One Sunday evening before writing this book, we sat down with a bottle of wine and the goal of reflecting on what we wanted to write, why we wanted to write and just how much we wanted to share about our home. Instead we stared at one another in wonderment that, after almost fifteen years, we have managed to stay married, work together and still have fun together. Meeru wanted to turn the evening into a reflective therapy session, but Vikram said, “Relax, honey, and just enjoy right now.”
“Relax, honey” has been our phrase of survival. It’s our cue to each other that “All is fine and I still love you” or, in many cases, “I’m not mad at you anymore.” We don’t throw around this phrase carelessly—whichever one of us says it is the one who will take responsibility to help the other relax. That particular Sunday evening Vikram cooked dinner and made sure to include lots of vegetables in the lamb stew so that Meeru could actually relax with the knowledge that everyone was getting enough vitamins and fibre. (If Meeru had said “Relax, honey,” she would have made the lamb stew with lots of cream and potatoes for Vikram and served the vegetables on the side.)
Days or weeks will go by when neither Meeru nor Vikram has uttered the words “Relax, honey,” and the entire family knows that we’re working and functioning but not necessarily enjoying one another’s company. Sometimes, Meeru will wait for Vikram to say it first and Vikram will wait for Meeru, because neither of us wants to take the first step and make the effort. In such ruts, dinner is what always breaks the ice—Meeru (or Vikram) will have come up with a brand-new recipe and is so excited to share it that she’ll say the words as he walks into the kitchen—“Relax, honey. I made a really cool dinner tonight.”
For the first thirteen years of our marriage, we didn’t have a proper place to eat as a family. Our actual dining room served as a combination of Meeru’s office and a playroom so that she could work and be with our daughters, Nanaki and Shanik. The kitchen was crowded. There, we had an invisible, grey table for four, which exuded convenience but no leisure whatsoever. Although we always had Sunday- or Monday-night family meals, on most other nights Meeru would feed the girls an earlier dinner, and then she and Vikram would eat later. We also didn’t feel too guilty leaving that table and taking our dinner to the sofa in front of the television.
When we had dinner parties, either we would go through the hassle of emptying our kitchen and bringing in folding bridge tables and chairs (and covering them with tablecloths) or we would just ask our guests to eat with their plates on their laps. Usually there were pre-party marital arguments because Vikram always wanted to use Meeru’s desk as the dining table and Meeru pushed for people to use their laps.
Finally, two things happened. First, in the summer of 2007, Anthony Bourdain’s office phoned Vikram, telling him that they wanted to shoot part of the Vancouver episode of No Reservations, Bourdain’s culinary travel television show, at our home, with the featured Vancouver chefs eating and chatting around our dining table. It seems fair to assume that a chef would have a dining room. For an hour after Vikram informed them that we had no dining room and a crowded kitchen, he decided that this was all Meeru’s fault. Meeru snapped back that we weren’t going to ruin our family set-up just for the sake of a TV show.
Second and most important, Nanaki and Shanik (12 1/2 and 10) were growing up and no longer needed a playroom or needed their mom to be near while she worked. They were also getting homework and discovering the joys of pop TV and music. The important toys went up to their bedrooms; Meeru’s desk and files also went upstairs into an alcove in the hallway, and we had an empty dining room.
So, we had a life-changing moment in the spring of 2008. We set up a dining room in our home and bought a dining table and chairs for eight people. To make this endeavour even more eventful, we spent beyond our savings and bought a dining set that was beautiful to look at and as comforting as a picnic table with duvet seats. We decided that after so many years without a proper eating space, and being in the food business, if there was one thing on which we could splurge, it was our dining room. We went all out and had sideboards, shelves and cupboards built into the room.
To sum up our personalities when it comes to food, it’s simple: Vikram is robust, while Meeru is thoughtful. This is how each of us shops, cooks and eats. To turn our crowded kitchen into a leisurely cooking place and to furnish a dining room in a way that reflected our complementary—yet sometimes clashing—traits was a treat. We felt like a newly married couple shopping for our new home. We would sneak out from the restaurants while the girls were at school and go dining-room shopping.
