Born of India and the South

Farhan Momin combines fast food with traditional flavors of Gujarat.

As an Indian American kid growing up in Georgia, Farhan Momin would see his friends eating restaurant fried chicken and barbecue sandwiches. Because his Muslim family eats halal, he could never partake.

Trapped between two cuisines — his Gujarati-born parents' home cooking and the forbidden fast food that lurked on every corner — he created his own singular style, starting at 6, when he announced he wanted to break Ramadan fast by making his own meal. The first grader was super proud of his Tandoori fried chicken, even if his dad told him it was a bit heavy on the spice. Little did he know it was the start of a recipe that would one day change his life.

In 2017, Momin put his Tandoori fried chicken in a biscuit, moistened it with his mom's green and tamarind chutneys, and captured the heart of “MasterChef ” judge Gordon Ramsay, who picked the Georgia native for Season 9 of the show. Then a dental student in Chicago, the Emory graduate sweated his way through 18 episodes of the amateur cooking competition before being sent home.

“I would always have tears in my eyes, every time I saw him on TV,” his mother, Eliza Momin, told me.

Today, Momin, once torn between a career as a chef and a dentist, manages to balance both worlds. When he's not filling cavities or setting crowns, Dr. Momin — aka Chef Farmo — partners with his dad at Atlanta Halal Meat & Food, the combination butcher shop/fast-casual restaurant they opened a year ago in a Suwanee strip mall.

“My whole angle of cooking is all about these memories I have of eating my mom and dad's food, and combining it with the food I was missing out on,” says Momin, 27. “I couldn't eat Chick-fil-A. I couldn't eat at a barbecue restaurant that all my friends were eating at. So how could I bridge the gap between these two things and come up with food that's unique and very tasty?”

On a recent Sunday, Momin cooks the recipes for this article and, surrounded by family, sets the food on a table in front of the restaurant. The spread exemplifies his talent for combining Indian and Southern foodways.

There's his famous Tandoori bird, marinated in buttermilk and deep-fried to perfection. There's cornbread, modeled after a Gujarati snack cake traditionally fashioned from besan (chickpea flour). And there are two black-eyed pea creations, a falafel-like fritter and a chaat. Both are inspired by Indian street food. Both employ a legume as common to Atlanta as Ahmedabad. Both are transformed by the Momins' green and tamarind chutneys.

A couple of bites, and you know why Farhan Momin is such an original.

STYLING BY CHEF FARHAN MOMIN / PHOTOS BY CHRIS HUNT FOR THE AJC Chef Farhan Momin’s dishes include Khaman Cornbread (lower left), Black-Eyed Pea Vada (upper left), Tandoori Fried Chicken (center) and Crispy Black-Eyed Pea Chaat (far right). Momin, an Atlanta dentist who also owns a restaurant that is part of his family’s halal butcher shop in Suwanee, was a contestant in Season 9 of “MasterChef.”

LEFT: Chef Farhan Momin (from left), his father Ahmed Momin and his mother Eliza Momin own a restaurant that is part of the family’s Halal Butcher Shop in Suwanee. ABOVE: In Gujarat, where Farhan Momin’s parents are from, a favorite street snack is khaman dhokla (squares of steamed chickpea-flour bread).