Quest to win respect for Indian food
IN THE shade of a cardamom patch on a South Indian mountainside, Asha Gomez leaned against a tree and began to cry. She asked a photographer to stop taking pictures and sent a videographer farther down the dirt path. Gomez, a chef from Atlanta who had travelled for 22 hours to get to the land where she was born, needed a moment.
“I think I had disconnected myself from this place in some way by saying for so long that the US was home,” said Gomez, 47, who had moved from the Indian state of Kerala to the state of Michigan as a teenager. “There is still so much a part of me here. I think I had forgotten that.”
She wiped her tears and made her way back toward the cameras, more committed than ever to the work she had set out to do when she landed at Cochin International Airport a few days earlier.
Gomez had come to this land of ports, tea estates and spice gardens not only to reconnect with a part of herself, but also to find new ways to use her camera-ready personality and kitchen chops to lasso Kerala’s beautiful food culture and drag it back to the United States.
“I have to remove people from the mentality that all Indian food should be clumped up into nine dishes that are not really Indian dishes,” she said. “Not all Indian food belongs on a buffet line at $4.99. Indian food is 5,000 years of tradition and history, and it belongs right up there with French cuisine.”
Her frustration over American interpretations of the beloved coconut-scented fish curries, dosas and carefully layered beef biryanis of her homeland echoes the lament of countless cooks who have immigrated from countries like China, Mexico or Vietnam only to find their food mangled to meet the limitations of a new country’s palate and relegated to its cheap-eats guides.
“I wish I could say to every immigrant cook in America, ‘Why do you think your food should be any less than any other cuisine that comes from anywhere else in the world?’” Gomez said.
It’s not hard to see why: For one thing, unless that food is served in an upscale setting, with polished service, it doesn’t command the prices or the critical respect afforded European or American cuisines.
And even when the restaurant is fancy, the problem persists. Gomez experienced it at her first restaurant, a fine-dining place in Atlanta she named Cardamom Hill, after the spicegrowing region that she was touring last month. Customers would complain that she charged $32 for a complex fish curry with smoked tamarind, even when a fish entree at a well-regarded Southern restaurant not far away cost the same.
“That makes me see red im- mediately,” said David Chang, the prolific chef and restaurateur, whose parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea. “It’s the worst kind of racism, because it’s so readily accepted.”
Even though there are some notable Indian chefs cooking in the United States, integrating the kind of food Gomez loves won’t come easy, said Chang, who first met Gomez last week over fried chicken in Atlanta. “Considering the time we’re living in, having someone with that colour skin from that part of the world makes it a hard sell,” he said. “It’s probably not going to happen in one lifetime, and it is going to take relentless media exposure.”
That’s exactly why Gomez had invited a producer working on a show for PBS; two videographers, who help create her web-based subscription cooking show, Curry and Cornbread; and two newspa- per journalists to join her in Kerala.
The trip was a relentless blur of food and road miles. One day Gomez was picking out silky pomfret and river mullet to smear with masala, in a makeshift kitchen on the banks of Fort Kochi, and the next she was in a van grinding up a narrow mountain road to Kerala’s vast tea estates, or buying iron knives from a street vendor. By the end, she was happy to order a steak and get an ayurvedic treatment at a seaside hotel.
It had been eight years since Gomez last stepped onto Indian soil. She had come to adopt her son, Ethan, then a 3-yearold living in an orphanage.
So much has happened since then. For one thing, she embarked on a cooking career.
Gomez originally wanted to work in the beauty business. When the recession hit the United States in 2008, she had been running a luxe ayurvedic spa in Atlanta, where she had moved with her husband, Bobby Palayam. As her clients finished their massages and facials, she would feed them vegetarian biryanis and coconut-infused stir-fries bright with turmeric and chilies.
Then the spa succumbed to the downturn, and some of the city’s best chefs, as well as clients who understood a special thing when they tasted it, encouraged her to keep spreading the curry-and-coconut gospel of Kerala. She did, first with a supper club and then, in 2012, at Cardamom Hill. The menu drew parallels between the American South and the Indian South, highlighting both regions’ mutual love of fried chicken, braised pork and vegetables like okra and field peas.
“You know that Kerala is in your kitchen when you have coconut oil, curry leaves and mustard seeds sizzling in a chati,” she likes to tell people. “That’s our trinity.”
Two years later, just as Cardamom Hill had gained critical acclaim, she shut the place down. She wasn’t making any money, and was working so hard she had no time for her son. “I had lost my joy for cooking,” she said.
Her next restaurant was a quiet, stylish Indian patisserie where she served puff-pastry samosas and carrot cakes infused with black pepper. She closed it in February. The reasons weren’t much different.
Now she cooks for private clients at the Third Space, her kitchen and dining room in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. She teaches cooking, consults for food companies and has become a “chef ambassador” for CARE. Her 2016 cookbook, My Two Souths, was nominated for a James Beard Award.
Gomez learned to cook from her mother, Hazel, and her three aunts, who all lived near one another in a threehousehold compound in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital city on the Arabian Sea. It was a dreamy childhood, in a religiously diverse and literate region of India where young people prefer American rock to Bollywood soundtracks.
The Portuguese had begun settling there in the 15th century, bringing with them a love of pork and for the chilies that would come to mark Kerala’s food. It’s how her family got its name, and why she grew up a meat-eating Roman Catholic in a state where more than half the population is Hindu.
Sometimes innovators need to reconnect with their roots, which is why she got up at 4am at one point to visit a Kerala catering kitchen that for 100 years has been creating a classic Hindu celebratory meal called a sadhya, served at almost every wedding and holiday gathering in Kerala.
The meal, eaten from a banana leaf and centred on rice, can involve two dozen dishes that vary from salty to sour to bitter to sweet. Always there are spicy pickles, sambar and vegetables simmered in coconut milk or sautéed with ground coconut and curry leaves. It’s a celebratory feast that Gomez makes a few times a year.
In a wet, torrid kitchen, she watched the cooks, with bare chests and feet, add buckets of spices and vegetables to pots as big as wading pools. In a few hours, they would have lunch ready for 1,500.
In Thekkady, a town surrounded by spice gardens full of black pepper and nutmeg, she imagined customising Indian spice boxes for American chefs. As she wandered the vast tea estates of the Western Ghats sadhya mountains, she mulled over a plan to provide restaurants with tea service. She even pondered how she might do for Kerala what Danish chef René Redzepi has done for Nordic cuisine, opening a small, seasonal white-tablecloth restaurant with Michelin-star ambitions.
“Can you imagine what I could do in a place like this?” she asked.
But there in the Cardamom Hills, she understood the deeper meaning of the trip. She had found a way to merge her two homes.
“I want to leave an America behind where my son can be proud of both his heritages,” she said. “I want him to carry both these places with equal pride, hand in hand.”