The People You Need To Know

Over the past three decades, the Indian population in Dallas has expanded, with an influx of South Asians in the ’90s and another boom recently. It’s now a thriving, multi-faceted community, laced with culture and the accoutrements of culture: eateries and temples, veterans and trend-setting entrepreneurs, who are blending east and west, old roots and a bright new future. The profiles below shed light on the changing—and growing—Indian presence in Dallas, from those who first brought us chicken tikka masala to those introducing us to Indian ice cream or the ancient system of wellness called Ayurveda.

Pardeep Sharma of India Palace

The godfather of white-tablecloth tikka masala.

Pardeep Sharma says that when he opened India Palace in 1985, his concept of Indian fine dining was a tough sell. “People thought curry was one dish—you just add curry powder and make a dish out of it,” Sharma says. “We had to explain that we use different spices, that it’s made from scratch.”

Originally from Delhi, Sharma came to Dallas in the early ‘80s after taking a restaurant course at New York University. When he opened Kebab ‘N’ Kurry in 1982, the homey BYOB spot in Richardson was one of the only Indian restaurants around. It quickly became a hangout for young Dallas attorneys who would sit in their cars, waiting for tables to turn. A few were so enticed by the exotic menu they memorialized it in a song. “They went through the whole menu—started with the first item and went straight through to dessert,” Sharma says, chuckling.

He wanted to try something different at his second restaurant, in North Dallas. “India Palace was a little bit larger, a little bit more fine dining, so we could show off our culture and food.” But it wasn’t easy. The detail-oriented restaurateur with a sharp eye and a presence in the dining room spent a lot of time on the floor, explaining his exotic dishes.

While India Palace has become an institution in the three decades since then, its owner is always tinkering, revamping the décor, playing with new menu items. That said, Sharma, who also owns the fast-casual Roti Grill in Uptown, knows what his customers want. India Palace is where many had their first taste of the velvety cream-and-tomato masala that so seduced the British. Like the tortilla soup at The Mansion, it’s an icon.

“The chicken tikka masala, I can’t change,” Sharma says. “They cannot get over the chicken tikka masala.”

Navin Hariprasad of Spice in the City

An innovator of healthy, hip Indian fusion in the heart of downtown.

Navin Hariprasad wants people to see Indian food as stimulating and vibrant, not heavy. So it helps that his Spice in the City is located amid the bustle of downtown, a bright oasis tucked into the historic Power & Light Building. With a terrace overlooking the pool, it’s the perfect cosmopolitan setting for his contemporary Indian fusion.

Born in Dallas and raised by a mother who was a strict vegetarian, Hariprasad intended to be a pharmacist, but veered toward nutritional science instead. His culinary vision reflects that career path, emphasizing healthy ingredients—wild-caught seafood, grass-fed meat. Yet his menu can still satisfy traditionalists. You can get a halal kathi roll, a variation on the popular Kolkata street food, the paratha flatbread with spiced steak with a lick of heat. Hariprasad’s raita is creamy and fragrant with toasted mustard seeds; his vegetable korma soothes with cashews and coconut milk.

There are plenty of surprises, too. The breakfast menu features tacos—including one with chicken curry alongside egg and cheese—courtesy of Cruz Macias, who was lead chef at Gloria’s for 10 years. Marcias oversees the breakfast shifts as well as the Indo-Mexican portion of the menu. And Hariprasad reached out to Houston-based chocolatier Annie Rupani, whose Houston-based hand-painted chocolates come in flavors like garam masala and cardamom rose.

With vegan options and swanky cocktails now in place, Hariprasad has already identified his next fusion challenge: repurposing an elevator shaft as a chef’s table.

The Empire of Indian Ice Cream

Kaurina’s specializes in a traditional Indian sweet.

The Singh family specializes in the traditional Indian dessert kulfi, made from slowly caramelizing milk, stirring until it turns thick and the sugars appear tawny, before being frozen in the form of a popsicle. The result, which they sell as Kaurina’s Original Kulfi, is neither custard nor gelato, almost more fudge than ice cream. It is velvety and dense under the teeth.

“It’s been around for hundreds of years,” says Aman, the son in the business and Kaurina’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. “There are large Indian food companies making kulfi, commodity brand kinds of things with artificial flavoring and coloring, but no one that specializes. This is the only company that does [kulfi] as our only product.”

The Singh’s niche business started in their home kitchen in Dallas. They based their treats on the flavors remembered from the Punjabi vendors who are commonly seen trundling their carts. There is creamy malai, suffused with warm notes of roasted, ground cardamom. Another is pista, with the grit of deep-green pistachios. They also offer kesari, lush with saffron. The process is simple, the flavors indebted to the regal Mughal courtiers’ tastes for costly spices and nuts.

But Aman’s mother, Jas Singh, started simply.

