Somewhere between 5am and 6am, lights come on in kitchens all over India – and in a particular nook in Chennai, you’ll find me inhaling deeply from my cup of freshly-brewed lemongrass tea. This is how every morning in the re:store kitchen begins. I spend half an hour in contemplation, relishing my tea and the company of my setters, Max and Coco.
Sitting with my setters, I listen to the parrots in the mango tree and enjoy this most lovely time of day, with the first sunlight streaming through the green leaves and the quietude before the city fully wakes up.
This is when I plan my day. Are there orders to be sent out? If there are no orders to be delivered, I conduct new trials. Will the pomegranate dressing work with the millet salad? Will the zucchini work in the savoury cake? I enjoy the process of finding out.
Armed with a plan for the day ahead, the next few hours are spent preparing orders, and by noon I am covered in almond dust or chocolate or some other delectable condiment.
All the orders are sent out by then (the salads are dispatched first, by 9am), and the busiest hours of the kitchen settle down. By lunch time, I’m starving (if you were wondering, breakfast was a smoothie to complement my workout, made with almond milk and berries or fresh fruit). A traditional Gujarati thaali – a balanced meal with cereals, pulses, vegetables, rice and dessert – is my everyday essential, although I may sometimes substitute it with a foreign twist like quinoa.
And then, I take a little time to learn and be inspired. I surf the web, discover recipes, and innovate personal tweaks to ones that I like. When something appeals to me, I devote myself to it. This is how re:store was born. I’d never been much of a baker, until one day, my daughter Prakriti tried her hand at baking a cake. It was simply amazing, and it inspired me so much that for a month and a half, I baked the same thing every single day, teaching myself. I perfected that chocolate-orange jaggery cake, and it became a hit at a couple of the city’s most popular cafés.
In this way, re:store grew step by step. I began with extremely healthy vegan items, but gradually included well-earned indulgences. The finest quality sugar and butter are a given, and I only use Belgian chocolate. I love exploring unusual flavours like lavender, earl grey tea and pista cardamom, and make ingredients like almond meal and pista meal right here in my kitchen.
My journey from homemaker to entrepreneur meant that I never lost sight of the health angle. At re:store, there is not a single item sold that I would not happily feed my own family. This was what led me to studying macrobiotics at the Kushi Institute, Massachusetts. The founding principle of macrobiotics is: “food is healing”. I found that the concept of seasonal, plant-based eating to be very familiar, for in India too we eat food known to be stimulating or cooling based on the climate.
My desire to share this expertise brings us back to the re:store kitchen, where tea-time is reserved for comfort food like sundal with rajma (chickpeas with kidney beans), soya beans or karamani (black-eyed peas). Like all people who cook in India, I comfortably move between languages in the kitchen: the English I was educated in, the Tamil of my home city, the Gujarati of my community, and so on. We know our vegetables and spices by many names!
After the tea break, it’s back to counters! Preparations for the following day’s orders and experiments now commence. Lentils are soaked, portions are weighed out, spices and masalas are ground and carefully kept away. Still, each new day brings with it more tasks for the sake of freshness. Vegetable chopping and juice pressing, for instance, are morning tasks. There can be no compromise when it comes to flavour or nutritious value.
The kitchen closes at around 7pm, and the last thing that happens is a thorough wiping down of the counters with orange-infused vinegar. This not only keeps away ants, but is the secret behind why my kitchen always smells so good (that and all the baking scents, of course)! Just put a curl or two of orange peel in your cleaning vinegar. Substitute with lavender seeds or any fragrance of your choice. It’s a sublime touch that brings a splash of calmness or brightness to your daily mood.
But first – at around 6pm, I sit down to the day’s last meal and invariably feel a sense of gratitude. No matter how far-ranging my travels, I’ve found myself to be happiest of all when sitting on the floor of someone’s home, and hearing the words “I’ve cooked this.” That, to me, is culture itself, the most beautiful meal. That’s what’s at the centre of everything at re:store. The marvel of these words: I’ve cooked this myself – for you.
