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New restaurant to showcase Indian flavors and local farmers

Posted on April 8, 2010April 8, 2010 by Staff
Austin McCall spooning some of Vimala Rajendran’s kerala kozhi stew onto his plate as the smiling chef entertains her guests at her last community dinner before the restaurant opens in April.

By Catherine Rierson
Courtesy of the Carrboro Commons

Opening her kitchen to both strangers and longtime friends, Vimala Rajendran has hosted weekly community dinners in her home since 1993, fusing her love for authentic and local food with her value of community. But come mid-April, she’ll be moving the enterprise out of her kitchen and onto Franklin Street.

Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe, opening in the Courtyard in the space formerly occupied by Sandwhich, will blend flavors from the chef’s roots in Mumbai, India and her life in Carrboro.
Rajendran, celebrated locally for both her virtuosity in the kitchen and her involvement with food activism, plans to honor localism and sustainability in her business by bringing local farmers’ produce to the table.

“When it’s a private, catered event, food and knowledge isn’t available to the whole community,” she said. “In a restaurant, everyone can have access to organic, local food.”

The idea of a restaurant has long been marinating in Rajendran, but it was the ever-increasing demand for her food, in a kitchen already brimming with hungry guests, that impelled her to begin the endeavor now.

Her new collaboration with young food activists has also been a factor.

“What food activists do now, we’ve always done in my family,” Rajendran said. “It’s a great partnership with the youth because I already have some of the knowledge they’re seeking. In this inter-generational communication, we can learn from each other.”

Rajendran buys her meat and produce from farms like Ever Laughter, Eco Farm and Cane Creek, which are all within a 15-mile radius of town. When the restaurant opens, she plans to continue using pork from Cane Creek and Cliff’s Meat Market chicken, which is brought fresh daily from Siler City and butchered in-house.

“I try to bring an edible presence from the local farmers’ bounty to the community, and I want to do that with my restaurant too” she said.

Her cooking techniques remain faithful to Indian tradition. She cooks from scratch, first roasting fresh, whole spices, then grinding them down to a powder to season the meat and produce she plunges into enormous woks and vats she lugged from India.

“I make everything from scratch, which is why all my food tastes so authentic and wholesome,” Rajendran said.

Most of the restaurant’s menu will be Indian cuisine, but Rajendran said it will also include Southern staples like pork barbecue and cabbage from Cane Creek Farm as a way to pay homage to her adopted community.

“I lived here for over two decades without being able to see my family in India,” she said. “The people of this place became my family. It was the proverbial Southern hospitality, and I was the beneficiary.”

The final community dinner she hosted featured several items on trial for her restaurant’s menu: Kerala kozhi stew, a chicken curry swimming in coconut milk, fennel and curry leaves; Appam, a rice and coconut fermented pancake; Vatana usal, a whole pea curry; an egg roast with whole eggs atop a caramelized onion base; tomato-carrot chutney with tamarind; and, finally, her notorious cardamom brownies.

The last time Rajendran went to India, everyone in her family was buying pre-packaged bags of curry.

“I was the only person in my family who knew how to grind down whole spices,” she said. “It really is a dying art.”

Catherine Rierson is a UNC student writing for the Carrboro Commons, a bi-weekly online lab newspaper for Jock Lauterer’s Community Journalism class at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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