MASTER OF SPICES: How one man's vision became the most celebrated little chaat house in the Bay Area
San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 2006

Amanda Berne, Chronicle Staff Writer

When Vinod Chopra told his wife that he was opening a chaat stand in his Berkeley retail store, she had a two-word answer: "I'm leaving."

Indira Chopra packed her bags and returned to Bombay -- not because she didn't like chaat, but because it didn't fit with what she saw as her American dream.

The Chopras were business people, working middle class. In India, chaat stands, the pushcarts selling bite-size snacks along roadsides, are traditionally run by lower-class Indians.

But Vinod missed the chaat that he had loved at home, and there were few places to eat it in the Bay Area. Plus, he wanted something extra to lure customers into Vik's Retail.

Vinod eventually won his wife over, and after a couple of months of sorely missing her family -- and beginning to trust her husband's idea -- she returned.

He turned out to be a visionary. From its beginnings in 1989 as a bare counter with just a few chairs at the front of the store, Vik's Chaat Corner now fills an entire warehouse, and on a typical Saturday will serve more than 1,200 customers.

When the iron gate of the two-toned industrial cinderblock rolls up at 10 a.m., releasing aromatic blasts of cardamom, garam masala, cumin and coriander, dozens of people stream in to order their favorite flavors. There's no sign for Vik's, so it's easy to miss if it weren't for the throng of people lined up outside.

Biriyani from the north, dosa and dhokla from the south -- it's all here, and made fresh daily. Everything, from the yogurt to the bread batters to the sweets, is made in-house, not to mention the 18 different lunch specials, or thali, during the week, and the 20 or more extra items added to the menu on weekends.

"Our food is craving food for Indians," says Amod Chopra, Vinod and Indira's 35-year-old son, who helps run the business. "You don't crave naan or tandoori chicken. You want to eat the zippy, zesty food."

Chaat combine various textures and flavors -- crunchy, crisp and soft, spicy, tangy, fresh and sour. Crackers and dumplings, made from lentils, chickpeas or potatoes, act as vessels for a stunning variety of chutneys -- mint, cilantro, coconut and tamarind.
The thalis, the heart of the menu during the week, come with rice, kidney beans, pickle, raita, pappadam and roti. The chefs vary the menu by adding their regional favorites, so one day there might be a southern fish curry or a northern spicy spinach and cheese dish.

Lighter curries

The curries are made without heavy cream or clarified butter, and there is always a chicken and vegetarian option, and most days either a fish or lamb curry. A Hyderabad-style fish curry served recently featured a delicate, tangy sauce that was light in texture and balanced in spice.

All of it's cheap, too. Nothing, including thalis, is over $6. And it's spectacularly good.

Arjun Divecha, who lives in Berkeley, comes to Vik's once a week, alternating weekends and weekdays. His two daughters, Zai, 18, and Mia, 14, join him on occasion, but, typical teenagers, it depends whether they like Indian food that week.

"I'm a chaat fiend," says Divecha, as he and the girls tear into the bhel puri, batata puri and samosa. "I went to all those places they talk about in New York, and I still think this is kind of the original. The food -- it's the best. The dahi batata puri is as good or better here than in Bombay."

At the center of it all are the Chopras -- Vinod, whose sense of humor helps manage the crowds; Indira, whose recipe for aloo tikki -- the crisp, chile-studded potato croquettes -- inspired Vinod in the first place; and son Amod, chief taster and motivator.

They're supported by a staff of 35, a mixture of old and young, men and women, Tibetans, North Indians and South Indians. They communicate in Hindi, the common language throughout much of the region.

The staff is a second family, say the Chopras. Employees tend to stay; one, whom they call Amma, which means mother in Hindi, has been with them for 13 years.

A weekend ritual

The Vik's dining room, if you can call it that, is filled with a mix of students, couples and Bay Area natives either from the area or making the trek for chaat. It's a weekend morning ritual, so the tables fill up quickly and spill out on sunny days to the parking lot.

At first, Indira says, "A lot of students at Berkeley came in, looking for a taste of home. They would bring their American roommates, and it grew to become a very big mix of people."

