Doing Indian Right

At Silicon Valley businesses, Bon Appetit knows the value of providing authentic Indian cuisine to an increasingly foreign-born clientele.

The rich flavors and aromas of our childhood evoke memories of home and family at a deep, often barely conscious level.

Here in the melting pot that is America, experiencing those flavors and aromas again can make a real difference to foreign-born employees.  Increasingly, foodservice managers are coming up with creative ways to meet those needs.

In California’s Silicon Valley, an estimated 42% of the workforce is said to come from foreign countries. Of that number, 13% of science and engineering personnel at companies such as eBay, Cisco, and Yahoo, where Bon Appetit Management Co. operates foodservice, are estimated to be Indian. At each of those companies, Bon Appetit has Indian cafés with chefs trained in Indian cuisine to tempt the palates of those customers and link them to their heritage.

“We customize our menus to our workforce,” says a Bon Appetit spokesman, who adds that the decision to create the dedicated cafés and stations with Indian fare was driven by customer demand. While there are many Indian restaurants in the area, Bon Appetit wanted to fill that need for ethnic cuisine for its clientele, she explains.

“They were the driving force behind the idea. We have a very large Indian population here and at other high-tech accounts, and there’s tremendous demand for authentic Indian food.”

To assure authenticity, the company hired Raghavan Iyer, author of several Indian cookbooks, to develop menus and train the chefs.

At eBay’s Café 17 in San Jose, Calif., Executive Chef Bob Clark calls the café “Indo-Asian.” Consisting of a dedicated dosa grill, a tandoori oven, a wok station, noodle bowls and a tossed-to-order salad station, the operation offers daily specials from the tandoori oven such as Hydrabad chicken curry, Bombay fish curry or Lamb Masala, all of which come with rice, daal (a side dish with lentils) and naan (a flatbread).

Opened in April 2008, the café “tries to be as authentic as you can get,” says Clark. “It’s unique in that it’s driven by talking with eBay employees and we believe in giving them what they want. Our staff is trained to ask key questions of customers like ‘where are you from’ and if they are from India, to follow up with ‘what was your favorite food growing up’ or ‘what smells do you remember when you were a child and what was your favorite dish both from the street vendors and from what your mothers and grandmothers used to make?’

“That’s how we come up with our menu mix. We also study different holidays from around the globe. We look at our menu mix sales records to see what sells best, but we keep in mind that while not everybody may want a certain item, it means a lot to a person when you go out of your way to make sure they are taken care of.”

He’s “always looking at different menu items and adding more variety. As our staff gets more confident and customers keep looking for new things, we will always push the envelope.”

The biggest challenge, he finds, is “getting the flavors right.”
The dosa grill is very popular, serving Indian street food. “Dosas are a big pancake-like crepe,” Clark explains. “They’re 100 percent vegetarian.”

Indian cuisine is very diverse with influences from the many regions of the country. “We do a bit of everything,” Clark says. “I run four cafés. Here at eBay, 75% of our clientele is Indian and 25% is Asian. We wanted a full-blown Indian café done right. We usually do around 400 covers a day, five days a week.”

Along with the samosas, daal, naan bread and other items, the café offers seven or eight different chutneys. “They really enjoy that. We have coconut, mint, mango and more.”

The naan bread is baked fresh in the tandoori ovens, which are also used for chicken and fish skewers. “We toss salads to order with an Indian flair, going back to the basics. Every day we feature three salads and we might throw in mung beans, edamame or lentils.”

Samosas, which Clark calls “a appetizer-like wrap in a puff or phyllo type dough,” are filled with potatoes, spices and herbs. It’s like a spanakopita, only bigger.”

Because India is such a diverse cuisine, with both vegetarian and non-vegetarian fare and a range of cooking styles, menus at Café 17 rotate among the foods of the various regions.  Most Indians, he declares, choose vegetarian meals on Tuesdays and Fridays, and many opt for fish entrees. “We also do lots of lamb and goat,” he adds.

“Most of our fish is 100% sustainable,” says Clark, who uses salmon, cod and tilapia to stay “within price points.”

Clark likes to make his own spice blend, garam masala, which typically mixes spices such as cumin, coriander, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom and black pepper to create what is popularly known as curry powder. At Café 17, the mixture also includes fenugeek seeds, turmeric and chilies.

Finding ingredients “takes a little time,” Clark notes, “but we’ve been doing it a long time and our vendors are what make this work. We try to stay sustainable because we believe in ‘farm to fork.’”

Many ingredients, such as the spice mix, are actually made in-house. “We make paneer (a type of cottage cheese), too,” says Clark. “It looks like feta cheese but has the same texture as tofu. We make ours with carmelized onion.”

For a while, a special pilot program known as “Your Dinner” allowed customers to look at menus online, select items and come in at preset times—5, 5:30 and 6 p.m.—to the kitchen, where stations were set up to allow them to put meals together. “We had everything chopped or cut and they’d assemble their meals,” Clark says. “We had packaging for them and directions on how to cook the meals at home. Each meal took about 20 or 30 minutes to put together. People would come in and prepare four to six portions.”

The pilot was discontinued, he says, because not enough people took part, and currently there are no plans to revive it.