Nik Sharma

Category:
Season:
Season 01
Season 01
Nik Sharma
Loading
/

Show Details

In this episode, we explore Food as I chat with Nik Sharma – author, chef, food blogger, photographer and newspaper columnist about his food blog ‘A Brown Table’, his column ‘A Brown Kitchen’ and his debut book ‘Season’.

Show Notes

Karthika interviews Nik Sharma, a recipe creator, food columnist and photographer, and author whose book SEASON came out October 2. Nik shares his journey from Bombay to San Francisco and his love for food and the beauty that surrounds it, and explains how the recipes he creates are often a metaphor for his experience of the world.

The Transcript

Karthika Gupta: Nik, it’s such a thrill to be chatting with you today. Thank you so much for being a part of the show.

Nik Sharma: Thank you for having me.

Karthika Gupta: Oh, absolutely. I feel like everybody knows you already, you’re such a celebrity in the culinary space and the blog space and the photography space, but maybe for those of us who don’t know you, could you perhaps give a little sneak peek into your world?

Nik Sharma: Sure. My name is Nik Sharma. I grew up in Bombay and I still say Bombay because that’s what it was called when I left. I moved to America more than 12 to 15 years ago and I have been living in California for the past four years. I live in Oakland, which is right next to San Francisco. I write a blog called The Brown Table and I also write a column called The Brown kitchen for The San Francisco Chronicle, which is again a recipe-based column.

Karthika Gupta: Yup. And I’m right there with you. I will never say Mumbai. It just sounds really weird. I think Bombay sounds quite classy actually if you asked me, but I’m right there with you and I know we are going to talk a little bit about your journey and your blog and even the column, but you know, in some of your past interviews you’ve mentioned that all you ever wanted to do was to bake a cake everyday. What inspired this love for cooking?

Nik Sharma: Oh, let’s see. Necessity I think is probably the mother driver of every action in my life. Both my parents worked full-time and so I would go to school during the week. Thursdays were my day off from school and when my mother went back to work after she felt like my sister was of the age that she could be left alone with me or with my grandparents, that’s when I started to cook because no one was there, you could do what you want and I would go through her recipes that she had saved in her binders and her old cookbooks and I would go through that and then I started to go from there. And so that’s kind of was, like I said, necessity because I could do things the way I wanted to do and not have to eat what they forced on me.

Karthika Gupta: That’s awesome. I have a slightly similar story in that both my parents work too, except I’ve never quite been as interested in the kitchen. I just thought that “Okay, mom, dad are not home – let’s gorge on all the chocolate and all the candy that we can get”. But that’s awesome.

Now you grew up in a sort of a bicultural household. So who decided what was for dinner every night and how did, how did that sort of shape your approach to food?

Nik Sharma: You know, how it is in India, things are very different and of course it’s changed now, but as far as I can remember back then, the way things for that either parent would probably go out on the street and you would have, at least back then there were no supermarket. So you would go to the guy who has his cart that’s rolled on large wheels. And you’ve got vegetables laid out there, so that’s why you would buy your vegetables. So whatever was available in that season, you would buy that. And fortunately living in Bombay you pretty much get everything yearround except for a couple of seasonal things. But the weather is good for produce, you know, you could get tomatoes year round. Like even in California they die out when it gets cool, but it doesn’t happen there.

Nik Sharma: So, the concept of seasonality really never, except for mangoes and guavas, the concept of seasonality really didn’t come into play until I moved here. And then, with the meat and stuff, either either my dad or my mom would go. We lived in Bandra and so they would go and buy meat or they would send me, so that’s pretty much who governed the ingredients. And then they would cook what they bought. And then my parents also had a cook that would come to help out since both of them worked and she would cook food also.

Karthika Gupta: I love that approach though. I mean the whole seasonality concept kind of gives you this ever evolving palate of food and fruits and you know, just like dishes, right? So it’s not like because you have tomatoes the whole year round, you’re always having tomatoes. It just makes it interestingly. Now you love to bake, but you went to school to be a scientist. What influenced that decision?

Nik Sharma: Stability. I did want to go to culinary school, so when I was in school there were two things that I found really interesting. One was chemistry and the second thing was cooking. Cooking obviously wasn’t a part of my curriculum, but there were so many similarities between the two that they both felt like you were doing experiments all the time. So I really enjoyed that. When I wanted to go to culinary school, so my mom actually works in hospitality management and so she’s like a bunch of large hotel chains in Bombay and she said, I know what goes on behind the scenes and I don’t think that life is for you. It’s not easy and, and you know, coming from an Indian family, there is a hierarchy of career. At least in my family it was medicine, engineering and business.

