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Meet Meherwan Irani of Chai Pani Restaurant Group in Decatur and Old Fourth Ward

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Meherwan Irani.

Meherwan, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I came to the US when I was 20 to get my MBA. It was the first time I’d left home and, not only was I on my own in a foreign land, but I was in Columbia, SC – a culinary desert in 1990. I couldn’t get over how bland the food tasted, so I started learning how to cook. There was one small health food store in town where I’d scrounge up whatever Indian spices I could find. Whenever my mom visited from India, for the first time I started paying close attention when she cooked. My mom was a fearless cook – she’d transform whatever was at hand in my tiny apartment (and it was slim pickings in Columbia, SC back then) into something sublime. That time in my life started a comfort and love affair with cooking and experimenting that was the foundation for the idea for Chai Pani.

Of course, I first had to go through 15 years of a “normal” career. By day I wore a suit and tie to work (I was in the auto industry) and at night, I’d cook for friends and family and dream of opening my own restaurant one day. Ironically, that day happened in the midst of the financial meltdown of 2009, when faced with the prospect of the company I was working for going bankrupt, Molly (my wife) and I decided that it was the perfect time to try the riskiest business idea (opening a restaurant), with an unheard of concept (Indian Street Food), with almost no experience in professional cooking or running our own business.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Ha! There’s an old saying – ‘anything worth doing is worth doing well’. What they don’t tell you is that anything worth doing well is really frickin’ hard! Otherwise everyone would be doing it, right? One of the first things Molly and I realized by the end of our first year is that as successful as we were there was no way to keep good people if we didn’t grow and give them an opportunity to grow. So that’s why, 3 years in, we decided to open our second location in Decatur. Of course running a business with 2 locations presented its own set of challenges but we learned, and adjusted, and worked hard, and now we have 5 restaurants and a spice business.

Please tell us about Chai Pani Restaurant Group.
I’m proudest of our culture. One of the first things we knew we wanted to change was the stereotypes of the restaurant industry. We weren’t naive. We knew we were coming into an industry where the norm was that servers and cooks hated each other and everyone hated the customer, where everyone was hooking up with everyone, where substance abuse was endemic, jobs were transient, sexism was normalized, and everyone was underpaid. So we made a choice to make our culture the centerpiece of who we were as a company, and let that define us – more so than our food. We’re not an Indian street food business serving people food. We’re a people business that happens to serve Indian street food.

I’m also proud that we’ve managed to make an impact on the evolution of Indian food in America. Just in the last 5 years, I’ve seen an explosion in young Indian chefs (and some non-Indians) opening remarkable restaurants that are re-defining what mainstream America thinks of Indian food. We’re winning accolades and being noticed by the James Beard Foundation. There’s a pork roast dish of mine that’s in this month’s holiday issue (Dec) of Bon Appetit. To think that an Indian chef can be recognized for adding something to a traditional American holiday was an incredible accomplishment and shows how far dining taste and acceptance of cuisine have come in the US.

From the first Chai Pani in Asheville NC, we’ve grown into a restaurant group – we added Chai Pani Decatur, MG Road (in Asheville, NC), Botiwalla (at Ponce City Market), Buxton Hall Barbecue in Asheville, and most recently Spicewalla – our small new spice company that’s started shipping high quality, small batch spices to chefs and restaurants all over the Southeast.

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Image Credit:
Ehsan Khan, Mia Yakel

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