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Growing up in the southern Indian state of Kerala, Sajadmon “Sai” Nechiyan, the owner of the Keralite restaurant Mintza at 2245 W. Devon Ave. in Chicago, was surrounded by tropical trees bearing an abundance of produce unimaginable in wintry, tightly packed Chicago. He generally bypassed jackfruit in favor of mango when he wanted a snack, but the real treasure was coconuts, which are integral to the food of Kerala. He and his family would cut the brown shells down from the tree, open them up, and let the halves dry in the sun before bringing them to a local mill that would press the copra, as dried coconut is known, into rich oil. The desiccated leftover coconut was given to livestock as food – or, in recent years, sometimes turned into cookies.
Coconut oil is used as a medium to cook everything from shrimp pickles to curries in Kerala, but that’s not the only way coconut appears in the cuisine. Ground or grated coconut adds heft to chutney, the minced vegetable dishes known as thoran, and the mashed cassava dish kappa. Roasted coconut might contribute depth to a dish. Coconut milk thickens stews and sauces. “We use a lot of coconut in everything,” Vinod Kalathil told WTTW for a story about a special feast at his Keralite restaurant Thattu. It makes sense that some people believe the name “Kerala” derives from words meaning “land of coconut trees” in Malayalam, the state’s official language.
Obviously, Chicago doesn’t have coconut trees growing in every backyard; coconut oil has to be purchased here rather than picked up from the local mill. But that limitation is not forestalling a recent boom in Keralite food in a city that previously had almost none available commercially. Thattu began as a food stall in 2019 and moved into a standalone location at 2601 W. Fletcher St. in 2023. Mintza recently opened to bring Keralite food to a stretch of South Asian businesses on Devon dominated by Pakistani, Gujarati, and Telugu restaurants. Trilokah just relocated to 2239 N. Clybourn Ave. in Chicago after six years in suburban Mount Prospect. And Lincoln Park’s new Nadu (2518 N. Lincoln Ave.) features regional food from around India, with Kerala represented by more dishes than any other location.
Nadu is Sujan Sarkar’s third Indian restaurant in Chicago. He’s received heaps of acclaim for his fine-dining spot Indienne, but he betrays a particular enthusiasm for the more casual Nadu. He originally wanted to open a regional restaurant before Indienne, but wasn’t sure if it would do well. Several years later, he thinks it’s finally the right time. “People are very much excited about it,” he says. “This is great. I feel so happy that we have done this restaurant, it’s very genuine.”
For many Americans, “Indian food” means butter chicken, naan, mango lassi, and maybe some tandoor-roasted meats. It’s akin to knowing American food as burgers and pizza, thereby neglecting Southern food, Tex-Mex, and all the thoroughly Americanized versions of other cuisines that have come to define eating in this country. India is an enormous subcontinent with a vast array of geographies, climates, religions, and cultures that have together produced many unique cuisines, only a few dishes of which have made their way with immigrants to America and then been adapted to Western palates and the ingredients available here when they started opening restaurants.
But in recent years some chefs and restaurateurs have begun to spotlight the diversity of Indian cuisine, a trend mirrored in India itself, where Sarkar says that during his own youth most Indians only knew the food of their own area. The tropical south has been a special area of focus; Tamil Nadu-rooted Semma was number one on the New York Times best restaurants in New York this year and won a James Beard Award, while Thattu also made a New York Times best list. Locally, Thalaiva’s Indian Kitchen in suburban Park Ridge has been nominated for a Jean Banchet Award and received a positive review from Chicago magazine as it zeroes in on the food of landlocked Kongu Nadu.
“You will see, in the next five to ten years, this southern or coastal Indian food will grow rapidly in the United States,” predicts Sarkar, who specifically labels the geographic origin of each dish on Nadu’s menu. “I think that flavor-wise it really works well as an entry point to Indian food,” he says. “Because it’s so subtle, so flavorful, a lot of things can be vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free.” (South Indian breads and cakes like dosa, idli, and appam are made from rice, not wheat, while coconut milk is more often used than dairy.)
If people are familiar with southern Indian food, they might associate it with vegetarianism. But Kerala is notable for its wide range of meats, thanks to its cosmopolitan history as a center of the spice trade. Black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, and other punchy ingredients are cultivated on its Malabar Coast, drawing traders from the Arabic Middle East and Portugal in centuries past. There are still large Muslim and Christian communities in Kerala today, which is part of why beef is common, unlike in many other parts of India.
Dry-frying is a typical preparation, as is slowly roasting a tougher cut of beef in a masala sauce. A popular pairing is with porotta, a street food distinguished from the paratha of northern India by its use of white flour and layering method.
“Porotta is a soft and flaky bread which all the people in south India like,” says Shabin Matthews, the owner of Trilokah.
Another well-known Indian dish that has a unique expression in Kerala is the rice dish biryani. “For our biryani, the rice is short,” instead of long-grain, explains Matthews. It’s also “more onion-based, so it’s a little bit sweet,” he says. Nechiyan wants to add biryani cooked in a hollow bamboo stalk to his menu at Mintza; while this preparation is actually from a different part of southern India, according to Atlas Obscura, the same method of steaming in a bamboo stalk is used to prepare the Keralite rice-and-coconut cake puttu. “You get the steam coming out, all the aroma, the flavor, everything,” Nechiyan says of bamboo biryani. (Thattu’s biryani is made with the more familiar long-grain basmati rice.)
Banana leaves are also a frequent food vessel in Kerala. A common preparation, available at Trilokah, Mintza, and Thattu, is pollichathu: fish wrapped in a banana leaf with an aromatic sauce and then grilled or steamed. “When it goes on the griddle, the flavor of the banana leaf comes out and it gives a very, very flavorful taste for the item,” enthuses Matthews.
Banana leaves are also used as plates for the feast known as sadya, which is served to celebrate everything from weddings to a harvest festival. At Mintza, Nechiyan offers a mini fish-focused sadya on his regular menu – with some 360 miles of coastline in Kerala, seafood is abundant there. He wants to offer a full-blown sadya dinner at one of his other restaurants, Indian Clay Pot in North Center, once its renovation is complete.
Mintza is Nechiyan’s third Indian restaurant in Chicago; like Sarkar, he waited to dive into more regional Indian food until he established himself with familiar fare. Trilokah’s Matthews, however, went for Keralite cuisine right off the bat. He was a physical therapist but always dreamed of opening a restaurant spotlighting the food of his homeland. “I like to eat food – that’s the only background I have,” he says with a laugh. He opened first in the suburbs, where many South Asians and Keralites live – there are two grocery stores, Malabar Foods and Kairali Indian Foods, that offer Keralite cuisine in Glenview. Having survived the pandemic, he decided to move Trilokah to Chicago when his landlord in Mount Prospect raised the rent.
“I don’t do physical therapy anymore, I treat people with good food,” he says.
Nechiyan trained as a chef not out of an initial passion for food but because it offered a path to a life in the West. But now he is sharing the lesser known culinary culture of his tropical childhood in a decidedly not tropical city on the other side of the globe, and speaks about the dishes and traditions with eager excitement – just like Matthews and Sarkar, who is not from Kerala but has traveled extensively and learned from the cooks he has hired from various parts of India.
“It’s not, ‘I’m here to open a school and educate people” about the breadth of Indian cuisines, Sarkar says of Nadu. But, he adds, “We are not putting this Indian food in one box. We want to showcase how diverse Indian cuisine is.”
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