NYC's Best Indian Food： Brooklyn Curry Project ｜ Family Food

You don't get this kind of food really anywhere in New York. This is like a hyper, local, South Indian food. It's really cool that so many miles away, we're all able to find like a little community here. It feels like, you know, we're sitting in our friend's living room and eating more than like coming to a commercial restaurant. Working with family, it's really fun. They understand you, you understand them. This has brought us together as a family. It's like we found our calling and we really enjoy this. This is the Raju family. I'm Shweta. This is Venkat. That's Kanda. And Mahati. Hi. We are from Karnataka, Bangalore. We feel like New York doesn't have the regional representation and we really, really miss the food that we grew up with. The aim of Brooklyn Curry Project is to debunk that Indian food is not just curries. That was one thing also that inspired us to start a small dosa stand in Brooklyn. Currently, we are operating from 383 Bridge Street, Brooklyn in Nimbus Kitchen. Every Saturday, we do the pop-up. We sell dosas 10.30 to 2.30 p.m. We are searching for our own brick-and-mortar place. Once we get that, we'll have our own place and we'll try to do that full-time. The main chef is Shweta and I'm the sous-chef. And we help around. It's a South Indian food business. When you think about Indian food, there's some main things you think about, like naan or something. My parents tend to focus on more of the other foods that they grew up with and they try to provide that, like dosa and idli, which are staples in South Indian diet. Something more regional. I think this is what Brooklyn Curry Project is. My mom started the business. She makes most of the ideas. Me and my brother help around a lot. We come and we help her with ideas as well. Every third Sunday of the month, we have this meal going on. And that's like a family affair. We all sit and decide what's going to be the next thing. Yeah, the next thing. And they all contribute for the menu design and everything. Today, it's a Sankranti meal. So since it's traditional for Sankranti to have banana leaves, we're doing a banana leaf meal. All the holidays, we always eat on the banana leaf. A way to present food with all the six rasas, like the sweet, astringent, sour, basically all these qualities of food. So like each dish has a special place that it goes to. Because this is like a winter harvest festival, the menu is big on sesame, peanuts, and sugarcane. And sweet potatoes also. We met around, I think when we were in 7th grade because we are family friends. There's a lot of funny stories in between. Yeah, let's skip that. In college is when we decided, okay, there's more than friendship, just being friends. We kind of settled in, so he had his own office and I was busy at work. So I've done my engineering in computer science. I was working as a real estate lawyer. Shweta got an opportunity in Brooklyn, which was a very good opportunity. Since it was in New York, we were like, yeah, New York, we should go. 2016 was our big move. When we moved here, we went to each and every restaurant that served dosas. And we're like, nothing feels like home. So what is missing here? Why we are not satisfied? When we started thinking about Brooklyn Curry Project, those feelings started to motivate us more. During Sankranti, back home, we always used to get sugarcane harvest around this time of the year. The festival embarks with having a fresh sugarcane juice. So we got some sugarcane, and we're trying to juice it and have it fresh. It just needs to be prepped. This is our first time using the machine, too. It's really important to know your source and how the food is handled and where it's coming from. We are farmers, so back in India, it was such an integral part of our lifestyle. Most of the ingredients are sourced from the farm. My mom's parents, they own a farm. Dad's family, they also own a farm. They ship it over from India to us. Most of our recipe is from my grandmothers and my grandfathers. Single-source ingredients are obviously going to be higher quality rather than processed ones or things that you just find at your regular store, which would taste better. So it's basically like a win-win situation, you know? This is freshly squeezed sugarcane juice along with a dash of ginger and lime. Here you go, if you want to taste. Tell us how it is. Maybe we should do hangings? We have a lot of volunteers. So my name's Rahul. I volunteer here. I came here for college. It's been like four years since I had familiar food. And when I saw that it was just like two normal people who were just running this, like a pop-up, I just wanted to help in any way I can. It's like full service, you help with the prep, the setup of the tables, setup of the space. Just a fun, bonding experience. The events are not really our money makers. We just do it for fun. And this is our way to, you know, make