A few years ago, erstwhile mutineer Manish posted here about an enterprising Tiffinwalla in New York who would deliver healthy, vegetarian lunches (“2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney”) for all of $5.
I was living in California at the time and lazy ingrate that I am, I was green with longing, even as I was eating fresh Mallu food daily at home.
It just seemed like such a fantastic concept; New Yorkers got EVERYTHING, I wistfully thought. Couldn’t the left coast have had similar, especially during that arid, empty time that my Mother was abroad for two months? 😉 I mean, protein shakes get old, y’all.
Apparently, my whining has been answered, according to a story in the grey lady which many of you were blowing up our tipline/news tab with (Thanks, Derick):
In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, the tiffin, or lunch, is prepared by the wife, mother or servant of the intended. In the United States, because of little time (and a lack of a domestic staff), many of these lunches are prepared by outsiders, but the underlying principle is the same…
Annadaata, which began as a homespun operation in 2002, has morphed into a business with several delivery people distributing meals each weekday across San Francisco. Kavita Srivathsan, 29, the chief executive of Annadaata, got her start by cooking meals for her new husband and his friends.
Srivathsan stumbled in to a market which was just waiting for someone like her to hook them up with comfort food:
She did not have a job at the time, so she spent her time learning how to cook Indian foods. Using recipes from her mother in south India, she experimented in the kitchen for a few hours each day. On a whim, she advertised $5 box meals on justindia.com, a Web site based in the San Francisco area that no longer exists. “That was the only time I ever did any advertising,” she said. “The very next day I got a few phone calls from people ordering the boxes, and from then on the word spread like wildfire.”
Mrs. Srivathsan’s business grew so fast that a few months later she decided she could no longer run it from her home. “It began as me cooking out of my kitchen, but since there was such a demand for it, I had to make it a legitimate business with a tax ID number and a rented kitchen,” she said.
Because she wanted to reach a wider market and knew that Indians generally favored cuisine from their region, she hired cooks from various areas in India, including Gujarat, south India and Punjab. Today, customers can click on her Web site, annadaata.com, to view a menu for the coming week. After choosing from among a vegetarian ($7), a nonvegetarian ($8) or a south Indian meal ($8), they place orders over the Internet and pay with credit cards.
Uh, anyone want to start this up in D.C.? Pleeease? There’s only so many times that I can stomach Chipotle/Potbelly/Subway/Raisin Bran for lunch and like the people quoted in the NYT article, it’s just not possible for me to cook. Proper South Indian food requires time, discipline and a devotion to process that I can’t muster right now and I’m not a fan of shortcuts (my mother told me this weekend at our family reunion that if she ever caught me availing myself of something like this, she’d pinch my thigh so viciously I’d need a skin graft). Owww.
Srivathsan sums it up perfectly:
At the end of the day I just wanted the basic Indian food I had grown up with.
Werd.
I’m guessing the title is an allusion to the G-Dep song..?
u@%!n& finally! SOMEONE is paying attention. 😉
To someone above’s point, the whiners on SM need to learn how to cook, guys, girls, the lot of you. Why be dependent on someone else’s hygiene (lack of) and ingredients (quality of)? Catered food is always over the top in oil, salt, spices. If you’re working 60 hrs a week then you need to get your life sorted. I’m sure you make time to shit, shower, shave, and shake yer booty etc. You wouldn’t outsource those, so why leave the food prep to someone else? It involves your body too. If you ask me y’all have moms who spoilt you rotten.
You are too right. Please, feel free to pay my rent and student loans while I look for that mythical new job which requires that I only work 40 hours a week.
I posted this story because as a busy person, I could relate to it. I could make time to cook, but then I wouldn’t get to blog or moderate here. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind that, though. There are only 24 hours in a day. It’s fucked up for you to denigrate how I choose to spend them.
I don’t have time to address the other aspects of your comment; yes, I make time to shower and shave because that’s what normal, clean people do. If it means I don’t have time to make myself idiappam in the morning because I had the gall to take a bath, then that’s the trade-off that I and all other ordinary people make. For fuck’s sake.
Why am I suddenly craving some real Mumbai pav bhaji?
