On a Thursday afternoon at Cheeni in downtown Raleigh, Preeti Waas answers her phone, pausing briefly to talk to a customer who has just walked in with a question.
“I’m so glad you stopped by,” she can be heard saying cheerfully in the background. “We have a good menu.”
Waas has only had her spot on the ground floor of the Poyner YMCA open for a little over a year—it opened in November 2019, just four months before COVID-19 brought the restaurant industry to a halt. Still, the little Indian-inspired tea shop persevered, and when opportunity came knocking to open a second location at the Alexander YMCA off Hillsborough Street, Waas took it. This second Cheeni location opened on March 1 with an expanded kitchen that allows for a larger menu which will include NaanZas, buttered brioche rolls Bun Maska, and a full menu of coffee beverages alongside Chai.
Both serendipity and tenacity define Waas’s journey into the Raleigh food scene. A former adjunct culinary professor at Wake Tech, Waas’s two small-batch food companies, Sugar and Spice Kitchen and Jolly Good Jams, became gateways to Cheeni, when the Poyner YMCA reached out to her about taking over its vacant cafe space. The location was a perfect match for her passions for nutrition and education: Three weeks after that first phone call, Cheeni was open for business.
“My approach to food is—yes you’re coming to work out, play basketball, whatever,” she says. “But of course nutrition is a huge part of that. People tend to associate a healthy lifestyle with taking away things. You deprive yourself of such and such, or you don’t eat carbs. In India, it’s actually the opposite. Indian food is, by and large, very, very healthy. It’s meant to fit what your body needs during that particular season, several times a day. It’s a very comprehensive approach.”
During the lockdown, Waas says she has tried to stay relevant and resilient with a healthy, comforting menu of fresh-made masala chai, savory Indian-American snacks, smoothies, and baked goods packed with a wide range of grains, including buckwheat, einkorn, sorghum, and millet. (Take a look, for instance, at Waas’s eye-popping gluten-free Indian millet cookies with lemon curd.)
The opportunity to open a second location, she says, proved especially exciting because it gives her the chance to hire during time when people so badly need employment. It will also allow her to expand her mission to educate, not just through eating food, but through teaching kids how to make and prepare food.
“As we get more settled, I’ll be teaching workforce development classes,” says Waas, who has been cooking since the age of nine. “Because the Y naturally has a big population of youth that are underserved and kids who are coming in for after school activities and to play basketball and things like that, I’m going to be able to give them barista training and teach them ServSafe classes and customer service. That piece of it excites me so much.”
And ,as with her current Cheeni location, Waas says she expects the menu to keep prompting conversations.
“At first glance, it seems like a regular menu—there’s coffee and sandwiches, you know, the regular menu,” Waas says. “Then you see chili cheese toast, or you see a heading for tiffin and are like, ‘what the heck is a tiffin?’ It prompts those questions. We really get to have a lot of conversations—and I could talk about food all day long. Even in my sleep.”
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