“At that time,”Aman says, “our Indian cuisine wasn’t readily available [in Dallas] as it is now. Lots of folks were making things at home. My mother found a recipe for kulfi.”

She had the patience to caramelize the milk as it should be—it is, after all, the primary determinant for the fudgy texture. Aman remembers the stir it made among friends, who would bring out-of-towners to try it. The Singhs had no inkling of how to scale up the kulfi business, nor any particular need to. His father, Hari Singh, with a background in geology, had moved the family to Texas to take a job with ExxonMobil, and then gone on to open a wholesale jewelry business that was proving profitable.

But by late 1990s, the Indian community in North Texas had grown, experiencing an influx of South Asian immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The Singhs remembered when every trip to India included an extra suitcase for the shopping list of things to bring back. But now they were starting to see restaurants and grocery stores proliferate, catering to a new and stable community. That’s when they started exploring kulfi again. Things came together remarkably fast.

Initially, they handed out samples to businesses—mostly Indian grocery stores—of the kulfi they’d made in individual molds. The stores reported selling out the same day, Aman says. With their support and encouragement, Aman and his parents persisted. They bought more molds. By 2000, they had moved to their current facility in Far North Dallas and added more flavors: vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate, joining the classic trio of mango, malai, and pista. In 2004, Aman quit his job to join the business full-time with the goal of broadening the market, realizing its crossover appeal. Ice cream pint flavors now include coconut and chikoo, a sweet tropical fruit.

In 2012, they took home first place at the World Dairy Expo Championship in Wisconsin for their original malai kulfi in the Innovative and Creative Products category. (“They’d never tried anything like it,” Aman says.) But the true windfall had come in 2011, when Costco picked them up, pushing their market from the 60 to 70 shops in North Texas to distribution nationwide. Aman never dreamed they would be “the Henry’s of Indian ice cream,” he says, drawing a local comparison. Meanwhile, the confluence of demographics and demand have made Dallas the home of what may be the nation’s only boutique kulfi producer. If you have not reached into a Costco freezer or the Irving or Richardson IndoPak Supermarket cooler for one of the fudgy, beguilingly flavored frozen treats, you should.

“We’re kinda maxed out at capacity right now,” Aman says. The family’s current goal is to open a new, larger facility by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Aman still remembers when the business was a home operation—when every evening they cooked milk on the kitchen stove and every morning he went out to deliver the frozen gold.

Ayurveda Ambassador

In the kitchen next door, East meets West with classes in vegetarian Indian food and living with the seasons.

By the time I leave her house in a tranquil community in Irving, she has laid before me her special blend of Indian spiced nuts, warmed me with her chai tea blend, and told me that I was most likely of a constitution that was susceptible to having cold hands and feet. I most likely enjoyed to graze on salads, she added, telling me that I probably need to ground myself with soothing things like avocado. Sapna Punjabi-Gupta was right. And the constitution she was referring to, according to Ayurveda, is “vatta.”

Ayurveda, the thousands-of-years-old Hindu system of health and wellbeing, is centered on the notion of balancing elements in the body—air, fire, water, earth, ether, according to ancient Vedic tradition—in order to achieve wellness. Integrating nutrition, meditation, and exercise are part of a vegetarian lifestyle. Spices aid digestion and a balanced system promotes immunity. One eats according to the seasons, but also with mindfulness to one’s dominant dosha: vata (wind), pitta (fire), or kapha (water).

All of this Punjabi-Gupta blends into her multi-faceted work (Naivedhya by Sapna). A registered dietician with a Masters in nutrition, Punjabi-Gupta has done extensive work in endocrinology and specialized in neo-natal nutrition at Baylor University Medical Center, but also has a certification as an Ayurvedic practitioner. It’s this she brings to her work, part of a growing awareness about the places where East and West can meet—in her case, in delicious dialogue.

Many people had asked her, she says, how it was that Indian vegetarian food was so satisfying. Colleagues at Baylor, seeing her vibrant lunches, confessed their despair at facing yet another tofu burger. Her mission became providing people with more balanced, nutritionally sound options. And people were hungry for it: People who attended the classes she held out of her home, or the director of the Crow Collection of Asian Art, who saw possibilities for awareness and education. She sought to integrate Western nutritional science with the Eastern tradition to make it practical.

“I value evidence-based science, but I also have my Indian roots,” she says.

Punjabi-Gupta was born and raised in Mumbai, where her mother still lives, and came to the United States to pursue her Masters at a university in Cleveland, where she met her husband. Baylor in Dallas was her first and only clinical job, but five years ago, she left in order to spend more time at home with her children. This was the beginning of ushering in a new phase in her life. “I opened my home and I opened my doors,” she says, with the aim of sharing what she knew: Western nutrition overlaid on what was deeply familiar and intuitive.

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