Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, diners in Asheville, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C, queue at colorfully painted carts, tamarind-infused cocktails in hand, buying tokens for pani puri that are made nearly as quickly as they are eaten.
Meherwan Irani opened his Indian street food–inspired restaurant, Chai Pani, in Asheville in 2009 and a sister location in Decatur, Georgia, four years later. Just last month he debuted a third outpost in D.C.’s Union Market District, but not before taking home the James Beard Foundation’s award for “Outstanding Restaurant” in 2022. Because Chai Pani doesn’t take reservations, the wait to order dishes like crispy okra fries, samosa chaat, and saag paneer can be lengthy on weekends, but pani puri carts keep guests happy until a table is ready.
Photo: Courtesy of Abhish Desai
The pani puri cart at Chai Pani’s Decatur location.
The puris are perfectly crisp, hollow wheat crackers filled with warm potatoes and peas that pop with a burst of mint water and gingery, subtly sweet tamarind chutney. Eating pani puri is unpretentious and interactive; Chai Pani–goers crowd shoulder to shoulder around the stand as fresh puris are handed to them one by one. The dish is a multilayered mouthful reminiscent of busy street stands in India.
Here’s the anatomy and backstory of this perfect bite, according to Irani.
Inspiration and beginnings
Back in 2009, pretty much the day Chai Pani was founded, I knew if I was going to do Indian street food, I had to do pani puri. It’s probably the quintessential street food snack of India. It’s a simple-sounding dish, but it’s actually quite complicated to make.
It’s a participatory type of eating experience; it doesn’t come to you on a plate sitting down somewhere. You have to stand right next to the street food vendor, and the pani puri is handed to you fresh as it’s made. Within about thirty seconds, if you don’t pop it into your mouth, it’s going to start melting in your hand.
It took me until 2012 to find somebody in the U.S.—an Indian family in Atlanta, actually—that could make the puris for me.
Emotion
It’s really fun to see someone try it for the first time and recognize that this is a sensation they’ve never had before. It’s harder and harder in today’s global world to eat something that actually makes you feel that way.
You can see the look of utter confusion on their face as the puri explodes in their mouth, and their eyes go wide and their brains try to figure out what just happened—and then see the delight as the flavor and sensation washes over them.
For Indians that grew up in India and came here, having pani puri is evocative of the street food carts of India. It’s reminiscent of summer evenings in college when your parents would let you go out for the evening and you’d promise them you won’t get sick. There was a bit of a forbidden fruit aspect of pani puri, because the word “pani” means water, because it has this mint and tamarind water in it. And if the water wasn’t sanitary, there was a really good chance you’d get sick. My parents were always stressed about me catching a bug—and that would happen every now and then—but it was worth the risk.
Flavor and execution
The puri part is this little wheat disc about the size of a Ritz cracker if it was popped up into a hollow sphere. But then you put a finger at the top and tap a hole in it, almost like a little bird pecking its way out of an egg, but the other way around.
Photo: Courtesy of City of Decatur.
Puris ready to be filled.
In that hole you stuff a mixture of potatoes that are very lightly seasoned with salt and a hint of asafoetida and dried white peas, or vatana. These are cooked with the potatoes, which creates this warm, soft, wonderfully starchy texture. So you put a little dollop of that inside, and then you take the puri and dunk it first in what we call the sweet water—almost like a syrup made with tamarind, dates, lots of ginger, and a little black rock salt to give it a funky sulfuric note. Then you do a second dunk into mint water that’s traditionally ice-cold, and the mint water has cilantro and a hint of green chiles blended in with it, so it’s a little spicy and a little minty.
And then once it’s filled—now at this point, you’re racing against the clock because this little sphere full of water is going to collapse in a second as the water seeps through—you pop it in your mouth, and when you bite down, the cracker shatters and that cold, herbaceous mint water just explodes in your mouth. And then you taste the sweetness of the tamarind water, and the potato texture helps cleanse the palate; the warm potatoes and the peas just wash it down. And then you’re ready for your next one.
You can’t do this ahead of time, so it’s a very visceral experience of someone making one of these, popping the hole, stuffing it, dunking it in the water, and handing it to you on a little plate.
Mass appeal
In Atlanta, we probably serve 2,000 to 2,500 of these per day. One kid won a T-shirt from us because one night, he ate 75.
Behind the curtain
Everybody keeps commenting on how our puris seem to be nutty and crispier. A little secret is that we actually re-toast them just before service to get them crisped up more. We also have a specification for how ours are made: We add semolina flour to the dough, which helps give that little extra crunch. It is a little special thing we do so that our puris are crunchier, crispier, and hold up a bit better for a moment or two before you bite into them.
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