Jessi is eating a bowl of dahl when I go in and asks if I mind him eating. Having seen how crazy busy it gets at Daughter in Law from the minute the doors open at 5 o’clock, he should definitely be having that dahl. There won’t be a moment to breathe until much later in the evening. We have the chat and then I’m about to leave when Jessi insists I have a cocktail. It’s a new one they’ve been experimenting with; Negroni with coconut cream. Then he brings out a couple of oysters to have with it and ceremoniously squeezes a lime wedge that has been dipped in black lava salt. Then he brings me Batata Vada, a mustard, curry leaf and potato croquette. Delicious. I pop my head into the kitchen to say good bye and thank you. Jessi looks disappointed, telling me his head chef, Jimmy (who I’ve spoken to before at Bomba) is just making me a ball of happiness, a mouthful of crunchy, creamy, sweet, sour and spicy and some scallop ceviche. Here you have to picture me standing in the kitchen eating delicious food and feeling a bit like a rock star while the other chefs were surely thinking, who is this woman?
Hi Jessi. How was today?
Busy. It was fun.
I’ve been in twice, once for lunch and it was flat out, then I came back for dinner and thought I’d just slip in at 5 o’clock and by 5.15pm it was already a full Punjabi disco. I love it. And I love the bathroom. Going out there and being bathed in pink lighting and hearing that sung mantra, ‘you are beautiful, you are beautiful,’ is wonderful.
That’s all part of the concept. The design, fitout and concept; you have a separate thing happening in that part and something else happening here and something else in the bathroom. We tried to create a fun place you want to be. Now we are competing fiercely with a lot of other businesses.
I was chatting to Joe Grbac at Saxe on Wednesday and he said now is the hardest time for restaurants because of the economy and Uber Eats and eating out is the first thing to go.
Now the thing is, the media and the consumer, everybody is all about the new openings. What happens after six months, or after a year, two years?
You have longevity, so what’s the key?
For me, it’s having a $10 – $25 menu. You’re not cheap and you’re not expensive either. It’s approachable. We’re a fun restaurant, not an Indian restaurant or an ethnic restaurant. Not only that we’re a bar, a wine bar, we have cocktails, happy hours. You have to have so many different elements now so that you can survive. You can’t just be a restaurant any more. We learn and change with every restaurant and every new opening.
How many have you opened now?
A few. This is my ninth.
Ninth? Wow. My impression of you is that you have a holistic hospitality approach, you’re a chef, but I loved that you were out here weaving amongst the tables and talking to people and you said how much enjoyed that. I thought that’s ultimate hospitality.
For me, for none of us, you don’t open a restaurant to make money. There is no money. I’m lucky to get 2 per cent. But this is what we love. All these guys are here because we love it and this is all we know.
I wanted to ask you whether you’d always been in hospitality.
Yes. I’ve always been in hospitality. My cuisine is, it’s cooked and ready to go in the evening. As you know, dhal…you can’t make dhal to order, this dish takes five days to make. Two days of soaking, two days of simmering and then on the fifth day we cook it with a lot of curries. The more mature they get, the tastier they get. That allows me evenings to be on the floor. That was my first review in America, the New York Times, New York Post, they all said that normally in restaurants the chef is a ghost chef, you don’t know who the chef is, they never come out. But here, you see me. I’m full on. I wear so many hats; I’m a dishwasher, a glass polisher, doorman, helping team member. It’s a new business and I need to support other people. We have new people here, so we need to train multiple people in different sections and stations. But I love that.
Did you start as a chef?
I’m not a trained chef. I didn’t go to school. I don’t have a hospitality degree, none of those things.
Where did it come from?
I was born in a farmer family, a big family where food always played a big part.
Where did you come from originally?
Punjab, northern India. I’m from a village, a farmer family, a joint family. When you grow up where food is your living, you get very close to food. It was very big for me. I was very lucky to be born into that family. Not only did we grow crops to sell, we had a separate garden where we grew crops for us to eat. When you’re a farmer, it’s a basic living, the money isn’t there, but you have a good living, you own your own home, you own your own buffalo and cow. The basic necessities of life are covered. It’s a very time-consuming life; long days. Time goes by quickly. It’s not like a nine to five job. I really enjoyed working with my family.
