A few years ago, erstwhile mutineer Manish posted here about an enterprising Tiffinwalla in New York who would deliver healthy, vegetarian lunches (“2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney”) for all of $5.
I was living in California at the time and lazy ingrate that I am, I was green with longing, even as I was eating fresh Mallu food daily at home.
It just seemed like such a fantastic concept; New Yorkers got EVERYTHING, I wistfully thought. Couldn’t the left coast have had similar, especially during that arid, empty time that my Mother was abroad for two months? ;) I mean, protein shakes get old, y’all.
Apparently, my whining has been answered, according to a story in the grey lady which many of you were blowing up our tipline/news tab with (Thanks, Derick):
In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, the tiffin, or lunch, is prepared by the wife, mother or servant of the intended. In the United States, because of little time (and a lack of a domestic staff), many of these lunches are prepared by outsiders, but the underlying principle is the same…
Annadaata, which began as a homespun operation in 2002, has morphed into a business with several delivery people distributing meals each weekday across San Francisco. Kavita Srivathsan, 29, the chief executive of Annadaata, got her start by cooking meals for her new husband and his friends.
Srivathsan stumbled in to a market which was just waiting for someone like her to hook them up with comfort food:
She did not have a job at the time, so she spent her time learning how to cook Indian foods. Using recipes from her mother in south India, she experimented in the kitchen for a few hours each day. On a whim, she advertised $5 box meals on justindia.com, a Web site based in the San Francisco area that no longer exists. “That was the only time I ever did any advertising,” she said. “The very next day I got a few phone calls from people ordering the boxes, and from then on the word spread like wildfire.”
Mrs. Srivathsan’s business grew so fast that a few months later she decided she could no longer run it from her home. “It began as me cooking out of my kitchen, but since there was such a demand for it, I had to make it a legitimate business with a tax ID number and a rented kitchen,” she said.
Because she wanted to reach a wider market and knew that Indians generally favored cuisine from their region, she hired cooks from various areas in India, including Gujarat, south India and Punjab. Today, customers can click on her Web site, annadaata.com, to view a menu for the coming week. After choosing from among a vegetarian ($7), a nonvegetarian ($8) or a south Indian meal ($8), they place orders over the Internet and pay with credit cards.
Uh, anyone want to start this up in D.C.? Pleeease? There’s only so many times that I can stomach Chipotle/Potbelly/Subway/Raisin Bran for lunch and like the people quoted in the NYT article, it’s just not possible for me to cook. Proper South Indian food requires time, discipline and a devotion to process that I can’t muster right now and I’m not a fan of shortcuts (my mother told me this weekend at our family reunion that if she ever caught me availing myself of something like this, she’d pinch my thigh so viciously I’d need a skin graft). Owww.
Srivathsan sums it up perfectly:
At the end of the day I just wanted the basic Indian food I had grown up with.
Werd.