I’ve never experienced this NYC tiffanwalla, but i have had food from that dosa guy in Washington Square Park and it is excellent! As for some troll asking Anna to woman up and just make South Indian food, I mean the whole point is, it’s a huge commitment, time-wise. If she’s eating Raisin Bran at the office during dinnertime, chances are she doens’t have time to properly make a curry or dal, she’s probably busting her ass to make some deadline.
Plus, I find if you live in an apt, making Indian food is quite cumbersome. It seriously stinks up the whole place. Then again, my mother says that these are all my BS excuses and she made proper 7-course Indian food in small, confined apartment kitchens for years when she first came to this country. Of course, she makes sambar and dal look effortless and easy in a 30-minute way that Rachael Ray nor I, will ever aspire to understand.
GIADA! At least pick Giada. 😉
Quick note– please use ONE handle in each thread. Switching handles to address a point that you made earlier is grounds for banning. Thanks for cooperating.
My issue with cooking desi at home is the waiting after it is cooked. Desi foods need to sit for a decent amount of time after it is cooked. The film needs to form on top of the rajma.
So it’s doable! Before anyone comes back and says so is climbing Mt Everest doable, my point is that you HAVE to eat. Why is nutritional value a trade off commodity?
I remember there was a desi tiffin-walla in the Richardson area (Dallas) when I was an intern there. One meal for $5. I wait for the Mc-production of a huge desi-tiffin network. That certainly is a business venture whose time has come.
Actually, I’m trying to find someone who will shit for me, but I haven’t got any applicants yet.
I think the affect is 2 fold. Not only do the spices meld together, the people waiting for the food get hungrier
Dunno, but I know what I’m making this weekend – Neyyappam! Seems easy enough…
Desishiksa, did you know they’re good for both Hanukkah and Yom Kippur? Not sure if they’ll also go well at Passover though…
LMAO! actually i interviewed a nice Indian lady who wanted to babys**t for my son!
actually SI cooking is easy. pick up a copy of “Dakshin” or alamelu vairavan’s book. It has all kinds of tips and tricks.
or go to SSVT in Lanham and tell one of aunties that you are missing home cooked SI food and they will hook you up. They may even start a tiffin service, since many of the old timers live near metro.
Anna: I would totally pick Giada anytime over Rachael. Serious. Even if neither one of them can make appam.
begtodiffer: I think the point is that some people just have a hard time fitting cooking into their lives, and these tiffin services are tastier (and sometimes at least seem healthier) than restaurant food. I can cook and do so maybe 3 or 4 nights a week, but there are those other nights…. and yeah, whipping up a 20-minute moong dal is easy, but who the hell wants to just have dal for dinner all the time? Don’t be so critical… everyone has their priorities, and some are more than willing to pay for having someone else’s auntie cook up some saag paneer or dosas or whatever.
Dunno, but I know what I’m making this weekend – Neyyappam! Seems easy enough…
Uh… sorta. But do you just happen to have an appakara on hand???
GIADA! At least pick Giada. 😉
I mean I totally am all about Team Giada vs. Team Rachael. But Giada does not boast a 30-minute meal, hence the joke wouldnt’ have worked;)
That and we’re talking about lunch. You have to have time to make dinner in order to take leftovers to lunch. That’s why a tiffin service would be a blessed alternative to yet another chipotle burrito, for those souls-with-unsorted-lives who will take six hours of sleep over 4.5 after cooking and cleaning, after an exhausting day.
Just in case you didn’t know what that was…Seems a bit drastic though – to go there just for South Indian food!
So very true. Your point is well-taken. Except when joking at Jaleo. 😀
?
One of the recipes I read said you could fry the dough-balls in any kind of frying pan. Any contra-indications? 🙂
Chachaji, thank you so much for clarifying that…we in the bunker weren’t sure and those moody monkeys are never useful in these situations.
ok. clearly you have not been to the cafeteria there or to the Ganesha temple in Queens. Many many people go there primarily for the food. It’s that good.
The only bad thing I can say about SSVT food is that the containers are flimsy. The food doesn’t make it all the way to Virginia without the sambar making it’s way to the yogurt rice. You need one person to take care of the food, while the other drives.
Seriously, if they let me and if I have the time, I will stand outside SSVT and pack food for people in good containers. I guess they aren’t thinking about profit, but I bet a lot more people will take food home if they pack it well
another article on the same: http://www.insidebayarea.com/entertainment/ci_5321059 interesting that this hasn’t caught on anywhere else but in the bay – though seattle is mentioned as well.
