PaperCity Magazine

December 2017- Houston

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PONDICHERI BAKE LAB ANITA JAISINGHANI "I ndia is more in- ward-looking," Anita Jaising- hani tells me one afternoon at her bakery and sandwich shop, Pondicheri Bake Lab + Shop. Indeed, stop a passerby in Mumbai to ask for directions, and a disquisition on how life is a journey can begin in the span of a sentence or two. By comparison, the Russian thinkers in a Chekhov play seem like coarse materialists. The Bake Lab seems to operate on a simi- lar trajectory. How many other restaurants' websites post not only menus and hours of operation but a link to mantras as well. When Jaisinghani first opened her moth- ership restaurant Indika, in a small house in the Memorial area next to Town & Country Mall in 2001, I hurried out there to see if the cooking equaled the buzz. I was not disap- pointed. Indian spices and techniques were married with European ingredients, resulting in crabmeat samosas and foie gras appetizers, tandoori duck, and little cookies flavored with cardamom. Now Pondicheri and the Bake Lab expand on that early fusion to create wonder- ful treats that would be difficult to equal in either India or the U.S. For the winter holidays, there's pumpkin chai pie, with pumpkin purée layered over chai-spice-flavored custard. A long list of cookies suggests that careful think- ing went into the ingredients, from the besan mithai, a fairly traditional Indian sweet made with chickpea flour, to the wildly experimental mesquite honey cake, made with a flour of milled mesquite beans — an ingredient that's as Texan as a Kilgore Rangerette. The Shop part of the name refers to little packets of hard- to-source spices that beg for experimentation at home (especially for chefs who have attended one of the Bake Lab's monthly cooking classes) and non-food items ranging from kaftans to facial and body oils with traditional Ayurvedic medicine ingredients. "I have ideas coming to my mind every day," says Jaisinghani. Food ARTS 91 (continued)

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