Shrabani Mukherjee - Indian Foodism Lounge
It’s a Wednesday night, and I’m sitting at the same table my wife and I sat at just a couple weeks prior. It’s a slow night. There’s only one other table occupied by the window–a couple speaking English. A handful of Takeaway drivers collect their orders from the front door. Across from me, Shrabani Mukherjee describes India and the food of her home, West Bengal.
“The basic concept is nature,” she begins. “India is not a country, it’s a continent, it’s a part of lots of small states, and each and every states have their own diversity. We have all nature. Whatever you can see in the whole world, we have the whole nature in one country, like frozen mountain, to sea, even desert. Everything in our country. Every region, every state has their own climate, in West Bengal, there are lots of rivers. It’s a mother state of rivers. Lots of rivers, water bodies in our state, so we are habituated to take every day fish. Fish is our speciality. The climate is very favorable for growing rice, not wheat.”
Enamored with geography, Shrabani spent a good amount of time traveling India, wanting to see the mountains, sea, deserts and rivers for herself. Along the way she became familiar with the differing religions of India and the food of each region she visited.
“I didn’t think I would do anything with those memories,” she confesses about her travels in India. “I learned cooking from my traveling, and I learned the capacity management from my family.”
Indian Foodism Lounge, her restaurant, is not only West Bengal food, but rather a mix of various Indian cuisines. With the WhatsApp group she created prior to opening the restaurant, the goal was to reach people. Shrabani found that most, if not all of those in the group were Indian, who knew Indian food and missed their Indian food. Now, with her own restaurant, the business point of view has shifted.
Shrabani often takes time describing the food to the customers at her restaurant. “The problem is the concept,” she says. “Everyone knows the Indian cuisine is a spicy cuisine, like the Chinese, Belgians have a concept in their mind that Indian food is spicy food.”
“But…” I hesitate, confused, “Chinese food isn’t spicy. Sichuan food is spicy, but as a whole…” It’s a conversation I’ve had with my wife numerous times. What is it about Westerners that makes them equate Indian and Asian with spicy?
“When people come to my restaurant, they have the concept, but they want to try. When people still have that concept that it’s very spicy, they will not come.” The goal now, she tells me, is to get people out of their homes and into the restaurant to try something unique.
“I started to think about, what could I sell in my restaurant that will not be spicy? That people will love and when they love it they will want to come again and again to have that.”
Of course you will still find butter chicken on the menu. It’s not because Shrabani wants it on the menu, but that she acknowledges the customer wants it. Instead, Shrabani wants to focus more on the grill, and her Indian style street food. “Indian food is a world class cuisine, '' she reiterates. “We want to do something new, but I know it’s not so easy. We are trying to do something out of track, Indian people don’t love, because they are not comfortable, European people don’t know about that. So I’m in no man's land right now.”
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Shrabani Mukherjee was born in the West Bengal city of Kolkata in India–a city with a population of over 14 million people. The population of Belgium, for comparison? 11 million. Her father was a bank employee, who worked his way up to manager. Shrabani remembers him helping lines of illiterate neighbors with understanding official documents as well as reading and writing letters.
Shrabani proved herself and ranked high enough to become a national scholar, meaning the Indian government covered the cost of her schooling. She graduated with a Masters in Geography, and by the age of 22, had landed a government job as a teacher–a lucrative and stable position she explains to me.
“The difference between a third world country and a first world country,” she tells me, “the third world country population is huge and there’s a lot of problems with employment, so getting a government job at 22 is a big thing.”
She got married after university to a man working in IT, who, over time, started to work more and more abroad. “Maximum time, he is out of town, out of city, and after a few years, he was out of country,” she remembers. “It was a good life, everything was smooth for me, I had a graduate degree, fifteen years job, my own world, and suddenly my husband, going out of country for six month, two years.”
