Brown in the South and the Holi Grail
Garland, Raleigh
“Food is a universal way to bring people together, culturally and also intellectually. For as long as people have been arguing about ideas, they’ve been doing it around food and drink, whether it’s at home, at a coffee shop, or at the dinner table,” says chef Meherwan Irani, chef-owner of Chai Pani in Asheville and Decatur. “And it’s a very democratic way to show what we’re talking about. Obviously, because we’re restaurateurs, the story we’re telling is not just of our personal identity, but the identity of our food—in this case, Indian cuisine—and how we’ve integrated that into where we are, which is in the South.”
Exploring themes of identity and belonging through food is the impetus behind the collaborative Brown in the South supper series, which features a collective of acclaimed Southern chefs of Indian descent, including Irani, Vishwesh Bhatt, Maneet Chauhan, Asha Gomez, and Cheetie Kumar. Kumar, the chef-owner of Garland in Raleigh, will host the third installment of the series on March 24. Though the 2:30 p.m. “Chat & Chai” panel discussion, moderated by Southern Foodways’ John T. Edge, is sold out, you can still snag tickets to food event, The Holi Grail, from 4:00 to 6:30 p.m.
The original Brown in the South chefs and five guest chefs—including Vimala Rajendran from Vimala’s Curryblossom Café and Nick Singh from Viceroy—will create a festive street-fair vibe by setting up stalls in the Garland dining room and upstairs at Kings, dishing up Indian-and-Southern-inspired snacks and street food. As is tradition with Holi, a Hindu spring festival that’s also known as the festival of colors or festival of love, there will be plenty of music and good cheer (Kumar says details are still being worked out, but there will likely be a photo booth opportunity involving the colored powder typically thrown during Holi). Tickets ($55, including food and one drink ticket) can be purchased here, and all proceeds will benefit the Southern Foodways Alliance’s mission to document, study, and celebrate the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
Irani and Bhatt had the idea for Brown in the South while chatting in a Mississippi parking lot after the 2017 SFA Symposium. They realized that there was a group of Indian chefs based in the South—rather than in big food cities, like LA and New York—who were gaining national recognition for pushing the ideas and interpretations of Indian food in innovative ways.
When she was asked to be part of the series, Kumar, who has earned national acclaim with a third consecutive James Beard Award semifinalist nomination, jumped at the chance.
“There are a lot of Indian people cooking in the South, and we all kind of embrace the ingredients that are indigenous here that are similar to our cooking and the way we approach the table and family meal,” Kumar says. She sees the dinners as another way to help express their individual and collective identities, and a way to bridge the gap between the food that they cook and what Southern food is (which she acknowledges is a complicated definition in itself).
From the first dinner, it was clear that people were hungry for the types of conversations that the Brown in the South chefs hoped to initiate, and it’s telling that within a day of Kumar posting the event on her personal Instagram, half of the tickets for the Holi Grail event sold out.
“I think all of us heard so many times that ‘I always wanted to have these conversations, and why don’t we?’” Kumar says. “It wasn’t just about the Indian experience or the Indian immigrant experience. It was a lot of different experiences that we share but don’t talk about, because it all centered around us being outsiders or different. I think people are so afraid of the history of Southern food because a lot of it is dark and horrible, but food is such a great entry point to having that conversation.”
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