About Restaurant Openings Around DC
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Chai Pani, 1325 Fifth St., NE.
Though they’d never met until a few years ago, Meherwan Irani and Vishwesh “Vish” Bhatt have a lot in common. Both are Indian-born chefs and adoptive Southerners, and they struck up a friendship immediately.
Irani owns Chai Pani, a fun, funky Indian street food restaurant that won many accolades in Asheville before expanding to the Atlanta area. Bhatt was a Southern-trained two-time James Beard-winning chef and cookbook author who’d been at the center of the food scene in Oxford, Mississippi for decades.
“We’d both been in small Southern towns where there aren’t many people like us,” Bhatt says. “We’ve been friends ever since.”
Irani had long had plans to expand Chai Pani northwards. In August, he’ll open its first location outside the South—and its new flagship—in the Union Market District, with Bhatt as executive chef.
Chai Pani, like its Southern counterparts, will serve traditional, non-Westernized Indian street food like sev potato dahi puri, vada pav, and bhel puri, and original Southern-inflected inventions like crispy okra fries, kale pakoras, and the “sloppy jai” sandwich, made with spiced lamb. With Bhatt leading its kitchen, the new Chai Pani will also focus a bit more on snacks from his native Gujarat, and on Mid-Atlantic ingredients.
“I’m really looking forward to the four seasons,” Bhatt says. “When you’re this far south, you miss that a little bit. And then using seafood out of the Chesapeake and figuring out how to best incorporate it into this street food model that we have.”
Irani says the bustle of the Union Market District made him feel immediately at home. After Chai Pani’s 4,000-square-foot DC space opens, he plans to expand his footprint here with a location of Botiwalla—his fast-casual grill with locations in Asheville, Charlotte, and Atlanta—at the Upton Place development in Tenleytown.
In the meantime, Chai Pani will preview its offerings at the New Kitchens on the Block event at Mess Hall on April 26.
Irani and his wife Molly started Chai Pani in 2009 in Asheville. Four years later, they expanded to Decatur, an Atlanta suburb, and in 2022, Chai Pani was named the country’s most Outstanding Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation. The new DC outpost is the Iranis’ first collaboration with Bhatt, who has worked at the City Grocery Restaurant Group in Mississippi since 1997, opening the southern brasserie Snackbar in 2009. His debut cookbook, I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes from a Southern Chef, came out in 2022.
Though Chai Pani has deep Southern influences, Bhatt and Irani feel that their concept can work anywhere.
“If you think of being Southern as a mindset, it’s about localism with your foodways, it’s about hospitality, it’s about community,” Irani says. “Those are the parts of the South that I fell in love with, and I don’t see a reason for that to be any different regardless of where we are.”
He and Bhatt will continue focusing on Indian street food because, to them, it’s inherently the most fast-evolving and locally focused of cuisines.
“This food deserves to be celebrated in its own right without deconstructing, modernizing, tweezer-izing, foam-izing, elevating,” Irani says. “Just make it perfect, as good as it’s ever been made, and that should be enough, because the food deserves it.”