Nineteen days after the birth of her son, Shrabani’s husband flew to Denmark for work. Ten months later, after completing all the formalities for the birth certificate, passport, and visa by herself, the two flew to Denmark to join her husband. “I had a very good vacation [in Denmark],” she says, remembering the time she spent there. It was here Shrabani first discovered the importance of her national cuisine.
“There I started realization that European people and Indian who are living in Europe are loving the Indian food. It is crazy! Before that, I didn’t know that Indian cuisine was a world class cuisine.”
Shrabani and her family would often attend potluck parties and other festivals and festivities where she quickly discovered that everyone loved her food.
“It was so simple for me because my family background. We are a joint family, we have ten peoples in our house.” Shrabani explains that in Indian it’s very common to live in the same house with multiple generations of extended family. Parents, cousins, aunties, all living together under one roof. A lot of people means a lot of food. “Here I prepare for 10 peoples 20 peoples, it is very natural for me… if you give me one hours, I can make 20 people food like that. It’s very easy for me. I didn’t realize it would be a future for me.”
After a year and a half in Denmark, Shrabani and her family returned to India, though only briefly as her husband was soon offered a position in Belgium.
The week prior to her arrival, her husband had employed the assistance of a number of friends and colleagues to help assemble some IKEA furniture. When Shrabani arrived, she was met with a completely furnished apartment and agreed to throw a party for the families of those who helped with the construction.
“The food was very good that day,” she tells me. It was so good that one of her husband’s friends offered her an opportunity to cater a work function. “This taste we miss here,” he told her.
“My husband said don’t do it don’t do it, he will be embarrassed if it isn’t good,” she remembers, “but the friend was confident, ‘don’t listen to your husband, listen to me, I know you can do it,’” he told her. The order consisted of over 120 samosas, as well as other snacks, and though the number was slightly intimidating to Shrabani, she just thought of it as making food for 20 and doubling it, then doubling it again and again. “I don't know how I managed all those things.”
Shrabani asked a friend to help her and together the two of them cooked everything in her small apartment kitchen.
Not anticipating staying in Belgium permanently, Shrabani had planned to return to India and resume her job as a geography teacher. A part of her knew that if she found a job in Belgium that she wouldn't be returning. So when her husband’s contract was extended, she tried to request a two-year period of leave from her job, which would allow her to resume her work when she returned to India. The school told her that without her resignation, the post wouldn’t be vacated, and consequently her position wouldn’t be filled. Not wanting to disadvantage her students, Shrabani, with 15 years of experience, resigned from her position.
“My whole entire story is based on my husband,” Shrabani insists, seeing him as the catalyst for what would become Indian Foodism.
I met Shrabani back in 2019 in a classroom full of fellow immigrants. The class, which spanned only three days in early October, was an “integration course," intended to help new arrivals adapt to the Belgian way of life. The course covered the basics—the founding of Belgium, the constitution, basic rights, the monarchy, the difference between the white bags and the yellow bags. The course clearly wasn’t designed for someone from a Western, developed country, like myself, but instead more targeted toward those from the Middle East as well as Central and Southern Asia. Most of the people there were only there to fulfill a communal requirement for the residency permit. I was there because it was a necessary step to acquire free French classes.
With my integration course complete, I had been granted free A1 and A2 level French classes. So, a month later, on a chilly November morning, I found myself in an aging Brussels-style house in Schaerbeek for my first language class in nearly a decade. As I sat in the freezing cold, my coat still on, my breath visible, I started to notice some familiar faces from my integration course–Shrabani, one of them.
As the two teachers tried and tried to get the radiators on, and the heat working, a few of the Indian women conversed among themselves as I sat in silence. Anxiously I awaited the teachers’ first words, only to be relieved when they informed us that class for the day would be canceled due to the manfunctioning boiler.