Another great site for locating tiffin service in your area, enjoy.
I’ve tried AnnaDaata’s weekly supply of food. It is fairly healthy but the portions of veggies are very small and for that the pricing is fairly high. In the bay area and especially in and around south bay you can do much better by just eating a thali at any of the tons of Indian restaurants and get some excellent healthy food (dee dee’s comes to mind). Take-out is very cheap at some of these places too(Madras cafe for excellent dosas and idlis and Spice hut for general and mallu stuff)…so Annadaata may work well during emergencies but is not necessarily the best option in the area.
OK Anna, this post has inspired me to get some food delivered now by Jyoti on 18th St in Adams-Morgan. Their lamb rogan josh is so good! Thanks!
Since I can no longer eat spicy food, tomatoes, onions, I do with a lot of food hacks* and Trader Joe’s shortcuts. No spice. I’m sure my food hacks would make the more rigorous ANNA blanche, but, hey!
*Food hacks was a Manish-ism. Remember that post? And all the funny short-cuts to making something vaguely diasporic and desi-flavored, like adding pickle to a cheese sandwhich, etc.
Oh, my point was I’d have to have order my tiffin American-style (no spice……)
And, finally (sorry SM intern, I know I’m probably breaking a rule tandem-posting and will try hard to stop in future), but I go for the easy and fast cooking. Basically, I lower my standards. Boil rice, heat lentil soup, doctor lentil soup with everything and anything at hand (garlic, yogurt, mild spices). Disgusting to some, to most really, but you have to understand that I have eaten in many hosptial cafeterias over the years and have no taste-buds left.
Kusala,
You don’t need an appakara – it can be fried in a kadhai or wok.
As far as such tiffin/delivery services – almost every metro seems to have such a service. There are also subsets of such services, where you can order just chappaties and so on.
For those who do cook at home, but don’t have the time to do so in the week, I don’t think anyone has mentioned this option so far: why not cook in the weekends? This is what we do…both of us work long hours, and we have kids, who have multiple activities during the week, so no time in the evenings to cook. We make 5 or 6 dishes in the weekend – usually a sambar/rasam (kids love rasam), couple of veggies, and one N.Indian dish that can be eaten with chappaties. Then during the week, all we need to do is make rice (rice cooker, so gets done in 20 minutes). Lunch is variations of the above. Yes, it does get somewhat monotonous, but seems a better option to us than eating out or ordering food.
Anna, I am surprised your mother disapproves of buying idli/dosa batter – On a recent trip to India I found almost everyone does this, if they work outside the house – This was in Madras, Bangalore and Bombay. Noone seemed to think it was a shocking thing, and my cousins were pretty surprised to hear that I still grind my own batter.
Regards,
Bitterlemons.
This is not really an option for us single people who are cooking for a party of one. (But I do think it’s a fabulous idea for busy families!)
When making subji you are not going to make one or two servings, you are going to make a lot for it to be worthwhile for the time you spent shopping, chopping and cooking.
I never feel guilty when I eat Indian food.
Huh? I just noticed a desilet in the kitchen, under the counter!
i hear you, anna. i can’t even get good north indian food in boston, much less south indian. on another note, i made dosa batter for the first time ever (yay!) but the sambar took too long and it was a bit disastrous (not so much yay). so i was forced to eat it with podi and honey. is it just me, or is cooking south indian food much much harder than north indian food?
19 – you should totally start the tiffin service in philly. i know plenty of people who would be interested. philly is another one of those cities where finding desi food was terribly tough. it was a hard five years. sigh.
may i just say, anna, i am a newcomer to SM, but i already look forward to reading your posts. i guess it’s a good thing, then, that i didn’t have to suffer through your hiatus!
Yeah, I don’t think they are quite K for P (kosher for Passover) but my husband does say his Passover menu has improved substantially since meeting me. I just make Indian curries and he eats them with matzoh. I eat them with rice like I always do. I’ll have to make them for Hanukkah. It must be because they are fried in oil.
I know, like Latkas, right? I guess if Neyyappams were flatter they’d resemble Latkas more. (Experts please come in on this one..)
Or does he eat matzoh with the curries? Are those matzo balls in my vindaloo?
