Preeti Mistry is the author of The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook: Indian Spice, Oakland Soul and now the executive chef at Silver Oak Cellars.

Alicia: Hi, thanks so much for being here.

Preeti: Thanks for having me.

Alicia: I think it's wild that this is the first time I'm interviewing you, because I feel like we've been following each other on Twitter for a long time. [Laughter.]

Preeti: I know! I was thinking that. I was like, ‘I don't think we've actually had a conversation that wasn't in 140 characters or DMs.’ [Laughs.]

Alicia: Right. [Laughs.]

Well, I'm excited to finally have that conversation. So can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Preeti: Well, I was born in London, and then we moved to the U.S. when I was five. I mean, I pretty much just ate Gujarati vegetarian food, traditional Gujarati vegetarian food, which is like dar, bhat, rotli, shaak, which basically means dar is dal. Bhat is rice. Rotli is whole-wheat flatbread, and shaak is just whatever vegetables are in season or that my mom cooks in various different ways, from things that are super saucy and spicy to things that are more of like a dry stir-fry. Could be okra and potatoes, which I was not a fan of as a kid. I liked the potatoes, not the okra. Or spinach, or eggplant, or cauliflower. You name it. 

And then, I really craved everything that wasn't that. I was super curious about what my family calls ‘outside food.’ And I always wanted outside food. I was just curious. I just wanted to know what other things, you know? You watch TV, and you're like, ‘What is Ponderosa? What happens at a steakhouse? I need to know. Red Lobster.’ 

I mean, especially the meats and seafood and stuff that I never experienced at home, or at anybody else's home. And my parents were not about to take me there. At least I mean, you don't know. But my parents were not going to take me to those places. I mean, mainly because we didn't have enough money to go to Red Lobster and my mom would just never even step foot inside. She’d just freak out. She's a very staunch vegetarian. My dad eats chicken and lamb and some other random things. I helped him try a scallop once. He was pretty excited about it. He enjoyed it. 

But yeah, I mean, so then it was like McDonald's, Taco Bell, that kind of stuff when it wasn't traditional Gujarati Indian food. And we would go out to Indian restaurants, which was the first time I tried all these things that people think that somehow Indian people eat at home, like chicken tikka masala and naan. Newsflash, my mom doesn't have a tandoor. 

And just yeah, Mexican, Italian. I don't know if you've heard that before. But generally speaking, most Gujarati Indians that moved to the U.S., the two foods that they generally gravitate towards when not eating Indian food are Mexican and Italian, mainly because they can be made vegetarian relatively easy. And also because they tend to use spices. Obviously, Mexican more so with the heat. And then, my mom is just like, ‘Make me a pasta, put vegetables in it, add chili flakes. I'm happy.’ [Laughter.]

And then for us, it was like, ‘Oh, we could order other stuff.’ So it was, ‘I want to try the chicken fajitas or shrimp cocktail,’ or just all kinds of things that we had never tried before. So, pretty  classic Midwestern fast food with a mix of everything from scratch vegetarian Gujarati Indian  cuisine most nights.

Alicia: Well, how did you go about getting a culinary education beyond the staples of what you grew up with?

Preeti: I didn't learn. I didn't really have an interest in cooking. I just saw it as another chore and women's work, and I didn't necessarily see myself in my mother. I didn't look at her and think, like, ‘I'm going to be like that one day.’ And so, I wasn't really interested in cooking as much as curious about food. 

So it wasn't until I left home. And Ann and I, my wife, we moved to San Francisco. And then I just started getting really bored of outside food. [Laughter.] And so, I started cooking. And that's all how it all started. I just started cooking. I would go to the now famous Bi—Rite grocery store in the Mission and look at what the vegetables were and what was in season, and they had really great fresh pasta, so I'd buy some of that. And I was starting meat, because I was vegetarian for a period of time in my late teens and early 20s. So it was the gateways. It was ahi tuna, salmon. 

So I would get out of things and experiment with cooking them. A lot of Williams Sonoma, Deborah Madison, Mollie Katzen kind of cookbooks. And all my friends were just like, ‘Holy shit. You're good at this.’ And it wasn't cool then in the late ’90s. Twentysomethings were not having dinner parties and cooking. Just not at all what people were doing. So we were kind of an anomaly that we would have fancy dinner parties and tell people what wine to bring, and that they needed to dress nice and do the decor and everything. 

And so I mean, eventually, enough people were like, ‘You should pursue this.’ I wanted to be a filmmaker. Since I was a teenager, I wanted to make films. And I was working in film at a film arts nonprofit. So I really was like, ‘I don't know what the hell I'm doing.’ And then it just was like, ‘Ok, I'm gonna try this.’ I don't think I ever thought growing up that cooking for a living was a career, that was an option, or something that people did at all. Again, it was the late ’90s. Food Network was just starting out. There wasn't the level of celebrity chef culture that we have today. And so, I just was kind of like, ‘Ok, well, I like this. It seems to come naturally to me, makes people happy. I guess I'll give it a try.’ 

So it was just, coincided. I made a five-minute film, and it was in film festivals. And then my wife got this opportunity to work in London. And it was just a perfect break for me to try something new. And I talked to people at the British Film Institute and stuff like that. And they were like, ‘We'll take you as an intern, but you're not gonna get a job.’ I'd graduated from college. I had a couple years of experience of working. I was an assistant. Yeah, it was the perfect moment to be like, ‘Ok, I'm going to do this different thing and see how that goes in London.’ And then, whatever. I can always come back to working in film in San Francisco if I want. 

So yeah, I went to Cordon Bleu. It was weird. Mostly a lot of Americans and Japanese. I met the most wealthy people in my life. And yeah, it was just a total 180 from the world I'd been living in. I'd been living in this gay bubble of college-educated critique people, people were into activism and queer politics. And all of a sudden, I was in the basement of a five-star hotel peeling ten cases of artichokes with these kids who are five years younger than me, but have been cooking for four years.

Yeah. Changed it all.