Pravasi Samwad reproduces an edited story by Megha McSwain of the Chron and salutes the enterprising spirit of the three Indian female chefs who have made Indian fine dining a cult in Houston.
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Today, Indian cuisine is in the top leagues in Houston but it was not so a few decades ago. The influx of South Asian immigrants in the 1970s and 80s saw a wave of restaurant openings, in the years that followed.
Indian restaurants began appearing in hip neighborhoods, like Khyber at Upper Kirby and Bombay Brasserie in Uptown, reported the Chron. These had candlelit dining rooms and white tablecloths, and they were making the cuisine more visible to Houston diners. Around the same time, a few unlikely restaurateurs took things a step further by incorporating attractive beverage programmes, high-quality ingredients, and thoughtfully-designed spaces. This shift began largely in the 90s, when powerhouses like Anita Jaisinghani, Kiran Verma and Shiva Patel unknowingly built the foundation of what would eventually become Houston’s impressive modern Indian dining scene.
Their contributions were imaginative and exciting, and Houstonians took note. Thirty years later, these three women operate some of the top-rated restaurants in town, and are highly regarded among their peers. Furthermore, they built a solid foundation for a new era of restaurateurs to establish roots.
The James Beard Award-nominated chef and newly minted cookbook author, Anita Jaisinghani has built a successful modern Indian dining concept with her River Oaks restaurant Pondicheri. However, it was back in the 90s when she set the wheels in motion for building a career in hospitality.
After moving to Houston from India in 1990, Jaisinghani saw Indian dining throughout the city and felt that it was not being represented well. Beyond the food in restaurants, she discovered she couldn’t get her hands on a cilantro chutney that wowed her. So, she created the must-have Indian condiment herself. Along with a friend, she developed and jarred her own cilantro chutney, calling the product NJOY. When it came to distribution, she sought out Whole Foods to be a partner.
Jaisinghani was an avid cook, and she knew she wanted to open a concept of her own. In order to learn the nitty gritty of working in a commercial kitchen, she walked into Cafe Annie — a fine dining establishment which she considered one of the best in Houston at that time — and asked for a job.
When she finally opened Indika in 2001, she chose the Memorial area for its home, in lieu of an area with a concentrated South Asian population, like in the Mahatma Gandhi District on Hillcroft. “To me, those restaurants wanted to serve Indians, and I wanted to serve non-Indians,” she says.
Indika’s first locale in Memorial turned out to be a success, earning lots of positive buzz among diners and critics alike. The follow-up location in Montrose further cemented Jaisinghani’s place in Houston’s dining scene, and by the time she opened Pondicheri in River Oaks in 2011, she had built a respected name for herself in town. Today, modern Indian dining in Houston is hardly discussed without the mention of Anita Jaisinghani.
Before she opened her eponymous restaurant at Levy Park, the road was a winding one for Kiran Verma. The Indian-born chef, who grew up in Delhi and moved to Houston with her husband in the 1970s, honed her chops as a home cook while she worked as a bank teller at Texas Commerce Bank (now Chase).
Verma’s passion for working in the kitchen led to the opening of her first restaurant, a barbecue concept called Kebob-B-Q. After giving birth to a daughter in 1980, she put her restaurant dreams on hold as she took on the role of new mom.
It wasn’t until the 90s that she chose to dive back in. Verma started working at Ashiana, an Indo-Pak restaurant in the Energy Corridor. By 1998, when she was 44 years old, she purchased it from the owner, and began making waves as a chef and restaurateur in the city.
She sold Ashiana in 2004, only to buy another existing restaurant called Bombay Palace, which she quickly renamed Kiran’s. With her knowledge of traditional Indian cuisine and her experience leading up to this point, she was able to lay the groundwork for one of Houston’s first fine dining Indian restaurants.
The restaurant power couple went on to open the more formal Oporto in Midtown in 2014, and most recently Da Gama in 2021. The concepts were stylish, hip, and offered cocktails and wine—and the thread of Indian cuisine ran through them all
Before long, Verma’s tagline became known as: Traditional Indian, modern chef. Not only was she forward-thinking in her presentation of food, but she began to incorporate fine wine into her concept.
Verma’s mainstream success was further fueled by appearances on the latest season of Bravo’s Top Chef, recently filmed in Houston. Beyond being known as one of the pioneers of modern Indian dining in Houston, Verma has become well known as an industry leader.
London-born chef, Shiva Patel, moved to Houston with her family in 1980. “Most of what I was eating then was my mom’s home cooking,” she recalls. Like other immigrants in the city at that time, Patel soon became acquainted with the many Indian restaurants around town, including on Hillcroft Drive, in the Mahatma Gandhi District.
Frequent visits back to London with her family allowed her to stay tuned into the presentation of Indian food across the pond. “In my family, food always played a big part of our lives. I felt like food was going to be something important for me.”
Shiva made a career for herself in corporate banking, working on commercial real estate lending, but at night, she attended culinary school at the Art Institute of Houston. She didn’t get involved in the restaurant game until the early 2000s when she met her now husband Rick Di Virgilio, who was operating Oporto Cafe in Greenway at the time. When she met the New York-born, half-Portuguese, half-Italian hospitality veteran who had honed his chops as a dishwasher, bartender, server, and restaurant manager, she found herself wanting to help out in his restaurant in her free time. “Once we started cooking together, we knew we had something special to offer,” she says.
After the financial crisis in 2008, Patel left banking for good, and she officially joined forces with Di Virgilio. She brought a lot of Indian influence to the menu at Oporto Cafe, and in 2009, the duo opened Queen Vic at Upper Kirby, an Indo-British gastropub.
The restaurant power couple went on to open the more formal Oporto in Midtown in 2014, and most recently Da Gama in 2021. The concepts were stylish, hip, and offered cocktails and wine—and the thread of Indian cuisine ran through them all.
Patel acknowledges that Houstonians are more open to Indian cuisine now than ever before. Her contributions, including the way in which she and Di Vigilio presented food in an approachable way with their restaurants, have played a major role in its evolution in Houston.
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