Eating Out at Javitri – a new Indian Restaurant in Manhattan
Chef Dhandu Ram – and MF Husain too!
Getting the urge for an Indian feast, redolent with magical spices like back home? The good news for New Yorkers is that there is a brand new Indian restaurant on the Upper East Side, Javitri. Javitri is the Hindi name for mace, a spice which originated in Indonesia, but is one of the great Ayurvedic spices used in Indian cooking.
Javitri is a delicious way to taste traditional food from the well-loved Chef Dhandu Ram who originally cooked the famous butter chicken and black daal in the Bukhara at the Maurya Sheraton Hotel in New Delhi. A longtime New Yorker now, he has had a hand in many of the noted restaurants in New York, and his touch is what gives that blissful, satisfied feeling after a meal. I recall eating his wonderous daal at Tulsi, the Michelin starred restaurant in 2011, where he was the co-chef with Chef Hemant Mathur. I wrote then, “Dhandu Ram’s Dal is the traditional house dal. Most restaurants serve this urad dal cooked in the regular way but Dhandu Ram likes to cook it for thirteen hours, slowly simmering and evolving it into a creamy texture. Talk about patience! We should all be as mellow as this dal.”
Meeting Chef Dhandu Ram
I had the opportunity of exploring the kitchen and interviewing Chef Dhandu Ram. He’s a down-to-earth man with no chef airs and a world of solid experience. He said he’d do the interview right in the kitchen as he cooked up a fresh dish and showed me how he did it. Knowing I was vegetarian, he said he would do an Alu Gobhi. With a sure hand, he handled the fire, the ingredients in the frypan and a lively conversation which took him from India to New York to Dubai, always cooking and creating. At the end of it, his aromatic Punjabi Alu Gobhi was ready and sizzling and he put it in a container for me to take home and taste.
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