It’s Sunday afternoon, and an entire Indian community, it seems, has packed into a single store. Dozens of jars of colorful spices and powders line the front of the shop. A complicated-looking steel machine busily cranks out perfectly round chapattis, which make a pleasant pfft sound as they neatly pile on top of each other. A woman in a burnt-orange sari sneaks a piece of mathri, a buttery fenugreek crisp, out of a container as she considers a bottomless bin of lentils. Welcome to Patel Brothers, the most popular Indian grocery store in America.

Photo by Dan Goldberg

I hesitate to think about life before Patel Brothers. Most of the Indian grocery stores my family used to frequent were located in rundown shopping centers. The produce always looked like it had been out for a day too long. There were jars of achaar collecting dust in the aisles. “Things were thrown on the floor or expired, and the employees talked to you like they were doing you a favor by allowing you to come,” recounts Barkha Cardoz, co-owner of Paowalla in New York. My first visit to Patel Brothers changed everything.

Photo by Dan Goldberg

I was visiting my parents in Dallas a few years back, and my dad asked if I wanted to come help him pick out the first mangoes of the season at the newly opened store nearby. I was shocked to see the bags of rice and flour neatly organized on shelves; the jalebi (like an Indian funnel cake) tasted as delectably syrupy as it did at the shops in India; one of the managers actually offered to walk our big boxes of mangoes to the car. That day, I became part of the enormous legion of loyalists who swear by Patel Brothers for Indian groceries.

Patel Bros (as it is affectionately called by fans) now counts 50 stores across the U.S — it’s by far the largest Indian grocer in the country. The business started as a storefront in Chicago, opened by two brothers, Mafat and Tulsi Patel, in 1974. At the time, the Patels were recent immigrants from India, and had trouble finding the ingredients they craved from back home. They purchased a dilapidated shop on Devon Avenue and sold the kinds of items you couldn’t get at your average grocery store, like fresh spices, mangoes, lentils, and chickpea flour — all imported from India.