Over the next six weeks, once class, and the heat, commenced, I got to know my classmates pretty well. Between learning our numbers and the alphabet, the basic pronouns and how to conjugate -er verbs, we drank coffee, and learned about each other’s lives. One Indian woman had been an accountant back in India, another a teacher, and when their husbands had been transferred to Brussels for work, they came along but hadn’t been able to find a job due to her lack of language skills. Almost the entirety of the class was female and Indian with similar stories.
My favorite part of French class though, was breaktime. I know, like that kid who’s favorite period is recess. If I was lucky, which, most days I was, the Indian ladies would share their homemade food with me. They generously gave me samosas, coconut laddu, a torn off piece of roti, or an assortment of pakora.
For a lesson, we held a school-wide breakfast where we each brought in a dish from our country of origin to share its significance with class–in French of course. There were, what seemed like endless tubs of Indian goodness, as each one of the Indian women had woken up early that morning and prepared something. I brought avocado toast.
The entire class passed the A1 course and, with our change of level and teacher, also came a change of location. Not everyone continued to the A2 level, but the ones who did were the ones who just so happened to make and share the best food. As my love for Indian food blossomed, I tried more and more to cook it at home. My wife and I became flexitarian, trying to eat only veggie during the week, saving our meat adventures for the weekends and we found Indian food lent itself nicely to a vegetarian diet.
They were also kind enough to answer my cooking questions, like do I need to use hing? What's chaat? Where do you buy your spices? Is there a brand of garam masala I should be buying? There were almost always conversations about food, and when one day, the conversation arose about where one would find the best Indian food in Brussels, I slyly took notes.
“There’s a WhatsApp group,” Shrabani approached me one day. “Would you like to join?”
I declined, despite my true desires.
The last time I saw Shrabani, pre-COVID, was outside of our final exam for A2 French. The written exam had been the day before, and now, each student, given a 15-minute time slot, had to respond to basic questions and answer with enough passé composé to get the nod of approval from the teacher.
“I didn’t pass,” I told her and another classmate upon exiting the oral exam–them awaiting their own fates.
She shared her surprise, as we both expected me to be successful. I gave her a heads up on how the exam worked and what the teacher might ask her. There was a mix of frustration, disappointment, and uneasiness in the air. Goodbyes were brief.
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It wasn’t until August of 2022, a good year and a half later that I found out Shrabani too had failed the exam.
“There’s an Indian Food Festival at Cinquantenaire this weekend,” my wife informed me. “Some of my Indian colleagues told me they were planning on going. Interested?”
Of course I was. Who doesn’t like food festivals? Certainly not me.
“Oh, I think I saw that on my Instagram,” I replied. “You remember that woman I told you about from my French class who opened her own restaurant? I think I saw she posted something about it.”
Indian Foodism Lounge was one of my first follows on Instagram when I opened my Bustlin’ Brussels account. I had learned about the opening of the brick and mortar some months back, and added it to my Google “Restaurant Wishlist.” Having wanted to go for some time, the opportunity to try Shrabani’s food again, at the food festival, rather than French class, seemed like a promising opportunity.
When we arrived on the Sunday at Park Cinquantenaire, we exchanged some cash for tokens and did a preliminary loop to scope out which booths looked best. Of all the booths there, Indian Foodism’s had the longest line.
“Never a bad sign,” I reassured my wife.
As we approached the front of the line, I noticed Shrabani working hard in the back of the tent. She looked busy and a bit stressed out. Afterall, the day's festivities had just started, and already they were getting slammed with orders. The names on the menu looked unfamiliar to both of us, though having learned recently of chaats, my wife and I were eager to try anything.
One Dahi Puri Chaat and one Aloo Tikki Chaat.
After placing our order, we did the customary slide-to-the-side to let the eager customers behind us order, when I caught Shrabani’s eye.
“Looking pretty busy,” I said. “It’s good to see you again.”
It took her a minute to realize who I was. I can’t blame her. A lot had happened in the 18 months since our final French class. She didn’t have much time to talk, being constantly pressed with orders to fill.
“Did you continue with your French classes?” she asked.
