Small business: Chaat Street spicing up Aotearoa’s food and beer scene

Chaat Street owner Vaibhav Vishen and Garage Project co-founder Peter Gillespie Photo / Supplied

Vaibhav Vishen says he started Chaat Street out of “sheer nostalgia” to experience authentic Indian Street food in Aotearoa.

Starting out in Wellington city, the restaurant expanded to Parnell in Auckland this year and partnered with Garage Project to produce craft beer All India Permit.

Chaat Street also landed a spot in this year’s Cuisine Good Food Guide. Vishen says the team is set to compete again for this year’s Burger on a Plate in Wellington.

What is Chaat Street?

It’s a tapas-style Indian street fare. The idea is to emulate the whole idea of Indian street food which is one dish at a time, fast and casual.

Where did you start Chaat Street?

We started off in Wellington about a year and a half ago. We started off as a pop-up where we served about 2000 plates over two days. We did not realise the popularity at that point, and a year later we started as a fully-fledged restaurant.

What was your motivation to start the business?

I think it was sheer nostalgia. I always struggle to find genuine Indian food in New Zealand.

We got into this with the mission of not changing Indian food, but to bring the genuineness of Indian street food to New Zealand in its real essence without having to compromise or cut corners.

Vishen says he started Chaat Street to bring authentic Indian flavours to Aotearoa

How did you get into business?

I come from a software development background. I worked for about four years in software in India. I wanted to be a chef from the get-go but in Indian society, there’s always a social expectation and a norm to get into academic fields.

Being of Kashmiri heritage, it is a lot more important to become a doctor or an engineer. I was taken into that routine of doing the same old, same old, but eventually I decided to move on.

I moved to New Zealand in 2014 to study at Le Cordon Bleu and I did a degree in culinary arts and business.

What do you do at Chaat Street?

I’m mostly in the kitchen but now being in this business, I had to learn I wasn’t an employee anymore. So I had to learn all the aspects of the business. Now I’m working at the front and back of house.

Why did you choose the name Chaat Street?

Chaat literally means to lick, but it’s a street food style that started about 300 years ago when the English arrived in India and defeated the Mughals.

A lot of Mughal chefs, who were previously cooking in royal kitchens, had to now fend for themselves because they were no longer employed.

So they started running little food stalls around Old Delhi, and of course near the railroads which the English were developing in India at that point.

Now it’s more of a blanket term used for all street foods in India. We essentially took that name and kind of brought the essence of it to New Zealand.

Why did you expand to Auckland from Wellington?

Hospitality is a very addictive business - I’m not sure if it’s a good addiction or a bad addiction. But seeing people enjoy a meal where they leave happy, it is very rewarding and you want to keep doing it once it happens. It’s very hard to put that into words.

One of the reasons why we wanted to go to Auckland was to take authentic Indian food to Auckland as well.

How did your collaboration with Garage Project come about?

When we won the Wellington on a Plate burger competition last year, it was a vegetarian burger. We were new and kind of naive in what we were doing. One of our guests walked into the restaurant and said that it’s criminal to put vegetables in a burger.

Little did we know that we’d end up winning and selling about 4000 burgers in about 15 days, which was great.

That’s how we arrived at the beer.

The branding was done by a truck artist from India. He drew the artwork, All India Permit, on a canvas and it was shipped over to New Zealand and we got it digitised.

The artist, Shabu, is a truck painter from New Delhi. His family paints trucks.

Chaat Street's Burger Wellington entry this year is the vegetarian Halkatraz burger. Photo / Supplied

The All India Permit brand was a holographic design that was painted over trucks in India so they could transport alcohol from state to state.

The alcohol laws in India are unlike New Zealand - every state has its own liquor laws. That means every transport company needs its own permit and licenses to transport alcohol from one state to the other.

In the late 1920s, bootlegging came in where a lot of small-scale alcohol brewers started making moonshine.

In later years, companies would just counterfeit the signage and paint them over trucks to take their products out into different states. So it was a nod to the bootlegging of the late 90s and the trucking culture in India.

What is your Wellington on a Plate entry for this year?

It is a vegetarian jackfruit burger that we are doing again this year. We created this burger with the first comment we received last year for the burger with someone calling it almost criminal. So we decided to call the burger Halkatraz, which essentially sounds like Alcatraz, the prison.

Halkat in Hindi is an insult, but if you spell, if you spell halkat backwards it is kathal which means jackfruit. So we used a spin on that word and kind of created a story around the first review that we got last year.

What flavours did you choose for All India Permit?

It’s a charred, spicy IPA. We used some of the spices that go into our menu blended in with New Zealand hops. Primarily the spices are tamarind, ginger, pomegranate seeds, and dried mango powder.

Where can people buy All India Permit?

It’s only available at Chaat Street Parnell and in Wellington.

Garage Project had it online in their stores, but they sold out in two and a half hours of being launched, so they don’t have it anymore.

Because we have that beer, sales have dropped quite drastically on our other drinks, because everyone’s coming in for that beverage.

What advice would you give yourself at the beginning of your journey in business?

Something that I’ve learned in business is to have patience and resilience.

It’s not just money that you need to start a business. You need the ability to stay put, and a wait-and-watch kind of mindset rather than instant gratification or for things to change overnight.

Keep your focus and that’s all it takes to be a business owner, really.