Certain clichés, some more tenacious than others, define generations of Indian restaurants in the United States. It’s a font, the type stylized with curly, pointy-ended serifs. It’s a basket of cold, black-edged papad dressed up as bread service. Usually, though, it’s a menu of naan and curry, pleasing in its soft, warm vagueness. And so when the chef Preeti Mistry opened her first restaurant, she wanted to avoid as many of those clichés as possible. “I wanted to do something that was the opposite of all of that,” Mistry said. At first, she railed against naan and curry. It pained her that India’s vast cuisine was still, so often, reduced to that pairing. “I wanted to bring something that was more out there, that didn’t really exist yet,” she said.
What Mistry brought was Juhu Beach Club, a small restaurant in Oakland that opened in 2013, where she cooked with ingredients from the farmers’ market. In “The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook,” which Mistry wrote with Sarah Henry last fall, she tells the story of how she grew up tasting Indian street food on the beaches of Mumbai, longing to eat more than her mother’s home-cooked meals and sneaking cans of Coke at friends’ houses. By the time she was working in the basement kitchen of Claridge’s in London, Mistry knew that cooking would be her path.
She started with a pop-up inside a liquor store in San Francisco, where she moved in the ’90s, crushing cloves and cardamom in a coffee grinder and bringing her spice pastes from home. Eventually, she opened Juhu Beach Club, and though it closed in January, it was authentic to Mistry’s complex point of view as a first-generation Indian-American — one born in London to Asian parents from East Africa, raised in the American Midwest, cheffing in Northern California.
“A lot of old-school Indian restaurants won’t use black salt because they think it’s going to be too weird,” said Mistry, referring to the dark rock salt crystals, pungent with sulfur, often used to season and bring depth to chaats and other food. “I love it, it’s awesome. It has this flavor and funk that’s really distinctive. And I’m not pandering to anyone.” Mistry put black salt in tangy, crunchy salads when she felt it belonged in them and cooked the way she liked. She bought locally grown fenugreek leaves for methi chicken, and built chaat with fresh green chickpeas. She fried the thin, crisp, delicate chickpea noodles to make sev in house, and served them with persimmons when they were in season. “I thought about the building blocks of sev puri,” Mistry said. “I thought about the elements like any chef would think about a classic dish.”
There were waffles on the weekends. Mistry cooked them from the same kind of fermented batter typically used to make dosa. And each summer, there was the conundrum of the tomato salad. Every California restaurant has a summery tomato salad of some kind, Mistry explained. A riff of some sort on a caprese — tomatoes, mozzarella, herbs. Mistry wanted one, too, and she experimented with many versions. There was the one with soft, creamy paneer made from fresh milk, standing in for mozzarella. But Mistry said it had too many bells and whistles. Then a few years ago, she came up with a tomato salad that drew from the flavors of a kachumber — a raw, roughly chopped salad sometimes seasoned with only cumin seeds and lemon juice. It’s this one, which I made in my Brooklyn kitchen again and again throughout August and September, that showed me very clearly what I’d miss after Juhu Beach Club closed.
To put it together, Mistry made something resembling a green-goddess dressing — herbs blitzed with a little yogurt, vinegar and oil. Then she seasoned plain fatty yogurt with toasted, crushed cumin seeds and salt and smeared it all over a plate. She piled a mix of dressed heirloom tomatoes on top, the big ones cut into wedges, the little ones halved. And that was it. “I wanted to make it simple,” Mistry said. “I wanted to make, in the moment, just whatever felt right.”
It wasn’t a kachumber, not by any definition. Neither could it pass as a caprese, not that it even wanted to. It wasn’t a mash-up of the two, either. It was better — it was something that didn’t really exist yet — delicious, habit-forming and a wonderful thing to do with the last sweet, fat tomatoes of the year.
