One of America’s best new chefs is in Kendall, says Food & Wine magazine. Yes, Kendall
Niven Patel is obsessing over to-go containers.
How food from his restaurant, Ghee Indian Kitchen, looks going into them, how it tastes coming out. How long it will spend in the car. How a diner will reheat it, serve it and refrigerate it.
It’s not something he studied in cooking school. But it consumes most of his days as he continues to run his Kendall restaurant as takeout and delivery through the coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s a story behind each dish at Ghee, and we wanted to preserve that,” Patel said.
It’s that kind of attention to detail that the editors of Food & Wine magazine saw when, on Tuesday, they named Patel one of the 10 Best New Chefs in America. Patel, a past James Beard award semifinalist, joins an illustrious list of past winners since the awards started in 1988, including Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, and locally, Allen Susser, Andrea Curto-Randazzo and Brad Kilgore.
But his industry has changed since he was visited by the editors, who went through a months-long selection process from October 2019 to February. And so Patel had to change with it.
When dining rooms closed on March 16, Patel had to furlough all but a handful of his staff — including the farmers he had on payroll, who grow food specifically for the restaurant.
With his wife and in-laws as his only staff, he started to plot a new way forward, redesigning every dish on Ghee’s menu, while also staying true to his vision of growing the food that he serves at his restaurant.
He continued buying produce from the farmers, Brendan and Laura Sutton, and harvesting crops from his own Homestead backyard.
Patel rethought every dish. The steamed green millet he turned into a sort of polenta, with a curry consistency that lent itself to reheating on the stove. The popular yellowfin tuna bhel he broke up into separate containers so diners can assemble it at home.
“It still tastes phenomenal, so you don’t miss the other dish,” he said, proud.
And he’s pushing ahead with three new restaurants.
Besides reopening Ghee’s Design District location, he still has plans to open his pasta-focused Erba, which started as a pop-up, in the fall. And he has a pair of new restaurants in the upcoming Thesis Hotel at 1350 S. Dixie Hwy. in Coral Gables. One, Mamey, is island-inspired cuisine using local tropical produce, and the other, Orno, features a wood-fire grill and oven.
For now, he’s thinking less about awards, and more about keeping his livelihood afloat, one to-go box at a time.
“We’re just rolling with the new times that we’re in,” he said.
This story was originally published May 12, 2020 at 9:00 AM.
