A New Kitchen Opens in Lebanon

When Falguni Mehta first followed her husband to Lebanon, she imagined it would only be for a year or two. Twenty-four years later, with a career in engineering and healthcare and a son ready to set out for college, she’s started on another venture: bringing delicious, healthful food to the city she calls home.

Newly ensconced in the home of the recently-closed China Station on Miracle Mile, Turmeric Kitchen serves food from across India: from Rogan Josh from Kashmir in the North to Chettinad from Tamil Nadu in the South – with dishes from many other stops along the way. A restaurant specializing in Indian cuisine might seem like an unusual direction for someone whose career has been built around improving the quality of healthcare services and engineering processes, but for Mehta, they come from the same place: a lifelong interest in how we take care of ourselves and each other.

Falguni Mehta, owner of Turmeric Kitchen on Miracle Mile in Lebanon.

Growing up in Gujarat, Mehta’s family helped form her first connection between food and health. She recalls that the food there was very sweet: “They use sugar in everything, from curry to lentil dishes.” But she says that her mother had always had a very healthy approach to cooking: “she would alter family recipes to use less salt, less sugar, less fried, less butter, less this, less that…and you know, knock on wood, she’s 75, doing well.” Her first experience with American food was rather less auspicious.

When she first came to the United States, her husband’s aunt and family came to pick them up. She recalls one of their then young children offering a stern warning: “You eat Subway, right? If you don’t eat Subway, you won’t survive in this country.” She laughs about it now, but at the time she took it seriously. “It was an acquired taste for us…we’d never had a cold sandwich in India.”

Still, opening a restaurant was never exactly in the plan. After getting master’s degrees in engineering, she and her husband interned in upstate New York before he eventually landed a job in Lebanon, and she followed along on what she expected to be a short-term stay in a small New England town. But the stay extended, and Mehta wound up getting into healthcare. “I found my calling,” she says, in the field of healthcare and making Lebanon home.

After investing several years in her career, Mehta took some time off in order to spend more time with her family. “It was extremely important that I raise my son,” she says, “so he grows up knowing our roots, Indian culture, traditions, cuisine, and various languages.” While raising her son, Mehta also completed her MBA, but she initially hesitated at the idea of starting a business: “business is too much,” she once told her husband, but she tucked the idea away and it became a longtime dream. She might consider it, she thought, when her son went off to college, though she never thought she’d open a restaurant. “We’ll see how I feel.”

Her son is now seventeen and attends Lebanon High School, and for the last year Mehta has been feeling the impending departure approaching. “My son is my entire world,” she says. “I know I will be crying all day long [when he goes],” so she decided, “I need to find something, something new and exciting, that will keep my mind busy!” At first, she considered art lessons at AVA in Lebanon or taking up singing, but the thought of starting a business had been on her mind as well. That’s when inspiration came to her, in the shape of a bright blue food truck. She remembers thinking, “Taste of Punjab? What is that?”

Mehta and her husband had long been running a yearly Indian cultural dance festival called “Navratri”, at which they typically provided an assortment of Indian foods. In previous years, they had to go down to Manchester or Nashua, but last year, thanks to Taste of Punjab, they were able to get the food made locally for the first time. More interestingly, the food truck’s owner, Manjit Singh, was interested in collaborating – and in getting into a real kitchen: “It’s hard to cook Indian food in a food truck,” Mehta says. “This sparked the idea and opportunity to use my business background and open an Indian restaurant to provide a better, healthier option to our community.”

After some back and forth about the structure the business should take, Mehta eventually collaborated with Singh to create the new brick and mortar restaurant that would come to be called Turmeric Kitchen. It was a challenge to find chefs who could cook a wide variety of dishes. “Up here, you only see North Indian food…[like] tikka masala – paneer tikka, chicken tikka masala – and butter chicken.” As a result, she cast her search net wide. “That’s why we had to go to New York, New Jersey, D.C., [and] Colorado,” she says, to look for people able to make authentic dishes from all over India. “There is a lot more to Indian cuisine than just Punjabi food.”

Fans of the Taste of Punjab food truck needn’t worry, though. Mehta volunteers on Lebanon’s new Food Truck Task Force and has plans to bring the truck back under the Turmeric Kitchen name, “come next spring.”

And as for that name, it all comes back to Mehta’s focus on health –

in this case on the health benefits of food. Turmeric has long been used in ayurvedic medicine, and studies

have shown that curcumin, a compound found in the spice, has anti-inflammatory properties. Plus, as a long-time vegetarian, she promises there will always be vegetarian (and nut and gluten free!) options on the menu, as well as fusion menu items that will combine traditional Indian flavors with elements of global cuisines, and a focus on local and healthy ingredients: “We are what we eat,” she says, “I have seen, first-hand in my own home, the health benefits of what you put in you.”