Meherwan Irani: Indian Street Food Evangelist

Special Sauce with Ed Levine

Chef Meherwan Irani discusses his journey from a luxury car salesman to a James Beard Award-winning restaurateur specializing in Indian stre

Key takeaways

• Irani's restaurant concept, Chai Pani, focuses on the democratization of Indian cuisine through approachable street food.
• He argues that Indian food is already 'elevated' due to its 3,000-year history and does not need molecular gastronomy to be sophisticated.

Main topics

• Indian Street Food
• Culinary Authenticity

Notable quotes

Indian food does not need to be elevated. It is elevated.

Conclusion

The episode serves as an inspiring guide to embracing culinary creativ

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) When we last spoke to chef, restaurateur, and entrepreneur Mehrwan Irani, he clued us in to the horrendous shape his beloved adopted hometown of Asheville, North Carolina was in following a horrendous flood in Speaker 1 (0:18) 2024. The Speaker 2 (0:20) city of Asheville and its incredibly vibrant and varied food scene is still digging out all these years later. and Irani and his fellow food culture folks are in many respects leading the charge. His flagship restaurant, Chai Pani, is thriving in both Asheville and D.C., and I think Decatur, Georgia, and his other concept, Botuwala, will be opening 15 locations in the next five years in cities like D.C. and Chicago. And now Marwan Irani has written a thoughtful, provocative, and most opinionated cookbook, number one best Indian cookbook in the world, at-home recipes from the streets, truck stops, Speaker 1 (1:04) villages, and palaces from India. I know what Indian food is and can be. I mean, I came from there and there's this incredible panoply of food and regions. And why is that not represented? But I realized, like, you know what I'm really qualified to do well is represent the street food of India. To a certain part, I felt like I, too, was from the streets. And I realized there was a universality of that experience that would really translate well in America. So, yes. The idea of Indian street food representing that, in my mind, the best of India, the most pan-Indian cuisine, the most democratic, egalitarian cuisine of India, kind of became that North Star. I'm Ed Levine, founder of Serious Eats. Back in a Speaker 2 (1:49) moment. Speaker 2 (1:59) Welcome back to Special Sauce Mejuan. So good to see you again. Thank you, Ed. Good to see you too. And what an introduction. I love it. And then even talk about how you won the James Beard Award Speaker 1 (2:12) for the restaurant in what, 2000? What year was that? 22. Speaker 2 (2:17) Yeah, like you've had some good years, man. Anyway, there's lots to dive in vis-a-vis the book. But before we get into it. I'd like you to give us a succinct backstory, because your backstory is unusual, to say the least. Speaker 1 (2:35) Yeah, succinct. That's going to be tricky, right? It's a meandering, wandering backstory. But in a nutshell, I came here when I was 20 to go to college from India to come to the United States of America. At that point, you weren't planning to do anything in the food world, right? I had absolutely zero connection with the country. Even though your Speaker 2 (2:55) mother was a good cook and your grandparents opened a B &B where they served good food. Speaker 1 (3:03) Exactly. And the B &B was in my hometown of Amalagra, India. And it was, again, serendipitous. They so happened to be in the same town where there was a... ashram with a renowned spiritual master who had passed away. But this being, you know, the 70s, a lot of long-haired sort of hippie types from America were coming to India to find spirituality, the Beatles most notably, right? And many of them found their way to my hometown to visit this particular ashram. And my grandmother had a setup where she could convert it to an Airbnb and sort of take advantage of the situation. So this being a multi-generational family household, my grandmother was there, my mom and dad lived there, I lived there, along with some other cousins and some other family members. We're in India, in a very small town, sort of from the outskirts of nowhere. And yet at the same time, we've got people from around the world showing up, and my mom got tasked with figuring out how to feed them all. So, you know, if there's any influence on this long journey to end up with opening Chai Pani, it probably is that my mom had the really interesting and difficult task of serving a meal where we had to eat it too. We're all sitting around the table, we meaning the Indians and then the family members, alongside with Westerners, Americans, such as yourself, and everybody had to be happy. Speaker 1 (4:25) Until today, I will maintain that she pulled off something that was remarkable to me in hindsight and the genesis for how Chai Pani operates and how my restaurant operates. This idea that a cuisine can accommodate without being dumbed down. It can be approachable without being inauthentic. And it can be innovative and can be evolved without losing touch of where it came from. But again, going back to the original question, when I showed up Speaker 2 (4:51) in Speaker 1 (4:51) America, there was no aspirations to have anything new. Yeah, you Speaker 2 (4:54) went and got an MBA at South Carolina. Exactly. My mom would have Speaker 1 (4:59) been horrified if I thought of doing anything other than that. Speaker 2 (5:03) And so then you