Actually I think neyappams resemble sufganiyot more. Without the jelly.
I read that article a while ago. I don’t know why no one wanted to write about my wedding 🙁
I don’t know about matzoh balls in vindaloo, but matzoh ball soup with saffron is good.
I’m a party of one and I do it(cooking large quantities of food on weekends, or on a free evening) regularly. I usually have a handful of meals pre-stacked in Tupperware dishes in my refrigerator. The only drawback is that I end up eating the same thing four or five times in a row — lunch, dinner, lunch, dinner…
ak, Rani, on Beacon St. near Coolidge Corner, has pretty respectable Southie food, and the owner is a lowely man. Tamarind Bay in Harvard Square is not too bad either although it’s more of a mix.
And yes, I am jonesing for dal, for the endless scratching of my grandmother picking through it for stones. . .
How difficult is it to make a different khichri everyday? Just switch around your dals and use different types f rice for the variety. The Indian style of meat and fish is not an easy thing to rustle up if you are single. Heated canned veggies with a little tarka with ghee/olive oil, and some papad, khichri etc., is very filling. And of course don’t forget to use methi and crushed ginger. With all that daal you will need it if you aren’t used to it!
And here’s a great recipe for khichri. If you are feeling ambitious how about trying to make this lovely dessert with your friends?
If someone has a little capital and wants to invest in a franchise of Meenakshi Bhavan, it would be profitable, and I’m pretty it could be written off as a social service if you don’t overcharge for idli/dosai.
NYC…POW! TiffinBlog
(Hopefully their food is better than their site design!)
That is EXACTLY what I was hoping would come of this thread. 🙂 A bunch of resources…please tell us if the food is good.
Sigh.
This is for everyone, not just Shiva: I loathe answering slightly different versions of the same question, but the problem is time, more than something being “difficult”. I am also NOT talking about dinner. I don’t have time to make dinner when I get home at 10pm and yes, I often work on weekends too.
Not that you had any way of knowing this, but I don’t really have a kitchen in this otherwise awesome, extra-tiny studio apt. No garbage disposal, no counter, no fan, just a miniature stove and sink, neither of which work rather well. I like South Indian food, which, even with shortcuts, requires more than what’s goin’ on in this here crib. So when I say I can’t, kindly give me the benefit of your doubt, that there might be REASONS for that. The suggestions that I cook “x” which is simple, or “y” on the weekends or…are getting frustrating. I am not an idiot. I’d do it if I could.
That is why it would be lovely to have someone deliver Southie food to our lobby mid-day. Comfort food. Delivered. Tiffin. Very specific need here, THAT is what I’d like to see addressed. What bliss.
If I have to eat take-out at lunch 80% of the time, back at my desk, why can’t I spend that Chipotle or Pot Belly money on sambar?
Thanks for the post Anna. Reading this article a couple of days ago, i was hoping for the same – a few more resources. I scoured the internet for something similar in the NYC area, but found nothing. Hurray for Pisco!
Annamoley! Pleeease! I didn’t mean to diss your housekeeping and homemaking abilities! There’s only so much of tiffin food one can eat. If not everyday, khichri once in a while is a welcome break. Here’s a deal. Khichri for everyone at the next blog meet. I will make it!
I sincerely hope that’s pronounced like “guacamole”. Moley, moley, moley…MOLE.
Tiffins sound like a lovely idea, but I’m not so sure about the “there’s no dearth of Indian housewives who’d be interested in doing it” proposition. Most of the desi women in the States are pretty well-educated and have better job options. To be financially feasible it would take a good deal of investment and relatively cheap labour, and if you wanted to make a business of it, a restaurant is more profitable, presumably (profits on booze always higher than on food). The home food delivery system as I know it in North India at least runs on housewives with low overheads (working out of home) and cheap labour (the household help who is paid a lowish flat monthly salary but gets roped in for the business), and the ladies who do it tend to be older, and of a generation or background where one didn’t work outside the home. I don’t think folks who had other options would do it, particularly on the low margins necessary to make these home-replacement meals. If this sort of thing exists in the States right now, I doubt it will last very long.
And at some point, folks, it’s worth learning how to cook that nice homey food – otherwise it might be lost forever. I think about that sometimes with regard to pickles…