Vij and Dhalwala?s latest cookbook deals frankly with couple?s amicable split
MIA STAINSBY
The Vancouver Sun
Guests at Vikram Vij and Meeru Dhalwala’s restaurants only felt the love, what with front-of-house man Vij embodying the verb “to welcome” at both Vij’s in Vancouver and My Shanti in Surrey.
But about five years ago, the couple’s private life went south and their relationship became a grenade threatening to blow them apart.
They’d spent 17 years entwined at home and at work. “We were unravelling because we were sick of being in one another’s personal and professional space all the time. We both knew we sincerely loved each other. It wasn’t about love. We were just driving each other bananas,” says Dhalwala. “Suddenly, there was hardly any making up and new arguments were layered on top of old, unresolved ones. We’d become different people with different interests, life expectations, and were unaccepting of the other.
“I had small-scale ideas whereas Vikram goes very big on everything (including borrowing $5 million to start up a food-production facility). He’s a hardworking idealist. I came from a middle-class family that experienced bankruptcy and three months of not having a home.”
A long while back, they decided Vij would be the face and the brand of the restaurants and Dhalwala would helm the kitchen because both areas were equally important.
Conjoined in business, they couldn’t separate quite like other couples. They are open and honest about those tumultuous years in their new cookbook, Vij’s Indian: Our Stories, Spices and Cherished Recipes. It’s the latest chapter of their lives through a cookbook lens.
“The first cookbook was about our meeting and moving here and the beginning of the restaurant and the second was about its progress,” says Dhalwala. “The third is 20 years later, where we are today, and it blurs the line between work and home.”
Cooking family dinner was their armistice. “We cooked dinner separately and together,” she says. “It was the precious line both Vikram and I knew never to cross. Cooking transforms us from whatever storm we’re in the middle of back to calm security. It is the one thing we did not fail at.”
They didn’t consciously uncouple, like Gwyneth and Chris, but in the end they reached an amicable separation. “We’ve maintained a love and friendship. We have 100 employees and our livelihood and careers depend on it,” says Dhalwala. They’re now living separately but still do family meals together once a week.
“Sunday night dinners for us is so precious,” says Dhalwala. “We take it very seriously. And we say when we have our new permanent partners, it has to be part of those relationships, too.”
Although they are partners in all their businesses, Dhalwala is responsible for food at Vij’s and Rangoli, and Vij for My Shanti and Vij’s at Home frozen foods. “We’re business partners and friends now. It confuses people,” says Dhalwala. “We have maintained our love and friendship. We had an amazing 15 years full of love, excitement and passion and that’s what got us through.”
The recipes in the book are from their lives, she says. “If I don’t have my stories, I don’t enjoy the cooking. The cauliflower and potato curry is a really fast dish. My mother had a stroke, and is now completely deaf, mute and has aphasia. The one thing she can do is cook, and she cooks that dish.”
Others are dishes they’d cook for daughters Nanaki and Shanik and their friends (Oven-baked Chicken with Chard and Red Radishes) or their own friends (Pani Pur with Shrimp Ceviche) or a favourite staff meal at Rangoli (Indian Japanese Chicken Vegetable Soba Noodle Curry), along with dishes that arose out of conversation.
Beet Bites resulted when they talked about who they’d rather be eating with one evening. Dhalwala chose Jonsi, lead singer for the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. She made the dish in his honour and the family had to eat it while listening to Sigur Ros playing loudly.
Dhalwala’s other passion is the ecological state of the world and she sometimes wrestles with the cost of operating a sustainably run restaurant. “I’m always trying to figure it out and that’s why I support the UBC Farm so much.”
She once had cricket flour parathas on the menu, gently introducing people to eating insects (they’re renewable and sustainable and much of the world already does) but they weren’t a popular item.
She’s not giving up on changing attitudes. She is researching black-soldier-fly-larvae as food. She’s eaten them and likes the taste, and a local producer is trying to get Canadian Food Inspection Agency approval, she says. “I’ve done so much research on insects (as a source of food) and I’m ready to sign myself up.”
And if that’s too much of a leap for you, you can try Vij’s Monarch Butterfly dish. It’s a vegetarian dish named for the colours of the beautiful species, in danger of becoming extinct. It’s her kind of environmentalism. Always delicious.
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