That mix has also been fueled by the explosion of the Indian population throughout the Bay Area. According to the U.S. Census in 2000, the Indian population in the Bay Area has more than doubled in the past decade, especially in Fremont, San Jose and Sunnyvale, and it just keeps growing.
But beyond the Indian population, eager for foods from home, the snacks have found favor with the local food-obsessed who hunger for exciting tastes of far-flung snacks.

The kitchen has more energy than an airport during the holidays, and as soon as the doors open, the automated machines go into action, flashing orders on flat-screen panels. Staff members man various stations, while a few work in the back on preparing for the next day. Amod expedites, calling out names on a microphone for people to come back to the counter to pick up orders.

Vinod and Indira arrive on the weekends around 11 a.m., and Vinod immediately starts greeting the customers. He's all over the place, tasting sauces, sitting in the sun chatting with groups of men, while Indira sneaks off to help work the store, her own meeting point to catch up.

Chief taster

When he's not at the counter, Amod dips into every curry pot, sambar or biriyani pan in the kitchen, tasting for balance of flavors, spice and salt. Pakoras fry in the giant karahi, a cast-iron wok used in Indian cooking, and as they turn gold, the vegetable dumplings come out. Amod barely waits for them to cool before cracking one open. He adds more salt and celery seed to the rest, then repeats the process, until they are perfect.

He's often nudging others to try, too. He's a natural feeder, just like his mom.

Indira learned to cook from her mother-in-law, and many of the dishes, especially the weekday lunch specials, come from her recipes.

The roti, homemade bread, is made assembly-line style in the back by two or three women on busy days. The perfectly round dough is slapped on the tava, or griddle, and then placed on an open flame, where it puffs full of steam and turn a crackly, spotted brown. They make several thousand roti every week.

Pakistan-born Naseer Ahmed has run the kitchen for almost four years. Tall enough to loom over most of the staff, and very serious as he works, he learned to cook in restaurants and school in India. He's added one of his favorite Muslim dishes, biriyani, to the menu, a dish that Indira says is usually served for special occasions like weddings. He sways slightly with sleepiness early on Saturday morning as he turns pieces of chicken over in the pot, releasing puffs of cardamom steam.

Ahmed and Amod work closely, often testing new recipes during lulls. While Ahmed stirs the heavy cream for barfi, using the long, shovel-like spoon, Amod adds ground pistachios to the Indian fudge sweet. Once the sweets are poured out, they are decorated with edible silver leaf.

The kitchen is a mix of vegetarian and carnivore -- both dishes and people -- but the equipment is carefully kept separate. Three griddles in the back have different purposes -- one for meat dishes, one for vegetarian, and the third for dosa, best described as Indian crepes.

The dosa station belongs to Amma Cheenale, an older South Indian woman dressed in a navy blue and gold sari, hair tied back in a silver and black knot at the nape of her neck. She turns out hundreds of the lacy, thin dosa, filled with mustard-seed flecked potatoes and coconut chutney.

As orders pour in, her fingers work quickly, adjusting the heat on the griddle constantly so that each dosa comes out uniform. Next to the griddle, on two tiny burners, she maneuvers a smaller pan with batter for another South Indian dish, uttapam, a slightly sour open-face pancake dotted with cilantro, tomato and onion.

Amma is one of the true workhorses of this kitchen. Before Vik's opens, she can be found standing over her large pot of sambar, mixing in the tarka, or fried seasonings that are added at the end of cooking.

Her sambar takes two to three days to make, but it's earthy and rich and could easily be eaten daily.

Chaat breaks

So can most of Vik's palate-stimulating food. Chaat means "to lick" in Hindi, a result of the fact that chaat originally were served on banana leaves, leaving customers to lick each leaf clean. Nowadays in India, people go out for chaat like Americans do for coffee. It's a mid-afternoon treat, and in the same way that many Bay Area coffee shops have cult followings, so do chaat stands.

Amod recalls a childhood memory of a tinkling bell that signaled the passage of his favorite bhel puri pushcart, which sold the puffed rice salad, dressed with onions, tamarind and chiles.