One day they came home from school to find the new family dining table, with two beaming parents showing off their latest joint achievement. What they didn’t realize at the time, while they stared at one another smiling as if they had crazy parents, was that our family culture was about to change dramatically.
Vikram started waking up early—although he often doesn’t get home until 11 p.m.—to set the table and make breakfast for everyone. For the first time we started eating breakfast together. To make this experience more pleasing to Vikram’s eye, he bought various lovely table runners to set the mood. And although in retrospect this sounds crazy, Meeru started spending more time grooming Nanaki and Shanik’s hair and helping them choose outfits. Nicely dressed children added to our ambience-driven pleasure. Of course, after a few weeks the girls decided that enough was enough and took over their own hair and clothes. But they continued to wake up earlier so that we could all spend a half hour together in the mornings.
Once breakfast became a new routine, we automatically kept coming up with new ways to make the experience even better than the day before. The joy of breakfast became a reality that was worth the initial investment of waking up earlier. Meeru started making granola from scratch. Vikram began cooking the Indian omelets from his childhood, which included white brioche lightly fried in a pan instead of our regular whole-grain toast.
Of course, not everything stayed perfect. Nanaki and Meeru wanted the richer whole-grain bread, and they wanted it toasted then spread with cold butter straight from the fridge. Vikram insisted that his butter-fried bread was the same as our North American toasted and buttered bread. He was also adamant that the taste of brioche was appropriate for breakfast while the heartier breads were for dinners and soups.
In our pre–dining table family, this difference of opinions would have escalated into a full-on argument that would have covered everything from whose mother knew more about food to Meeru’s being a health-freak dictator to Vikram’s being obsessed with white bread and meat, and so on. Nanaki and Shanik would have rolled their eyes and gone to school, and we would have spent another hour finishing the argument and making up and then starting the day much later than necessary.
However, the prospect of ruining this new family breakfast around our cherished dining table was unacceptable. We quickly settled on a locally made Italian ciabatta bread, with Vikram’s and Shanik’s being fried and Nanaki’s and Meeru’s being toasted. Eventually, Shanik decided that Papa’s omelets were good but had too many ingredients in them. Nanaki decided that the family granola had too many nuts and seeds in it and not enough cinnamon. Our cleared-out, updated kitchen has a cooking island, which makes cooking with the girls easier than ever. Now Shanik makes various versions of eggs, and Nanaki has become an expert at mixing granola with lots of cinnamon and maple syrup and very few nuts.
From breakfast we moved on to weekend lunches. Sushi Saturdays gave way to various versions of pressure-cooked organic beans and rice pilaf. Vikram took responsibility for the rice (again, the pilafs from his childhood), and Meeru took care of the bean curries. During farmers’ market season, the beans are replaced by whatever vegetables we buy there.
Our dinner routine also changed. Rather than cooking for the girls, Meeru started cooking with the girls and sitting down with them for a proper meal at the dining table. Vikram discovered candles in a big way and before he went to work made sure that they were set for our dinnertime enjoyment. As the girls tuned into the fact that they had our full attention around the dining table, they started pitching in to help. We pushed back dinnertime to 8 p.m., and Vikram started coming home early on Tuesdays to join us towards the end. For a restaurant family, three family dinners a week is a big deal.
A rewarding, yet difficult, aspect of our marriage is that we work together and carry the stress of running two restaurants—Vij’s and Rangoli—together. At the end of the day it’s difficult not to talk or argue about work when two very strong-minded people who always think they are right actually live together. So, unlike breakfast, which revolves around all the wonderful and traumatic stories about school and friends, dinners are often about the wonderful and traumatic issues related to food and the restaurants.
Vikram and Meeru still have heated discussions, but now they are discussions as a family, with full debate, rather than a husband and wife bickering. We spend hours at the table (often with the girls) discussing anything from the carbon footprint of lamb from New Zealand to the merits of buying local versus organic. We have spent days discussing the meaning of “gourmet.” We still haven’t reached any consensus on this one: is gourmet an extravagant beef tenderloin with a shiitake mushroom and rapini curry, or is it a rustic peasant-style stew? We do agree on one thing: any meal cooked from raw, unprocessed ingredients that tastes good and is served with love is basically gourmet.