I come from Sikh people. For Sikh people, every ten per cent you earn you are supposed to give it to the community. The first guy who started the religion was called Nanak Dev and it was meant to be a religion from the kitchen. He said to break the caste system, we would all gather, meditate, cook food and eat together, regardless of caste. Every Wednesday and every Sunday anywhere on the planet, you can go to a Sikh temple and there is a free meal for anyone. It’s all donated and run by the community. I grew up with that. My family would always be the ones who donated the food and cooked. We would go on Tuesday to prep for the Wednesday dinner and then on Saturday for Sunday. That stayed with me. We had a lot of labourers working for us in season and part of the deal in India is if you hire labour you have to feed them. So our family cooked and everyone had to chip in, That was my upbringing. Early in the morning you’d wake up, we had buffalos and cows and the kids had to go and help with them.
I grew up in a big joint family. My dad side had seven brothers and sisters and my mother had nine, so always people coming in and out. I have one brother and sister, but multiple uncles and aunties and tons of cousins. Every meal is made from scratch. Still today we never use a freezer of fridge. In India, from 4 in the morning the milkman comes and the yoghurt guy then the vegie guy, then you get it repeated again in the afternoon and repeated at dinner…if you live in the city. If you live in the village, it’s up to you and everything is made from scratch and to make things from scratch, it takes time. Mum would be saying, go peel the garlic, cut the ginger, cut the onion, go to the garden and get me a cauliflower, go get me eggplant. My job was to go and get stuff from the garden and to look after the buffalo and cow. Before I was 10, I knew how to get milk and I knew how to make yoghurt, bread, I helped cook. The older I got, my grandmother was very old school and she would say, that’s a woman’s job, what are you doing, get out of my kitchen? the ore she pushed, the more I went back in.
From there, how did you get here?
I never meant to start a restaurant. I met my partner in San Francisco, an Italian girl from New York city, well-travelled, and me being Indian, I would drag her to all the Indian restaurants. I told her I couldn’t eat bland food, I had to have spicy Indian food. She would come with me and then one day she said, Jessi, there aren’t any cool Indian restaurants, either they are cheap and cheerful or very high end stuffy, same cuisine but white tablecloths and waiters wearing bowties. I would take her to a lot of the cheap and cheerful places where the food was really good, but they’d stink. She would tell me I ruined her dresses because of the smell. We thought, why don’t we open our own restaurant and we opened our first restaurant in Kyneton. We moved from San Francisco to Kyneton.
You couldn’t get much more of a difference, could you? New York and San Francisco to Kyneton? Why Kyneton?
We were looking for a better life, a better lifestyle, a tree change. We had the option to come to Australia in 2003, I have family connections here. We came here travelling and spent one year traveling here, we had a campervan and went from town to town and when we saw what a beautiful country it was, we decided to move here.
We had both lived in big cities and decided we’d like to try a small town. Kyneton is an hour out of Melbourne, has a direct train line and is very affordable and it is very beautiful Somehow we fell in love with it and decided to move there.
There aren’t many jobs there so we thought we’d make our own job. We found a space and opened our first restaurant, just me and Jennifer, that was it. That was Dhaba at the Mill. It’s still there. We were open Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 5pm to 7.30pm. I would make six pots of curry and if we sold out, we closed the restaurant. That’s how we started out and the line just grew bigger and bigger. That was the best time and the most money we ever made because we didn’t have any employees. Whatever we made came straight to us.
How long did you do that for?
A few years. Then we thought we’d go back to Melbourne and open something. So we opened Horn Please, which was successful and so we opened Babu Ji. We had two kids then and Jennifer said she wanted to go back to New York for a couple of years with the kids so they could be close to her family. So that’s how we went back there and we opened Babu Ji, New York.
It did so well.
It was very successful. America hadn’t seen a restaurant like this. Still today we have customers in New York city who have never eaten Indian food in their life and they are 40, 50, 60, 80.
We opened and people were blown away. Like here, if you come here at 6.30, you’ll see. It’s full.
I was here on a Friday night at 5pm. I know! By 5.30pm it was a full Punjabi disco and then the drinks trolley rolled up!
First month of opening over there I had a two page article in the New York Times. And remember the New York Times only do 52 reviews a year, and out of 52, he goes to 20 existing places, so you’re left with 32. 15 of those are in other cities in America, then 5 he does overseas, s you have to be in the top 20 restaurants in New York to get a review in a year.
And it’s not enough that it’s quirky, everyone loves the food.