I told her I had and that this time I was successful, obtaining a B1.1 level.
“What about you?” I asked, knowing that COVID had forced the following session to be canceled and the subsequent classes online.
“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head with a tinge of disappointment in her voice. “There just hasn’t been any time.”
My wife and I took our chaats, grabbed a Kingfisher, and found a place to sit. The Dahi Puri Chaat–little airy hollow shells, filled with boiled potato, onions, tomatoes, ground spices and chutneys–Are everything you could ever want in a single bite of food. They’re crunchy, sweet, herbaceous with a bit of spice, and creamy all in one little flavor explosion. Having just one is nearly impossible. As we took alternating forkfuls of the Aloo Tikki Chaat–boiled chickpeas covered in onions, cucumbers, cilantro, ground spices and chutney–it became very clear to me that going to the restaurant was an absolute must.
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Indian Foodism Lounge can be found in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode on Rue des Deux Eglises, just a couple blocks south of the busy Saint Judoc Church area. Fairy lights dangle in a large rectangular window, enticing the passersby to glance into the softly lit ground floor of the restaurant. It was a quiet night when we came, only a couple other tables occupied when we arrived, and there was Shrabani to greet us with a big welcoming smile.
As she led us to our table and placed a couple of menus in front of us, I told her how nice it was to see her again, and just how much we had loved her food at the Indian Food Festival the month before. I told her how much I missed her snacks at breaktime, and how thrilled I was to see her success with opening her own restaurant–especially during COVID.
I had gotten in touch with Shrabani via a former classmate whose number I still happened to have saved to make sure she would be at the restaurant the night we wanted to go. When she said she would be there, we quickly made a reservation. As much as I had wanted to try her restaurant, I also wanted to make sure she would be there. I had been scheming about writing a piece on Shrabani since I first popped that Dahi Puri Chaat in my mouth just over a month before.
Instead of ordering off the menu, I told Shrabani that we trusted her to bring us what she thought would best represent Indian Foodism and her cooking. I knew whatever she would bring would be outstanding, and what followed certainly didn’t disappoint.
Knowing how much I loved her samosas from French class, as well as the chaats from the food festival, the first dish she brought us was a Samosa Chaat. The dish, one of many Street Food-style dishes found on the menu, is a beautifully fried samosa, broken into pieces and covered with a delicious chutney and spices reminiscent of the Aloo Tikki Chaat in flavor. I couldn’t think of a better appetizer, as it left us both with a mouthful of flavor and an anticipation of what would follow.
Known for their grill, Shrabani followed up the Samosa Chaat with a Mixed Grill Plate. The plate, sizzling when it arrived, came with three types of chicken, a Chicken Tikka, a Masala Tikka, and a Pahari Tikka. The three varieties, all slightly varying in color, came topped with red onions, salad, and citrus. We noted the differences in flavor, working our way through each variety one-by-one. Each piece more succulent than the last.
There was of course Naan. Pillowy, buttery, garlicky naan. The type of naan that sits on your shoulder, trying to convince you to order more naan, and ruin your appetite for what's to come. Typically I'm a weak man when it comes to ordering a second helping of naan. Giving into the temptation of naan almost seems like an Indian restaurant custom to me at this point. And though the temptation was fierce, I held strong, knowing there was still a main to come.
For the main, Lamb Tikka Masala and a beautiful side of Pulao Rice. The combination of the tender lamb, creamy masala, and buttery spiced rice made for a warm and comforting meal. Like everything that had come prior, the flavors had been present, forward, and encapsulating. With every bite came a reminder of just how good food can be when it’s made with care and heart.
At the end of the meal, seeing that nice woman who brought me samosas at breaktime only a year and a half prior, now standing here in her own restaurant, I felt a sort of pride for Shrabani. I knew, however, it couldn’t have been easy.
“I need to tell you,” Shrabani interjects, “that I am very crazy about driving. I love driving, I had Indian license, I was crazy about driving, long drives, everything I love very much.”