Vikram’s gourmet comes out when he’s cooking curried rack of lamb for dinner parties with our friends. Meeru’s gourmet comes out when she empties the grocery bag onto the kitchen island and sees all the colours of the fruits and vegetables, along with purple onions, green onions and garlic. For her the smell of green tomato vines right where they meet the tomato is better than any perfume.
After years of not realizing what we were missing, the arrival of a dining table was like a balm to our lives. We’ve always loved cooking, but now our rewards are multiplied with the joys of being able to have friends over for dinner without any stress of rearranging kitchens and carrying folding tables and chairs. Simply put, we are less lonely with the freedom of being able to more often invite people over for a meal.
Nevertheless, we simply can’t cook like a team, and we finally accept that. One of us has to take the lead, with the other one in a support role. Vikram in his robust mood will spend the day before a party planning and shopping and then cook all day of the party. The two hours before our friends are to arrive have become a family joke—Papa will start yelling about cleaning up the house and setting the dining table. This can’t be just any setting—every detail must be looked after in a very five-star way. It’s truly a high-maintenance feast with millions of pots and pans, different glasses for each type of wine, and different bowls, plates and cutlery for each food item.
Meeru is most comfortable when she’s cooking daily meals for the family or when she’s with her staff in one of the restaurant kitchens. When there’s no stress, she feels free to experiment and try new combinations of ingredients and spices. When cooking for friends, she enjoys making the meal as simple as possible, with a focus on few dinner items and minimal set-up and clean-up. She also loves to cook in the presence of friends and get their help along the way. Although she often makes a meat curry, she has no qualms about serving a completely vegetarian meal. And she always balances the dishes with little to no fibre with high-fibre dishes.
With the new dining table Meeru often has casual, small dinner parties, which Vikram joins later in the evening when he gets home from the restaurants. No matter how tired he is, Vikram always notices that something is “missing” from the table or that people are pouring their own wines instead of being served. Within minutes, he loosens up and starts drinking and eating, contending with the fact that, just as she’ll always be five minutes late, Meeru will never host a fine-dining dinner party on her own.
And this leads us to our cookbook. Almost everything we cook at home for our dining table ends up at either Vij’s or Rangoli, our two restaurants in Vancouver. Whereas Vij’s is sophisticated and exotic, Rangoli is bright and playful. At the restaurants we’ll pair up various dishes prepared at different times. At home we keep it mostly simple, unless it’s Vikram’s turn to cook.
In this book we’ve arranged the recipes according to the main ingredients. Traditionally, home-cooked Indian food is served in the middle of the dining table, and people help themselves to what they want and as much as they want. Indian food at home is rarely plated in advance. Whereas some people plate their own food in phases (Vikram’s dad will always help himself to a small serving of lentils before anything else), others (like Vikram) will pile everything on their plate at once. You can pretty much make any of these recipes and serve several dishes together or just cook one dish and serve it as your main meal. The combinations are endless, and we’ve given food-pairing suggestions at the end of each recipe to help you.
Ours is a whimsical, loud and very social cuisine that practically begs you to share it with as many people as possible. Its aromas will go through your entire home, the floor of your apartment building or your entire neighbourhood block. Meeru remembers childhood picnics at the Washington Monument and recalls how non-Indians would often follow the smell of the curry and ask her parents what they were eating. Every time, Meeru’s parents would invite the inquisitors to try the food. They always had more than enough, since Indian food tastes even better as leftovers.
We don’t have a 100 per cent cooking success rate at home. Many factors—a stressful day that is difficult to shake off, endless errands that still need to be done or just the feeling of not wanting to do any more work—can contribute to a less than perfect meal. But we don’t regard cooking as a household chore that can be postponed or neglected. Cooking, just like singing a goodnight song to your child no matter how tired you are, or listening to your sibling’s most recent emotional trauma no matter how distracted you are, is one of humankind’s unique forms of nurturing. Nurturing takes effort, but it isn’t a chore. We believe that when you look at cooking this way, the effort to cook a good meal becomes a form of pleasure and satisfaction.