美国国家公共电台 NPR A Visit To Houston's Himalaya: Pakistani And Indian Food With Deep Texas Roots

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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Just off a Houston freeway, in a strip mall with an Indian tailor and a South Asian grocery store, is a small restaurant with an outsized reputation. It's called Himalaya, and its chef and owner is a Houston institution.

KAISER LASHKARI: How are you?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lulu.

LASHKARI: Good. I'm chef Kaiser. Would you like some hot tea? Hot chai? Indian chai?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes.

Chef Kaiser Lashkari is a large man with a bushy, salt-and-pepper mustache. He's constantly in motion - greeting clients, inspecting steaming dishes carried by busy waiters, calling out to his wife, overseeing the kitchen. He offers us food before we've even sat down.

LASHKARI: Let's feed you first. That's what we're all about - to put a smile on your face with good food.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That food has made this humble¹ eatery among the best restaurants in the city, topping the lists of every Houston publication and more recently, after a visit from Anthony Bourdain in 2016, the country.

We'll let you choose what we eat.

LASHKARI: OK, wonderful. Thank you.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Creamy chai is set on the table - then vegetable fritters and spicy² samosas³.

LASHKARI: One each. Just grab it Indian-style with your hands. No formalities. All fat-free, sugar-free, cholesterol-free and zero calories.

(LAUGHTER)

LASHKARI: Most of it is doctor recommended for weight loss.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: He is a gregarious⁴ host.

LASHKARI: If I was not a chef, I would have been a part-time standup comic, I think, you know?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Kaiser Lashkari grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. And he studied medicine.

LASHKARI: I was in med school in Pakistan. And I had finished three and a half years. I had two more years to go to become a doctor. I told my parents that this is not where my heart is. They thought that I had flipped⁵ my noodle because everybody - every Indian and Pakistani parent in the 80s wanted their kid to either become a doctor, lawyer. Or No. 3 option was engineer. Nobody had heard of being a chef. I really broke their heart by not becoming a doctor.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But his heart was in cooking. He moved to America, got his master's degree from the Conrad N. Hilton School of Hospitality at the University of Houston. And he settled in the city. At first, he was mostly catering⁶ Indian weddings. And then 14 years ago, he gambled everything on this place.

LASHKARI: When we came here in 2004, I had $1,100 in the bank. This was a Colombian restaurant that we bought over.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: He kept the Colombian restaurant's painting of a traditional Latin American market scene with a tiny cross perched on the archway. It dominates the whole hall.

LASHKARI: So this is the story. In Islam, you can't remove a picture which has a cross in it. That was my wife's understanding. She - that's what she gave me to understand. And she said, don't ever remove this. And then this restaurant became very lucky for us. We - from being hand to mouth, we became self-sufficient. So this proved to be a lucky painting. Plus, this was a colorful painting, and this was all we could afford at the time. So we want to keep it, and we want to keep that cross as long as I'm alive and kicking.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's a sign of how so many communities have built Houston into what it is today - influencing each other, melding into something unique. Lashkari has applied⁷ that to the dishes he serves. His signature chicken curry⁸, cooked in huge metal pots in his sweltering, fragrant⁹ kitchen, is made with Mexican tomatillos and cilantro. It's incredibly delicious. And we ate that along with the best saag paneer, a spinach¹⁰ and cheese dish, that I have ever tasted.

LASHKARI: We do a lot of fusion¹¹ right now. This restaurant is famous for its fried chicken. It's fried the Southern way, but it's - the chicken - the raw chicken is marinated with Indian spices. My white gravy¹² is made with cashew nuts and almonds and coconut¹³. So it looks like a white gravy of the chicken-fried steak, but it's totally different.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So Pakistani and Indian food with deep Texas roots.

LASHKARI: Yeah, yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the things that we're looking at is how multicultural¹⁴ Houston is and how many different types of communities live here. Have you seen that change over time?

LASHKARI: Yeah, it's become more diverse - more ethnic¹⁵ restaurants coming in onto the scene, more Vietnamese restaurants, more Arabic restaurants, more Japanese restaurants, more Chinese restaurants. Besides that, there has been a great influx¹⁶ of Indian and Pakistani population. So yes, things have changed. One thing hasn't changed. I still don't like sloppy¹⁷ Joes.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).

LASHKARI: You know.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I hear that you're thinking of retiring.

LASHKARI: I want to say the same thing that Al Pacino says in "Godfather" - that every time he wants to quit the mafia business, they pull me in. And every time I want to retire, some customer comes and tells me how much he enjoyed the food. And there I am, back to the drawing board, trying to think of something new to make and put on the menu. I'm working on a few more things, whereby I could have a Himalaya goes West kind of restaurant. Yes, it's contradictory¹⁸ to what I said - that I want to retire. And then I want to...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was about to say.

LASHKARI: ...A part of me wants to open a second place where everything is Indian and Pakistani-style hamburgers, Indian and Pakistani-style fried chicken, Indian and Pakistani-style pizza. I've already done some tacos, some tamales with the Indian spices. So sky's the limit. As long as there are other ethnic foods to draw from, I'll be busy.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's chef Kaiser Lashkari, speaking at his Houston restaurant, Himalaya.

LASHKARI: Save a little space for the desserts.