These are the people behind some of the city’s best Indian restaurants.
BY KAREN ANDERSON
Running a restaurant takes a village — or at least the talents of a very dedicated family. This is especially true when the restaurant in question serves Indian cuisine where menus come loaded with long lists of chaat(snacks), curries, masalas, clay-oven breads and rich sweets. It’s a complicated cuisine to master for any cook, and when you come from a country where atithi devo bhava (our guests are our gods) is the credo for hospitality, attention to detail in the front of the house is as important as the food. Here’s a look at a few of the Indian families who sew this ethos into their hospitality as they weave their region’s spice-coloured threads into the fabric of Calgary’s food scene.
The Manns
The Mann family, whose ancestors hail from Punjab in Northern India, have run Moti Mahal on 14th Street S.W. for two generations. “My parents, Harjit and Bill Mann, bought Moti Mahal from my aunt 28 years ago,” says current owner Jesse Mann. “I grew up in the restaurant working mainly front of house. I left, went to business school, got a job, but found the office lifestyle was not for me. When I took over the business in 2014, I realized our chef team all went back to India to visit their families each year for three months, so I went to SAIT’s culinary school … I wanted to be able to cover all aspects of the business as my parents did. Dad was front of house and my mom is our executive chef. She developed all of our dishes and you can still find her here three days a week.”
The Samrai/Hundals
Makhan Samrai owned the very successful Tandoori Hut in Kensington for 20 years before he retired. But, he inspired his sons, Raj and Harry Samrai, to open Tandoori Hut: Indian Street Food in Airdrie and his nephew Rav Hundal to open Karma in 2006 in southeast Calgary. “My family is from Punjab but I was born in Blairmore,” says Hundal. “I had worked with my uncle, but my mother, Mandeep, had always cooked for me, my siblings and cousins, and she loved it, so she’s in our kitchen every day now along with our original chef, Bhuwinder Sandhu.”
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