ended up as a very successful... Speaker 1 (5:08) Used car salesman. A new car salesman. Yeah, I mean, it sounds more dramatic when I say used car salesman. But the reality is that I actually was working at a very high-end Mercedes-Benz dealership in San Francisco in the height of the Silicon Valley boom, right? And it was hard to not stumble into success at that time. So yes, I worked for Lexus for many years and then Mercedes-Benz for many years and found myself enjoying the automotive industry and working my way up. If things hadn't changed, I would still be trying to sell you a car right now. Wow. And then, so what Speaker 2 (5:47) was the seat change that sort of forced you into changing your life? Speaker 1 (5:52) Yeah, so when we moved from the Bay Area, which was the first big step, we moved to Asheville, North Carolina, Molly and I. And we did that for family reasons. Our daughter was, you know, when we left was two years old and we were struggling. to kind of raise her in where we could both be present, you know, living in the barrier to be able to afford it. We both had full-time jobs and had this moment of recognizing that our daughter was being raised by a babysitter, not by us. And we hoped by moving back east that we'd be closer to Molly's family because they're from South Carolina and that we'd find an affordability index where one of us could afford to not work. And for a while it worked. I stumbled out of the auto industry into the real estate industry in Asheville, North Carolina. Also luxury real estate, golf course communities, you know, private airstrips, country clubs, that whole side of the business. But then 2008 happened, the Great Recession. I Speaker 2 (6:42) remember 2008 all too well, Marwan. It was two years after I launched Serious Eats. It was not a good year. It was Speaker 1 (6:50) not a good year for the real estate industry also. Speaker 1 (6:55) And as I'm sitting here watching sort of the industry collapse around me, Molly and I were driving back from visiting her family in Myrtle Beach and having the kind of conversations one does in a car for five hours when you're talking about life and what to do next. And she asked what I would still say was the pivotal question. She said, look, up till now, you've always found a career and a job that seems sensible. Speaker 1 (7:21) accommodated having a family that paid the bills. But if you could do anything you wanted to do, what would it be? And I said, well, this sounds like a terrible time to kind of suddenly start dreaming big. And she said, no, actually, this is a wonderful time to dream big because when things are going well, why would you rock the boat? You got nothing to lose. Why not dream big? And I said, well, I got to think about this. And about a week later, I sat bolt upright in bed and looked at Molly and said, you know how I've been rambling on about why Indian food is in the state it is in America? I think of an idea. And the chai pani was sort of formed in my head. I sat up that night and wrote the menu. And Molly and I kind of sketched out what the restaurant would look like. And then we went out and started looking for a restaurant space. And it was as naive as that. And so Indian street food became your North Star for the restaurant, right? The epiphany that I kept having was like, why is Indian food stuck in a rut? Why is it stuck in this rut of North Indian cuisine, often done buffet style, often in a strip mall, or a white tablecloth experience that's meant to be exotic with sort of, you know, pictures from the Tourism Board of India on the wall and then Sattar music in the background, right? I know what Indian food is and can be. I mean, I came from there and there's this incredible panoply of food and regions. And why is that not represented? And then when I realized that, I realized that how that bring that regionality of India, like that come into the forefront, it was going to be a long journey. And I wasn't qualified to be. sort of any type of leader in that journey. But I realized, like, you know what I'm really qualified to do well is represent the street food of India. Because to a certain part, I felt like I, too, was from the streets. You know, I grew up ditching classes to go eat bhel puri at the local, you know, hawker stand. or being, you know, the only guy brave enough to go out late at night to sort of, you know, discover the Muslim community where they were cooking kebabs or were open fires, or going to the train station at 2 a.m. with my college buddies to have a cup of chai and a waterpile. And I realized there was a universality of that experience that would really translate well in America. So, yes, the idea of Indian street food representing that, in my mind, the best of India. The most pan-Indian cuisine, the most democratic, egalitarian cuisine of India kind of became that North Star. What really your food is all about is the Speaker 2 (9:52) democratization of Indian food. So talk a little bit about that. Speaker 1 (9:57) Well, I feel like the Indian food experience, and even today to a certain degree, it's following in the... footsteps or the molecular gastronomy trails of trying to elevate itself. And there's a very Eurocentric approach to elevating Indian food that I'm seeing happening in America today, right? They think that, oh, well, molecular gastronomy and foams and tweezers and microgreens and reimagining dishes is how you elevate Indian food. And I would argue like Indian food does not