Chai Pani (Meherwan Irani)

Irani opened Chai Pani in 2009 on Battery Park Avenue with his wife Molly, naming the place for Indian slang — "tea and water," shorthand for grabbing a snack. The menu dealt in Indian street food: chaat, thalis, the architecture of flavor that plays sweet against spice, crunch against tang. Kale pakoras and okra fries landed in Asheville before most American cities had mapped those geographies, and a dish Irani called the sloppy jai became the kind of thing people argued about. The food was affordable and a departure from the curry-house template most Americans knew. By 2013, Irani had opened a second location in Decatur, Georgia, where the menu pivoted toward the cooking of India's Deccan Plateau, the region he'd grown up in.

In 2022, the Asheville restaurant won the James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Restaurant — the foundation's top national honor for a working restaurant. The award marked what Irani and his team had been arguing for over a decade: that Indian food in America could mean something other than the same ten dishes under heat lamps. It still does.