South Indian Street Food Restaurant Pochys Wraps Crispy Manchurian Cabbage and Butter Chicken Into Rolls - Eater SF
"In a quiet corner of Berkeley in the former Lulu’s space, a new fast-casual restaurant hopes to make Indian street food as popular as Chipotle. First-time restaurateur and founder Aravind Pochiraju opened Pochys to bring South Indian rolls to the East Bay. Pochiraju immigrated to the United States from India 23 years ago but says he hasn’t found restaurants serving the Indian dishes he misses from home. In particular, street food holds a special place in his heart, so now Pochys will serve dishes that remind him of Bangalore, Mumbai, and Tenali. “It has to be so good that if people from that place come here, they’re like, ‘God, this reminds me of the streets of India,’” Pochiraju says. The Pochys menu is compact, focused first and foremost on rolls as they’re called in India, though most Americans would refer to them as wraps. There are three varieties, which can be ordered with different fillings. Tenali kura refers to the Indian city of Tenali, and these rolls start with an onion base, plus a choice of egg, chicken, or paneer filling. The butter masala roll is based on a street food found in Bangalore and features onions, tomato, and butter; it’s also available filled with egg, chicken, and paneer. Lastly, the Manchurian rolls are the restaurant’s take on Indian Chinese food, such as gobi, or cabbage, that’s battered, fried, and tossed in a garlic-ginger sauce, along with chicken or corn options. Customers then have the option to add on ingredients such as roasted onions, bell pepper, cilantro, and lime, with spinach and avocado available for an additional fee. In general, rolls start under $10 each with the price decreasing if you order more. And if a roll isn’t quite your thing, they can be converted into bowls, taking those same protein choices but served with a choice of bagar rice or fried rice and two pieces of roti. A lime juice drink and a mango milkshake, as well as sodas and water, round out the beverage selections. Although Pochiraju doesn’t have any formal chef training, he has worked on nailing down exactly what makes each dish work — why paneer butter masala tastes so different in Bangalore, for instance, versus everywhere else. He also has another secret weapon in the kitchen: his mother and her family recipes. As a young worker in Mumbai, Pochiraju says he needed to cook at home to save money and asked his mother for her recipes. These were the same recipes their family would use to feed 200 to 300 people at their village church, he says, and where the restaurant’s bagar rice recipe comes from. A self-professed perfectionist, he worked on those dishes at home over the years with ingredients he could find wherever he was living at the time. “I started experimenting with different types of dishes that I get in India, because every time [a restaurant would] put it on the menu, and you taste it and it is not that dish,” Pochiraju says. “I was like, ‘This is nothing like the dish that I’m used to.’ So after all that disappointment, you start saying, ‘Okay, you know what? I’ve given up, let me just cook here.’” If the concept becomes popular, Pochiraju hopes to turn Pochys into a chain, drawing comparisons to the aforementioned Chipotle. Already, he says he’s funding secured for two more locations in the East Bay with hopes to open in the next 18 months. Pochiraju says his goal is to reach 20 locations in the next five years. “Everything has culminated to this,” says Shruthi Sampath, Pochiraju’s wife. “He’s very particular about food and this is the kind of food he wants to eat at home because you don’t get it in a restaurant. A lot of love and research has gone into the recipes and the concept.”" - Dianne de Guzman
