheese."
So, yes, it's not paneer cheese, it's goat cheese.
It's that playful way of looking at food
whereby we use something that is not available in India
and make it fun.
One of the most important things for me for any dish
is that the dish has to not only make me happy,
but it has to make my diner happy eating it.
So, I believe good food is not only about me
and the way I cook it and the way it looks on the plate.
It also has to be a feeling that transcends
between the cook and the diner,
and the two of them have to get this immense joy:
one who's preparing it and the one who's eating it.
That's when I think it's good food:
You know, I could eat Indian food every single day,
and I wanted you to eat it every single day.