Each school day the dabbawala delivered a fresh, hot, home-cooked lunch to Jasmine Sheth (and many others), each dish packed into a stack of three circular aluminum tins, or tiffins, with roti on the side, a salted lassi, and something sweet. The food itself was cooked every morning by her mother, and sent off via Mumbai’s sprawling lunchbox delivery system by bicycle and rail. The tins returned the same way each evening.
Sheth left home in 2003 for New Jersey, where she earned her MBA in human resource management and a master’s in organizational psychology, then moved to New York City for a series of corporate jobs. In 2012, she was laid off from an ad agency and contemplating her next move. “I was trying to keep busy and I just started cooking at home and inviting friends for dinner.” This led to a new career throwing pop-ups and underground dinners, and working as a private chef for various online platforms that sent her all over the country. She didn’t want to be pigeonholed as an “Indian chef,” so she kept a deliberate distance from the food she grew up with. It “was always Indian-inspired but I tried to meld Indian and Mediterranean flavors, used some French techniques I learned. It was sort of this fusion cuisine with American influences as well.”
There would be no more fusion. The first menu focused on Punjab, the northern Indian state whose food westerners are probably most familiar with—except the season’s last ramps were folded into her roti dough, and not many restaurants on Devon offer vegetable khichdi, “an Indian ‘detox’ dish made with mung beans, lentils, rice, and vegetables flavored with the immune-boosting power of turmeric.”
On the Bengali menu, she vividly described visits to Kolkata, her mother’s hometown, and the sweet cardamom-laced labneh it’s known for: “My uncle’s mission in life was to ensure we enjoyed every single fresh dessert in the city. Mishti Doi were his favorite, and each year at the end of our vacations, he would drop us off at the train station and hand us a clay pot full of fresh Mishti Doi. We could not/would not board our train without it!”