Other chaat aficionados go to their favorite pani puri stands, where the golf-ball-size puffed crackers are popped open and filled with garbanzos, potatoes and chutneys made to order.

At Vik's there's no specialty, although most customers have their favorites, and the kitchen serves more than 3,000 puri each week. "We don't have 1 billion chaat eaters here to demand a specialty," says Amod.

The operation has always been a family business, including daughter Shagun Sonthalia, a nephrologist in San Diego, who grew up in this kitchen. Amod, like his father, sees expansion in the future -- not of space, per se, but definitely the menu.

Two years ago, Amod added sporks to the cutlery, instead of just spoons, to make it easier to eat for novices -- it's a compromise to adding forks. He's computerized the business and put in options for the staff to receive health benefits. Now, he has the kitchen testing new recipes from ideas he and his parents have gathered from trips to India.

Growing the business

Amod has also been instrumental in helping with greener business practices. He and his father worked together to design a disposable -- yet recyclable -- compartmentalized thali plate. This keeps costs of dishwashers and water down. Using counter service instead of tableside has also kept costs down. The low prices -- most items are $3.50 to $5 -- also account for the high numbers of patrons who crowd the tables.

Amod has arranged for Steve Smith, a Berkeley resident, to pick up the used oil every week to be converted into bio-diesel fuel for his Mercedes G-Wagon.

Amod and Vinod are the dreamers, often outdoing each other with new ideas. It's these ideas that have propelled them into expanding the restaurant into two warehouses, moving the growing Vik's Distributors wholesale business into its own building, and keeping Vik's Retail active, although it only grosses a third of what the restaurant does.

Indian groceries

The retail store is a great pit stop for fresh spices and curry leaves, jars of saffron and a container of fresh, homemade dosa batter, which shares cooler space with ready-to-bake Pillsbury Roti, imported from India. There is also fresh produce, tiny eggplants and okra, chiles and ginger, and Indira will rattle off a recipe or two if you ask.

"If ever they were to sell this place, a lot of people would stop coming," says Ferdoos Nagarvala, a longtime customer who has become friendly with the Chopras. Nagarvala and his wife, Veenu, have bought their groceries at Vik's ever since the Chaat Corner consisted of just a table and two chairs in the front of the store.

For Vinod Chopra, the typical American dream was very atypical.

Before coming to the United States in the 1970s, Vinod worked in India as a distribution manager for Roussel Pharmaceuticals, now known as makers of RU-486, the controversial abortion pill. The Chopras were a well-to-do middle class family, and Indira taught English.

When Vinod arrived in Berkeley, he started an import business specializing in Indian beers. Beer grew into cooking vessels, and by 1987, Chopra's Vik's Distributors included food items and spices from India. The business was, and still is going strong, supplying 250 restaurants in Northern California.

"Retail was a tiger by the tail," says Vinod. He converted part of the warehouse space into a retail outlet, clearing off some shelves, but no one came.

At the time, Berkeley was the epicenter for the Bay Area Indian community, and University Avenue and the surrounding streets were crowded with Indian stores. There was little reason to trek to the warehouse district for groceries.

"I had my other business to fall back on if chaat didn't work," says Vinod. "We try to do the same things here as you would get back home, but things just taste differently. Vegetables and fruits are smaller and more concentrated in India."

Fremont and San Jose host larger Indian communities now, but people still travel to see the family and crunch through the snacks. It's rush time for the chaat house now, a point that comes a few times during the day, and Amod goes into full service mode, moving around the open kitchen, checking in on the back and helping put final touches on the chaat.

Amod calls out names on the microphone and as people come up to pick up the food -- it's counter service -- and by mid-day rush, they are a bit giddy, and slightly silly, with the energy of it all. They tease the men, make jokes with the women and have everyone smiling despite the wait.

"Robert, man, come get your kulfi before it becomes ras malai," jokes Amod over the loudspeaker. The kulfi, Indian ice cream is melting quickly, and Robert has been outside soaking up the sun.

His casualness reflects his outlook on Vik's.

"This is like a big home kitchen," says Amod. "It's a labor of love, not business."