In India, Shrabani and her husband shared a car. Whoever happened to be using the car was the one who would be responsible for the car. If her husband was out of the country, Shrabani was responsible for the upkeep, the gas, if it broke down. When he drove the car, he would be responsible. After seeing a driving school a couple blocks walking distance from her apartment, Shrabani put her husband on the spot one night at a party with friends.
“Can I learn the international driving?” she asked him in front of everyone.
“You had a job and a salary in India, but you don't have one here, so how can you manage?” he retorted.
“I took it in my ego,” Shrabani admits, declaring then that she would prove herself in one month. “It was a fun challenge.”
Following the success of her first office catering order, Shrabani saw the opportunity as a way to fund her desire to drive, and started a WhatsApp group with her friend. Offering a special lunch menu for Fridays and Saturdays, Shrabani and her friend quickly began receiving order requests. People eagerly anticipated the week’s special menu and within weeks, they were delivering dozens of meals every weekend. All off word of mouth “We are relaxing the whole week and work for weekend!”
After resigning from her position in India, Shrabani found herself to be quite studious. She had always enjoyed learning and she began taking French classes, and online classes. But after a while, the allure began to wear off. She needed employment.
“In between covid, it was my courage to do something here, because I quit my job, and here I had nothing.” Shrabani explains that sitting at home wasn’t something she wanted to continue doing, “[With] a job you have friends, your students, it’s a quite different environment.”
Already with a solid customer base, Shrabani approached her friend about becoming licensed, and to start making a career out of food. When her friend declined, Shrabani, determined, refused to quit. “I started my struggling from there.”
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Originally looking for a professional kitchen to operate out of, Shrabani found the property on Rue des Deux Eglises and was immediately taken by the possibility of opening a restaurant. Becoming licensed and opening a business, during COVID, especially as a foreigner, was not an easy task. With most physical offices closed, Shrabani sent upwards of 20 emails a days for over a month, simply trying to find out where to begin.
“I didn’t know anything, any laws, any rules, regulations, even the office where I can go for the license, I didn’t know. I literally asked other restaurants, how can I get a license?.” Often the information she received was misguided. “99% of the doors were closed for me.”
Finally, with the help of the organization in which Shrabani and I took our integration course from, she was given the contact information for a man named Pierre, who helped her navigate the often Kafkaesque Belgian bureaucracy. “He was like a god to me,” she admits. He helped her with her business plan, obtaining a license, acquiring the property, and getting Indian Foodism Lounge open.
“When it’s not your country, you don’t know anybody, you don't have any experience, it’s a very difficult thing to prove yourself, that you are able to do that. It’s beyond struggling.”
There are still elements of the Belgian legal system that Shrabani struggles with navigating as a foreigner with no experience in business–but she’s surviving. For Shrabani, the food was the easy part, already having a strong customer base, it was everything else associated with the business and governmental side that she’s still learning.
With the added pressures of high energy costs, Shrabani, like many other restaurant and shop owners, is unsure of the future. “I say, everyone who loves this industry, come here,” she invites, “come to this industry, and you will realize what is the real struggle. I didn’t struggle to get my customers, to reach my customers, but I struggle with the government every day.”
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“Excuse me?” the man at the next table interrupts, standing in the middle of the restaurant. “Interesting story you have. Sorry, we were overhearing,” the man apologizes.
Humbled, but possibly a bit caught off guard as well, Shrabani thanks him, introducing me as her friend who is writing an article about her and the restaurant.
The man, Hiran, states that he’s from Texas, and that he and his partner had been traveling previously in Paris and decided to come to Brussels for a few days. Having a love of Indian cuisine, and having eaten Indian in Paris as well, they had discovered Indian Foodism Lounge through Google Maps when an ad piqued their interest.
