SERVICE READY

When following one’s bliss leads to smoky grills and skewered chickens.

It was a counterintuitive move, to be sure, that found Irani’s husband, Meherwan, resolved to find his way out of a midlife crisis in the middle of the Great Recession by opening a restaurant. Irani, who, unlike him, grew up in the restaurant business, responded, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” But it turns out Meherwan—a devotee of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba of “Don’t worry, be happy” fame, like his wife and their families—had a winning idea: a restaurant featuring Indian street food in the hippie haven of Asheville, North Carolina. Thus the James Beard Award–winning Chai Pani, named after the “slang in India for going out for tea and snacks or a small bite.” It wasn’t just the cuisine that was different; the Iranis were committed to building “humanistic management practices into our space.” If that sounds like the opposite of kitchens staffed by the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Emeril Lagasse, it’s meant to: The Iranis rebelled against the toxicity, machismo, rage, and dysfunction of the standard back of the house, and in doing so built a small and apparently happy empire that has not been without its failures—and yet it’s survived not just recession but also a pandemic and catastrophic flooding. The narrative gets wobbly, however, when Irani begins to pepper it with boldface business-cum-lifehack platitudes, such as this mildewed chestnut on “active listening”: “Notice the speaker’s body language; does it match what he/she is saying?” There’s a treacly quality to some of the spin, too, as when she writes, “It is our belief that if we bring our whole selves to work, and make and serve food with love, it becomes infused into every dish we send out of the kitchen.”

Well-intentioned, and of some interest to would-be restaurateurs, though with few surprises.