This is a new conversation series by Donna Kennedy-Glans, a writer and former Alberta cabinet minister, featuring newsmakers and intriguing personalities. This week: Canadian restaurateur Chindi Varadarajulu.
CHENNAI, India — She’s a top-rated chef with no sense of smell.
Chindi Varadarajulu lost her ability to sniff out flavours over three decades ago, the outcome of a nasty flu she got shortly after emigrating from Singapore to Vancouver; an auspicious start on her way up the ladder in the restaurant business.
I’m sitting across from Chindi in a chic dining room, a restaurant she helped launch for a resort on the Bay of Bengal. I’ve been in India a week now and my sense of smell is overwhelmed; every curry masala I eat lingers in the fabric of my clothes and oozes from the pores of my skin. How on earth Chindi cooks — and her role as a restaurateur — is a wonder. She tells me she relies on an accentuated sense of taste, and memories of old flavours.
I’ve returned to southern India after a dozen years because I want to better understand this place, and what’s behind the hustle. What better way to get to know people than to eat with them?
After travelling around Mumbai and Hyderabad, noshing on street food with the locals, I’m invited to try more familiar fare at Chindi’s restaurant in Chennai. After all the spices, her sourdough bread, Italian-style gelato and pumpkin soup are soothing.
Chindi’s connection to Canada is intriguing. I’m also curious to understand how she thrives here, a 56-year-old female restaurateur, holding her own with local patriarchs. After leading Canadians on culinary trips to India for several years, Chindi decided to sell her Vancouver restaurant, move to southern India and immerse herself in the rich Tamil culture she’d grown up with in Singapore.
When it comes time to meet for an interview, we both intuitively know that food will get in the way of our conversation about her journey. Earlier that day, I’d asked Chindi about a ridge gourd, a basic vegetable that looks like a zucchini. My query launched a gushing account of the health benefits of this gourd and how to incorporate it into a dal, curry, stir-fry or salad.
The restaurant where we meet is located at the Grande Bay Resort in the town of Mamallapuram, an hour’s drive south of Chennai, and is called L’attitude 49 (a nod to Vancouver). The chrome tables, white marble floors, and supple leather chairs wouldn’t be out of place in Vancouver.
We sneak into the closed air-conditioned dining room and sit as far away from the entry as possible. It’s a welcome reprieve from the oppressive humidity. The monsoon rains are officially ended but the Bay of Bengal still churns. My hair is frizzy and beads of sweat collect on my neck and brow. Chindi appears chill and professional.
She waves over the female server standing guard at the door and briskly orders a coffee, black; I indulge in chai tea masala, a cardamon infused milk tea with heaps of sugar that takes me back to my years working in Yemen, first in the oil fields and later, running a non-profit. Our drinks are served deftly, without a word being spoken.
Two decades ago, Vancouver had plenty of restaurants serving northern Indian curries and tandoori but in the entire city, Chindi couldn’t find a restaurant serving dosa — a paper-thin lentil and rice flour crepe that was a staple at her mother’s Tamil table. That spawned Chindi’s ambition to launch her first restaurant, Chutney Villa, in downtown Vancouver.
And now, in southern India, Chindi offers up sourdough bread, eggs Benedict, mango gelato and panettone bread to expats and tourists homesick for western food. That a
“foodie wave” is taking hold in India — with cooking shows trending — makes Chindi’s fare appealing to the locals as well.
“Imagine the business potential if hundreds of thousands of Indian families take to ordering a panettone for the holidays,” Chindi enthuses.
It occurs to me that I’ve never met anyone so fully aware of the powerful connection between food and emotions. Chindi intuitively senses what people crave and caters to those needs. She brought Tamil food to Indians in Vancouver, and now she brings western comfort food to southern India.
As Chindi explains the secret behind her sourdough bread — the starter was shared by Aviv Fried, renowned baker and owner of Calgary’s Sidewalk Citizen Bakery who was invited to Chennai by Chindi — I realize she’s doing it again, pulling the cords between food and my emotions.
Chindi is steeped in restaurant culture, up-to-speed with all of the new trends: the slow food movement, the 100-mile diet, farm-to-table, sustainable seafood, zero waste. She’s a wizard at spotting the unserved niches in the marketplace.
“It’s not about social responsibility,” she says,
“I do what makes sense. For example, it’s an Ayurvedic practice to only eat what’s in season.”
After realizing the bounty available across the whole of India — and the viability of ordering directly from farmers —this pragmatic entrepreneur abandoned the notion of a 50- or even 100-mile diet.
Some credit goes to the Indian government’s push to digital. People may not have hot water or modern plumbing, but they all carry a cellphone. I was surprised to see QR codes on vendors’
pushcarts in village markets, and customers paying with Google Pay (there’s even an auditory function for the illiterate). This means Chindi can order mangoes and ridge gourds, or whatever she fancies, from farmers across India and pay for the produce with her cellphone.
Chindi’s phone has buzzed a few times to interrupt our interview, and when a green-uniformed male hotel employee bursts into the dining room, shouting to Chindi in Tamil and pointing to a ringing cell phone held high above his head, I grimace.
Here in India, the cellphone is the soundtrack. But food drives the script.
Donna Kennedy-Glans is active in the energy business and a multi-generational family farm. Her latest book is Teaching the Dinosaur to Dance: Moving Beyond Business as Usual (2022).
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