In the cafeteria of Hurley Medical Center, in Flint, Michigan, a doctor walks up to the steam trays at the Cafe Spice kiosk, takes a spoon, and flicks two grains of rice pulao into his mouth.
He chews for several seconds, then walks to the other side of the counter and samples another batch. After careful deliberation, the doctor forgets the rice, takes two naan breads, douses his plate with mint chutney, and sits at a table with his colleagues — doctors from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal.
All of them have been eating curries, biryanis, and other Indian staples every day for lunch and dinner at the Cafe Spice kiosk since it was opened last summer.
“Earlier, we were eating a lot of mac and cheese,” says Rao Mushtaq, a general practitioner, originally from Pakistan. “During my first year here, my cholesterol level shot up dangerously,” says Vishwas Vaniawala, an Indian pediatrician. “Honestly, I used to skip lunches because I was sick of eating salads, sandwiches and chips.”
The South Asian doctors, who, as is the case in many US teaching hospitals, make up the majority of residents at Hurley, eventually demanded more familiar food from Steve Dunn, the cafeteria's executive chef. While Dunn, an employee of the French catering company Sodexo, had never tasted Indian food, he made samosas and saag paneer.
“I couldn't do it every day,” he says, even though doctors responded enthusiastically. “I mean, it takes a lot of time and knowledge. It took my staff three weeks to learn how to make basmati rice, because they were used to Uncle Ben's.”
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So, Dunn turned to Cafe Spice, America's largest Indian food-service company, which has a branded partnership with Sodexo, an Issy-les-Moulineaux, France-based company. Each month he receives a shipment of frozen Indian dishes that his staff heats and serves in a kiosk designed and installed by Cafe Spice.
Malhotra family
What's happening in Flint is spreading across the nation as Cafe Spice owners, Sushil Malhotra and his son Sameer, place their curries in supermarkets, hospitals, colleges, and corporate cafeterias.
Cafe Spice's 17 current locations include Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and the New York headquarters of Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley. The company’s food is sold without the brand name in another 400 cafeterias and in more than 250 Whole Foods Market stores.
In the past year, Cafe Spice's revenue grew 40 per cent, to $20 million. While that's tiny compared with sales at a food giant like McDonald’s Corp, which moves $20 million worth of product about every six-and-a-half hours, should Cafe Spice’s expansion continue, Sushil Malhotra may fulfill a dream he’s had for 40 years: To make his beloved Indian cuisine mainstream in the US. “It could be as big as the sushi invasion,” he says.
To showcase Indian cooking, Sushil opened a fine-dining restaurant in Manhattan called Akbar in 1976, and another, Dawat, eight years later.
While Dawat was a critical and financial success, Sushil wanted to emulate what was happening in the UK, where curry was supplanting fish and chips as the national food. He dabbled in other mass-market concepts, including a takeout spot called Curry in a Hurry, before opening Cafe Spice near NYU in 1998.
The restaurant, since sold, was revolutionary in its design and simplicity: a modern Indian bistro. A year later the company opened its first Cafe Spice Express in Grand Central Terminal. Sushil soon saw the potential to put these quick-serve counters where Indian restaurants had never ventured.
“Sushil's at the cutting edge of getting the message out,” says restaurateur Drew Nieporent, who changed the image of Japanese food in America with his Manhattan restaurant Nobu. “By bringing Indian food to supermarkets and cafeterias, Sushil's also made it more acceptable and accessible.”
Cafe Spice's food is prepared in a 50,000-square-foot industrial kitchen in New Windsor, New York, just up the Hudson River from West Point. Inside, more than a hundred workers fold samosas, fry potato pakoras, grind spices, and stir giant vats of curry.
“At the end of the day, I'm not making one batch for the University of Massachusetts, one for Goldman Sachs, and one for Whole Foods,” says Sameer Malhotra, 33, who runs the day-to-day business with his wife, Payal.