Good food, self-service beer fridge, cocktail list, it’s fun. We train our staff. We don’t take ourselves too seriously but we are very serious. I hate going to places where people are stuffy and they think they know more than you because they are in hospitality.
We opened our restaurant for the guests. We are here to give them an experience. Just the other day, a kid came to work for us and he said he didn’t like a song. I said, mate, I didn’t open this restaurant for you. Nothing personal, but it’s not about you liking the playlist. We try and pick and choose the people who are serious and love what they do. My success is because of these people. You have to bring the right people along with you. It’s the same here. They are handpicked. Shane Barrett is Operations Manager, his wife, Sacha Imrie is the head sommelier and has come from Marion. She has done a really really good wine list, pairing with the food. You can’t just bring good people on as employees, you have to give them a piece of the pie. When we find people and we want to work with them, you have to say, hey man, let’s open a place together. If the place is successful, then they equally benefit.
This space is dedicated to that character of the daughter-in-law and to honour daughters-in-law. She is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. The daughter-in-law is strong, she’s educated, she’s telling the mother-in-law, I know you want me to do it your way, but I’m going to do my own thing. She is breaking taboos. That’s why we are having fun and doing oysters, scallop ceviche, steak, ribs and doing cool, fun things. It’s not Indian, but I don’t live in India, I live in Australia. This is the food I eat. I do eat dahl but I eat oysters and steak. That’s what I try to create here.
You were saying to me when I was in a couple of weeks ago that you enjoy the Melbourne vibe perhaps more than America.
Melbourne is a beautiful town. It is truly a most liveable city. We have beautiful coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner. It’s very tolerant, ethnically we have different communities and we don’t have the racism they have in America. I wanted my kids to grow up here. I couldn’t wait to come back. We had so many offers to open all over the States, but I said no, man, I want to go home.
Another thing I love about Australia is the produce, their farms, fresh seafood, the meat. Here, Australia has a very strict law about what you can bring in from overseas and that helps the local economy to grow. You can go to the market and you know it’s Australian stuff. In America you don’t know where stuff comes from. It could be from China, or Africa or Chile. They will say it’s one thing, but when you’re in the industry, you start to doubt it.
Now, you told me when I had the balls of happiness, that they summed up everything about Indian food. Can you explain a bit more about that?
That’s my take on the dish from India called Panu Pori, one of the most eaten Indian street foods. From around 4pm until 7pm, a billion of them get eaten all over India. In the third world, street food is big, you eat tiny food all day long. Indian cuisine is crunchy, creamy, sweet, sour, spicy. The first time you go to India you go whoa, the smell, the colour, the population, the pollution, everything. That is the dish that represents all that. You put it in your mouth and you don’t know what is going to happen. It just explodes. The ball has a crunchy outer shell and then yoghurt is infused with cumin seed, date tamarind and smoked peppercorn, that gives the sweet and sour then the green chutney has coriander, scallion, jalapeno and mint. People get blown away by it. It’s a dish that sets the tone for how the night’s going to go.
Daughter in Law is a newly wed bride. So this colourful space is the newly wed bride’s house. In India, most marriages are arranged marriages, still today. Imagine that you grew up at home with mum and dad, you had your life, your own room, your own stuff. You turn 19 or 20, you get married and the next day you have to go and live in someone else’s house. People don’t know what a nervous wreck that can cause. You’ve left the comfort of your own house and then you’ve got a mother-in-law and father-in-law and a husband and you have to please those people.
It happened to my mum, it happened to all those women. When my mum was growing up, my grandmother trained her so that she could cook for her husband when she married. She knew how to cook perfectly. She married my dad and went to his family’s house. In my dad’s house, his mum is the boss, the mother-in-law. To show her ego and power, she said to my mum, no no, we don’t make dahl this way, we make it our way. And my dad doesn’t like the dahl my mother cooks because he has eaten his mother’s dahl his whole life. So my mum then has to retrain herself over the next two or three years to be the way they like it.
So, this space is dedicated to that character and to honour daughters-in-law. She is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. The daughter-in-law is strong, she’s educated, she’s telling the mother-in-law, I know you want me to do it your way, but I’m going to do my own thing. She is breaking taboos. That’s why we are having fun and doing oysters, scallop ceviche, steak, ribs and doing cool, fun things. It’s not Indian, but I don’t live in India, I live in Australia. This is the food I eat. I do eat dahl but I eat oysters and steak. That’s what I try to create here.
37 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne