When Preeti Waas first introduced herself to me at a hospitality industry event in November 2019, she said, “I brought you something,” and pressed a silver thermos into my hands. I unscrewed the lid and a current of steamy chai wafted upward, redolent of ginger, cardamom, and fennel. I took a sip and the hot, velvety tea slid down my throat like liquid comfort.
It remains one of the most touching gestures I’ve received as a food writer, but it’s exemplary of the thoughtful, personal touches that Waas extends to diners at Cheeni, too. Now, on the heels of closing her North Raleigh location, Waas is going all in on Cheeni Durham with her most personal menu to date and an expanded vision for community cooking classes, collaborations, and pop-ups.
On May 17, Waas also opened the Bar Beej, a “semisecret speakeasy” within Cheeni Durham.
“In Sanskrit, there is the beej mantra, a very powerful mantra that speaks to the divine feminine,” she says.
Waas speaks reverently about India’s origins as a matriarchal society, one at odds with the societal framework for women she grew up in: “A culture where you’re dried up after 40.” She describes operating Cheeni as a “bonus life past 50.”
Prior to meeting Waas back in 2019, I knew of her through her superlative chocolate chip cookies and juicy jams—a friend had gifted me samples from Sugar & Spice Kitchen and Jolly Good Jams, Waas’s two small-batch food companies. That fall, Waas had just opened Cheeni, an Indian tea and snack shop in the lobby of Raleigh’s Poyner YMCA.
The venture’s success propelled her to take another leap forward, and in 2021 Waas opened Cheeni Indian Food Emporium in a North Raleigh shopping center. To honor her dream of teaching cooking classes, she had to become a full-fledged restaurant to obtain the proper permits. So in addition to serving pastries and chai, she added a counter-service menu: rice bowls and kebab rolls by day, lamb vindaloo and Bengali roast chicken by night.
Opening a restaurant led to one of Waas’s biggest surprises: being nominated as a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast in 2023 and 2024. The first nomination, in 2023, led to an influx of diners, but with high rent and a no-tipping model that starts all staff at a pay rate of $16 per hour, that boon didn’t translate into more profit.
Focusing on her fledgling restaurant operation precluded her from allocating time and resources to cooking classes and guest chef pop-ups. When the opportunity came along in November 2023 to open Cheeni Durham in the former Jack Tar space in downtown Durham, her time became even further divided.
Once she got Cheeni Durham up and running, Waas planned to return Cheeni Indian Food Emporium to its original vision: a community space and marketplace for classes, events, pop-ups, and grab-and-go goods. But in mid-April, she received an unexpected call from her landlord detailing plans to sell the shopping center to an out-of-state entity. This, Waas says, “meant that the community aspect of the location, which is what appealed to me when I signed the lease, was no longer the case.”
She adds that “high rent and high operating costs without the sales to sustain them don’t work—especially when an impersonal entity owns the building.” On April 20, she closed Cheeni Indian Food Emporium for good.
Classes and events scheduled prior to the Raleigh location’s closure will be honored at Cheeni Durham, including a pop-up that morphed into a Mother’s Day brunch collaboration with Madre executive chef Luis Zouain.
Cheeni Durham is closed on Wednesdays and closed on Sundays post-brunch, so during those times, Waas envisions hosting cooking classes devoted to making chai, chutneys and chaats, and samosas and pakoras. She also plans to do pop-ups with guests like Lauren Markowitz and Alex Fiacchi, formerly of A Mano in Syracuse, New York (slated for June 19), and Lordfer Lalicon, chef at Filipino restaurant Kaya, a James Beard Award finalist based in Orlando, Florida.
“I feel like I’ve come into my own and I’m realizing what ‘my own’ meant. I now know what is possible, what I’m capable of.”
“I feel like I’ve come into my own and I’m realizing what ‘my own’ meant. I now know what is possible, what I’m capable of,” Waas says of creating Cheeni’s current spring-summer menu. “I’m able to take homemade ‘basic food’ and make it look appealing on the plate, and the flavors are fresh and true to me, not fussy at all, but I still make it look like ‘refined dining’—that’s what I call Cheeni Durham.”
Honoring her preferred flavor profiles—funk, acidity, balanced spice—while also meeting diners’ expectations has been a delicate balancing act for Waas. Servers at Cheeni Durham wear buttons that say, ‘Ask me about anything except chicken tikka masala,’ but Waas has found a workaround of sorts. Saunf wala chicken, the one dish her mother taught her to make, features tender chicken thighs cooked with fennel seeds, onions, and green chilies, plus Waas’s addition of tomatoes, and finished with whipped yogurt.
“It’s bright, it’s acidic, and it is not a creamy dish where it has cream, which is what people think of when they think of tikka masala,” Waas says. “We don’t cook like that in India or eat like that in India, at least not how I grew up.”
Waas was born and raised in the south of India, but she identifies with her Punjabi heritage. After the partition of India and Pakistan, Waas’s father moved from northern India to the state of Tamil Nadu on the southeast coastline.
“We lived like Punjabis at home, so we ate like Punjabis every day,” Waas says. For Waas and her siblings, a typical Punjabi lunch consisted of whole-wheat roti (unleavened flatbread) served with dal (lentils) and accompaniments such as raita (a yogurt-vegetable sauce), and sabzis (vegetable sides). Waas pays homage to her Punjabi roots with tamatar and bhindi daal tadka, slow-cooked split chickpea lentils with tomatoes and okra, tempered with ghee and panch phoran, a five-spice blend of black mustard, cumin, fennel, nigella, and fenugreek seeds. “It’s a seed blend that combines north, south, east, and west so well; it symbolizes India to me,” Waas says.
Waas’s expansive view of Indian cuisine is reflected on her menu, which draws inspiration from culinary traditions all across the country. On the printed menu, you’ll find outlines of various states denoting a dish’s speculated origins alongside anecdotes of Waas’s connections to and riffs on each dish.
Growing up in a coastal town fostered Waas’s love of seafood and an appreciation for both coasts’ preparation styles. One of Waas’s favorite creations is fish moilee, which highlights a Keralan coconut curry sauce. She bucked tradition by blending the sauce and was delighted to discover that it further concentrated its ingredients’ flavors, including garlic, ginger, and chilies. Mild, buttery barramundi is marinated in lemon juice, turmeric, and salt, then seared skin-side down for a contrasting crisp. Two pieces are arranged skin-side up in an oval bowl, briefly luxuriating in the silky, bright yellow coconut sauce before being anointed with a verdant green curry leaf oil.
“I love it so much. I have chefs clamoring for this dish,” Waas says. “It’s a dish that makes people want to lick their fingers.” Happily, it’s served with flaky, crispy Malabar parathas to mop up the luscious sauce.
Another Kerala-inspired favorite are the muttakos medallions, inspired by vegetable poriyal, described on Cheeni’s menu as “a simple, tasty accompaniment to many meals, often prepared with freshly grated coconut, tempered curry leaves, and mustard seeds.” Waas’s interpretation makes fresh cabbage the main event by cutting it into “steaks,” which are then brined and braised until silky. The medallions are then charred on the flat top, plated atop a lime-pickle-spiked yogurt sauce, and finished with a tarka of fresh ginger, green chili, and black mustard seeds tempered in oil.
“It’s not me just opening a restaurant of Indian origin and saying I’m going to sell Indian food,” Waas says of her evolution as a chef. “This is a journey for me. It is a journey of saying, ‘I’m exploring what it means to be me through my food.’”
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