more dishes that we can't do at the pop-ups usually. So it's like, it's totally run by our volunteers. We are ever grateful for their support. You know, I've worked in like Mexican kitchens and like Italian kitchens where I don't have the same connection with the food that I do here. It feels familiar in a sense. It's exciting. So we always start with salt. All I remember is if the salt goes on the wrong spot, I used to get yelled at by my grandparents. We all usually eat in our right hand. And this is where rice and all the entrees go. And all the commodities go on the left-hand side corner. It's all such well-balanced. When we grew up, when we started learning about it, it was really fascinating. My family, I would say, is really extroverted. They really like introducing our culture to other people and learning about other people's too. Food is so much more than just the food, right? It's like, when it's served with love, and when people care for you, they watch out for you, that makes you feel so special, so seen. I've been around only for like four or five months, but that community-building aspect is something they've been doing for years, since the very beginning. This is how festivals were back home. I have 21 cousins, so it's just always been like this. And it just brightens my eyes when I see all this. It's like, wow. So a banana leaf meal usually has one steamed, one fried, and one cooked on the fire. Today, our fried dish is this, our ikkaalu mixture. Rice, peanuts, and the hyacinth beans. We've added a lot of spice into it. Just gives a very nice masala feeling. Funniest thing is that every place we've ever been, we've always done the same thing. Take some food, go to the neighbors. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how we got to know most of our neighbors. I was born in India, and so I grew up eating some of the same food that my parents grew up eating. Whenever I'm here and I eat that same food, it does remind me of home. It's the same kind of stuff that my grandma used to make, and it's the same kind of stuff I used to get when I was outside shopping for food. It doesn't matter what place you're in, it's still your family heritage. I think it's really important, so you should try to keep it down, in my opinion. So for desert, Sankranti, we always make sweet pongal. It's just made out of rice and lentils. Sweet potatoes are also big on season. We've made a brownie out of sweet potato, ragi, and the aloe vera butter, and then just made it fancy. I'm from the north of India. This is not common for me, eating on a banana leaf. So it was important for me to get my kids here. Being able to show them how they eat in other parts of India is also, you know, unique. I really love the sambar and rice, because ever since I moved from India, I have not found a good sambar place. If you don't get it right, you don't get it right, but here, they made it amazing. You know, I really like the fried puri and sago. It was one of my favorite back home when I was growing up. It's fresh, and it's, you know, it was so good. Happy to have food, you know, which makes you feel like you're at home. And yeah, I think that's exactly what I felt here. Beginning of the business, it was in Shweta's mind that, like, she wanted to do some kind of food business. One day, my daughter did a lemonade stand 2021 April in Fort Greene Farmer's Market. People were so supportive, and they got the entire lemonade within an hour, my wife said. So I'm going to start something here. I mean, I was saying no initially, because I was not, okay, why do we have to lose our weekend? But she was like, no, let me do it. If I'm not doing this, and I'll regret my whole life. Oh, then I thought, okay, let her try. On her birthday, she went into the market, and she started selling five lunch combos. They were standing in the line for an hour or half an hour. Till today, some of them are regular customers. They come every week. Without their support, we would have not come to this stage. Definitely. I'm really proud of her. I remember when I was like in fifth, sixth grade, and I used to go out in Fort Greene, and we only had this one cooler, and we decided to try to test things out. And now it's like a pretty good small business. And so I'd say that's really like inspiring for me. As a family, we feel like it's more connected now, like the stall is kind of meditation for us. When people say nice thing about your food, we both are very satisfied, and we'll get a good sleep after that. That makes us, for next week, we have to do more. We have to introduce this food. It's okay if you're scared. Fear doesn't have to completely go away. It can still be there, since that's just a part of life. It's fine, just do it. If you want to do it, just do it. Yes. If you believe in something, put your whole heart and effort, and believe in yourself, and universe has a way to bring everything together, and it will be successful.