My family is from India, and I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. I chose to be a chef pretty early in my life, so I got started when I was 19 or 20. I went out to California and went to culinary school there, worked for some great chefs, did some pretty intense stuff. Then, I came to New York and worked at Gramercy Tavern for a long time under Tom Colicchio. After that, I went out on my own and failed miserably the first time around when I opened my first place in 2007 and closed it in 2009, right in that economic rough patch. I was pretty young at the time; I gave it a shot and felt pretty good about what we accomplished even though we failed pretty miserably. It took some time to regroup, and when I got back to cooking, I found that I wanted to do something equally interesting but with less formality. 

That’s when I kind of found Mexican food, in general. I became a chef at La Esquina and was there for many years before opened Alta Calidad in 2017. 

What did you learn from opening up a restaurant that did not work out? 

I didn’t have the right background at the time. New York is very rough, in many ways, and it’s very competitive, of course. But the part that we don’t all know about is how unforgiving it is when you’re not prepared. So, I didn’t have a good understanding of business, and specifically, numbers and math. Now, I’m an excellent math student, and I’ve learned well from those mistakes, but they’re tough to recover from — it takes a long time. 

You grew up in Kentucky — are there any southern influences on your cooking? 

Growing up, there was a lot of southern food around me, and I had a lot of interest in that type of food, but I was seeking something much more refined. When I was growing up, people like Charlie Trotter were at the forefront of cooking, and those were the books I was reading at the time, about the elevated cuisine I was seeking to learn. That’s part of the reason I went to California, because so many of the chefs that were out there, like Alice Waters and all of those chefs who were doing so many interesting things, were what I wanted to learn. I went there, went to culinary school and ended up working for Loretta Keller for many years. She really taught me how to move in a kitchen, how to function in a kitchen, how to use your mind, respect your ingredients, so, I just learned a lot from that experience.

You worked with some pretty amazing people in New York and Gramercy Tavern is obviously pretty legendary, too.

I have terrible timing, but my timing was good when I worked there. I was coming from San Francisco, which had much less volume of restaurants at the time. I had never worked in a place where the chef was able to translate their personality to that volume of cooking. It was very indicative that he was involved in every plate. Nothing really got lost, and that was really interesting. Tom was very involved in the kitchen at that point, and I really got the benefit of that because he wasn’t on TV or highly awarded at the time. He has a really unique style of cooking, so I really got to pick up on that. 

Whenever he could, he would go back and cook at a station. He created a very competitive environment, which is what you want. But it was always “keep up with the chef,” so he was always pushing us to be better. 

Are you planning to stick with Mexican cuisine? 

No! We just bought the place next door, and that’s going to be more of a Mediterranean type of focus. I love the food we do here, but I kind of feel up to my eyeballs in tacos right now, so I’m excited to cook something different.

What are some of your favorite things to cook at home?

I cook some Indian food at home, but mostly it’s just health-oriented things. Yesterday, my daughter wasn’t feeling great, so I made her this Indian rice and lentil porridge called kitchari. But, in general, it’s very simple things with lots of vegetables and simple ingredients. 

How does that philosophy translate into your work? 

We’re very thoughtful about it here. We use very little butter in our Mexican cooking, and it tends to be gluten-free just because of the nature of being so corn-based. We’re thoughtful about how much fat we’re using in general.

Do you bring any of the Indian techniques from your home kitchen into work?

There’s a lot of crossover here, but we do it gently, so it still stays Mexican. There’s a lot of underlying things, like the guajillo salsa has Indian spices like allspice — which is also used in Mexican cooking –  cumin, coriander seeds and things like that, so it’s kind of like a chutney, but also a salsa. 

Tell me a bit more about your new endeavor next door. 

It’s called Wayward Fare (we’ve had to rename it five times already), and it’s not going to be as predictable as what we’ve done in the past. We’ve been working on the menu, and I’m excited to start working on dishes in the coming weeks. There are oysters poached in fennel cream with a little anise and pickled fennel, which we’re excited about; there’s an Indian bread called kulcha. We have a starter, which is a hybrid, and traditional Indian bread doesn’t use a starter, but we combine it with a leaven, which we’ve had here for many years, and we bring it to life every week to make things like pancakes and dosas. It’s a laminated dough in the sense that it’s done in the Indian way, which is folded with ghee, and we cook it in the wood-burning oven, and we’ll have a wood-burning oven! There was a moratorium on those, which is part of the reason we wanted to get that space, before it was gone. You can’t really have them anymore. It will be fun to cook something different. I’m excited about that. 

What is your favorite ingredient to cook with?

I cook with a lot of spices and chilis. When treated differently, they all act differently. Mexican chilis range from roasted chocolate smells to earthy elemental things, some have raisin qualities. Indian spices, like cardamom, can be smokey and earthy, but they can also be sweet and used in desserts and things like that.

What is on the horizon for Alta Calidad?

We’re in the process of redoing the menu here, which we haven’t done in a long time. Before the pandemic, we had a lot of chef-driven elements, and then during the pandemic, when people were home more, it turned into more of a taqueria. People could come in and eat very easily and take it away. Now that we’re kind of past that, we’re shifting the menu again to something more similar to where we started, so there will be more creative and interesting things on the menu.