“It’s interesting that you talked about how the culinary aspect of it caters more to Indians,” the man says, clearly having been listening to our conversation. “Indians come to these cities, and they like to have Indian food, but I wish it was more renowned, where everyone would come, and enjoy the different flavors as well.” Being vegetarian, the couple often find Indian cuisine to be accommodating to their dietary needs. “There’s always veggie options to have,” he states.
The man apologies for his interruption, but it is rather welcome. His commentary on the state of Indian food and the people who are actively seeking out and eating Indian food only further reinforced Shrabani’s talking points. Indian food among Indians, especially Indians outside of India, has been and is, renowned for being full of flavor, comforting, and to them is world renowned cuisine. But why has the rest of the world struggled to catch on?
Countries and cuisines all over the world have taken influence from Indian cuisine. There are entire Caribbean cuisines that prominently feature Indian spices and cooking methods. There’s Japanese curry. England’s national dish–the Chicken Tikka Masala. German currywurst. Hell, poulet-curry anyone?
It’s not that there is a shortage of Indian restaurants making traditional Indian dishes–rather it’s quite the contrary. A quick Google Maps search will bring up scores of Indian restaurants in and around Brussels. The reviews are often the same: “Most authentic Indian food we had lately,” or; “A very authentic Indian experience,” or; “Authentic Indian cuisine.” However, just a quick glance at the reviewers’ names will even further reinforce Hiran’s point as to who is going to these places.
The people working in these restaurants are some of the hardest working kitchen staff, nay, people, in Brussels. Shrabani is a prime example of the hard work and dedication it takes to run a restaurant, and for Shrabani in particular, it’s more than just the restaurant. One day she will be catering an office party, another she will be feeding lines of people at a food festival or cultural event, on top of serving people in the restaurant for both lunch and dinner shifts. With rising energy costs, restaurants are being put in dire straits. It’s becoming more and more necessary to have multiple streams of income just to survive.
It is no surprise that there are different spheres of food and food culture in Brussels. In a city of over two million people, where nearly a third of the population, including myself and Shrabani, were born abroad, it’s easy to forget sometimes that that “Best Restaurant in Brussels” title that is often thrown about, is almost always biased to certain cultures and ethnicities. Even if these anointed restaurants don't serve traditional European or Mediterranean cuisine, what they are serving has often been adjusted, or caters to, a western palate.
For those restaurants with frequent publicity, social media coverage, print article features, and prestige reviews, surviving may be just a bit easier on recognition alone. For those without it, everyday is a struggle. It doesn’t even matter how good the food may be, or how experienced the chefs. What matters is that people keep coming back. But before that, you first have to get people in the door.
What I’m saying here is no big revelation. When people miss that taste of home, they go in search of it. However, when people go in search of something new, something unfamiliar, something different, it doesn’t seem to be Indian food they’re gravitating toward. If it wasn’t for the Indians in my French classes, if it wasn’t for Shrabani, would I have sought out Indian food in Brussels?
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“Do you have your driver’s license now?” I ask.
“No. Til now, it was horrible within two years,” Shrabani confesses. “I didn’t get a single half an hour for me. I started from my home to food delivery, then I started, within six months, a restaurant, then I started with a dining service, then I started with party orders taking… even I didn’t get one hour to sit at home and take a good sip of coffee. I didn’t have one hour, whole day, whole week.”
I want to tell Shrabani that that time will come, but obviously I can’t. As a matter of fact, it very well might not come.
I think of Shrabani often. Everyone loves eating. Everyone loves food. Everyone loves going out. Very few people know just how difficult it is. When I bite into a crispy fried croquette, run my knife through a medallion of duck breast, or pop an entire Dahi Puri Chaat in my mouth, even I sometimes forget just how difficult things can be for restaurant owners and operators. And then I think again of Shrabani.
“Do you feel like you’ve proven yourself?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” she answers, for the first time tonight unsure of herself, “I don’t know. But yes, I am happy to do this, I am happy to do here, 15 hours, 18 hours job.”