Tastes of India Are Blended With the American South in Vishwesh Bhatt’s First Cookbook

There’s one question that Vishwesh Bhatt, a James Beard Award-winning chef, has been asked countless times while living in the American South: Where are you from?

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Cook With Vishwesh

Bhatt shared three recipes from I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes From a Southern Chef for AARP members to try.

Punjabi-​Style Fried Catfish

This fried dish is a popular roadside delicacy all around the world but especially in Mississippi, where catfish is king.

Collard Green Slaw

I have served this slaw time and again for a decade, and it is always a hit. It is an easy recipe to put together, perfect for a potluck.

Okra Chaat

Chaat is the catchall term for savory snacks in India and this recipe features thin strips of flash-​fried okra tossed in chaat masala.

“If I say I’m from Oxford, [Mississippi] then the next question is inevitably, ‘No, no. Where are you really from?’” explains Bhatt. His first cookbook, released in August, answers the question with its title: I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes From a Southern Chef.

“It's basically a statement saying that immigrants are from here. We belong,” says Bhatt, who moved with his family to Texas from Gujarat, India, when he was 18. “We have a stake to claim. We are part of this strange quilt that we've got going on over here.”

In I Am From Here, he proves that point by masterfully blending Indian and Southern cuisine. One prime example is his take on grits. The first time he had sweet-gloopy creamed corn, he wondered what all the fuss was about. “I was like, ‘Oh, where's the seasoning?’ Because all it had was some salt and butter.” At the Oxford restaurant City Grocery, he had grits with butter, Parmesan, white cheddar seasoned with cayenne, paprika and hot sauce. “That is the right way to make grits,” he says in I Am From Here. And he had a eureka moment.

“I recognized [grits] immediately as something that looked like upma, which is an Indian sort of a cereal made with cream of wheat,” Bhatt says. He connected the dots for his own recipe, grits upma, which includes chana dal and white urad dal to add nuttiness and texture. The result is a dish that could be a meal in itself.

Bhatt discovered his culinary passion while working as a cook at a vegetarian restaurant in Oxford while studying for his master’s degree in political science. He changed gears and attended culinary school in Miami before eventually making his way back to Oxford, where he’s worked at chef John Currence’s City Grocery Restaurant Group since 1997.

As a chef who has experienced life in both Gujarat and Mississippi, Bhatt is keen to draw parallels between the two regions. In the book, he notes that when he hears American chefs discussing “the virtues of Virginia peanuts over Georgia ones,” he’s reminded of the conversations that his father and uncles would have about peanuts from Bharuch versus Surendranagar. He wants to highlight the similarities between the two cultures because he feels there's more in common than people realize. “We share a lot of ingredients, but also just making a point that when we have conversations, whether you're in the South or you’re in Gujarat, they’re all very similar,” says Bhatt. “That’s what families and friends talk about. We talk about stuff that’s going on around us.

"We talk about the food. Food is when we get together. That’s a big thing in the South, together around food. It’s a big thing in India where I grew up, and so there are a lot of parallels, and it’s an attempt to point out that we’re not that different from each other.”