Nik Sharma: And so I had cousins who were in medicine, a lot of them were physicians and so I kind of felt that I would go down that route in some aspect. And I ended up doing biomedical research and that was kind of fun because a large part of my curriculum was also focused around food, surprisingly not intentionally, but there were courses that we took on. So I took microbiology and we studied fermentation and we got to do our own fermentation, so like making a batter and then looking at the batter under a microscope to look for the different yeast and bacteria that were in them, we would get a sugar cane juice from the road and then put that in thesecollinsand let them ferment over time to see how bacteria produces pigmentation. So there were all these things that are constantly happening, which was so exciting at the same time. Then when I took biochemistry that became even more fun. I learned how to isolate pectin from apples, oranges, how to isolate, you know, carotenoid pigments from the orange skin. And so there were all these fun things happening, how to make gelatin from bones. And so those things that I didn’t think of then, but that was actually a lot of fun. Like I was going to food and pulling out these things that were there. And then there were the things that were visible. And I think for someone like me, anything that’s visual is the most exciting. So there were things like chromatography where I was looking at pigments, isolating pigments from plants, like spinach, and it was just amazing to see like even something like spinach when it, there’s different types of chlorophyll pigments and they separate differently and the color is actually different when they separate. So those were the things that I was really excited by. So I was still cooking at this point back in India and then when I moved to America I was on my own living by myself, so I was cooking also for myself and you know, that’s when I started exploring the kitchen because I was independent and free.

Karthika Gupta: This is so fascinating. Now my daughter actually to cook and I have no idea where she gets us from because I don’t. I’ll have to tell about this because it’s so interesting that, you know, science can teach you so much about food. That’s, that’s fascinating. Now. And you came here as a student, and you said you cooked here, but you came in for like Phd in genetics, right? And you said your food was like your window to the world. I mean first of all, how the heck did you find time to cook? I mean I came here for Grad school too and I think all I survived on was like bananas and seven-layer burritos. I remember that distinctly because there was nothing else there for me to eat and I did not know my way into the kitchen. But how did you manage to juggle all of these different balls and wear all these different hats?

Nik Sharma: I think probably because I’m high energy most of the time. That probably has something to do with it. In grad school what kind of happened was, like you said, you’re always stuck in a lab, but often the experiments were so long. So you’d wait for these long periods and I lived on campus for the first year so I could just walk home and come back late at night, know, get my data and finish things off. I didn’t grow up in a rich family, so I had never traveled abroad until that point until I came to America. When I came to America again, I was kind of stifled by my budget. I wasn’t dependent on my parents, but I still had to pay my rent and do other things. And it’s not a lot of money. I was lucky I lived in Cincinnati where the cost of living is was low, so I had like some amount of disposable income to spend on food. First of all I wasn’t restricted by any dietary things. So I eat beef and everything. So I didn’t have, you know, those things. Not that those are limiting factors, but it does open up a lot of new things for you. And so when I came to America, one of the things that I wanted to, I really wanted to experience where I was for what it was. And so I, I was living where I actually lived the alone, I never lived with anyone and that was a conscious choice. And then I didn’t have a lot of Indian friends in grad school because I knew I was gay and that I was going to come out and I was always uncomfortable because of how it was perceived in India.

Nik Sharma: So I didn’t feel comfortable at that point to confide in anyone who was from India about that. So as a consequence, my friends were all American of like people from different countries. And also my program was such that I didn’t have a lot of people in my class who were from India. And this was all unintentional, but it just happened that way. So I was forced to go out and eat with my friends who were already used to trying different things. And so like I had a friend in Grad school who is Italian and I would go out with her to eat Italian food or Greek food and then I had another friend who was from New Orleans who exposed me to Cajun food. So there were all these different things. And so for me, since I knew I couldn’t afford to travel, this was a way for me to experience the world through food.

Karthika Gupta: That’s amazing. I mean that’s what a fantastic way to sort of get ingrained into different cultures. Right. For you, as somebody who cooks and food is such a big part of who you are, it totally makes sense. But even for others, who are maybe not like food bloggers or great cooks, , just trying new foods from different countries, it just gives such an insight into the culture. You know, how people eat, the spices, the way they cook. It’s fascinating. What an incredible experience. Now I have to ask. I had two suitcases and I think my mom gave me one of her pressure cookers and she was like, “here, take this, use it to cook rice and Dahl and everything else that you want to eat”. Did you do the same thing? Did you come with a pressure cooker?

Nik Sharma: I did. And I got rid of it in the first week. I remember when I came to Grad school before I took my flight, the Indian students association sent a pdf to all the Indian students and so my parents happened to see that and they said, okay, so we need to get you all of these things. And I said, come on. Also, at that point I had a fear of pressure cookers because my mom had blown the lid off a couple of times and taken the ceiling out. So, I don’t like stove top pressures, I use an electric one now. They insisted that I should take one. I don’t eat Dahl like everyday. Maybe once a month. It’s not something that’s always on because I’m eating other things too. And so I kept telling them that if I’m going to go to another country, I’m not going to want to eat Indian food all day long because you want to experience the country for all it has to offer. If I had to do that then I might as well have just stayed in India.

Karthika Gupta: That’s right.

Nik Sharma: And I mean I get how fast things cook, but you don’t always want the same texture. I feel like in Indian cooking sometimes the meat is overcooked. In the West, it’s not always done like that. Often, like a steak is cooked to medium rare. It’s very rare that you’ll actually cook something breaks down. Like in full pork, for example, right? At an Indian cooking we usually go beyond the point of cooking because our meat is also different. Our meat is not tenderized before, while meat is usually sold tenderized here, and they didn’t listen so they packed the thing up in my bag and I brought it and then I gave it to someone who really love to cook. I met an Indian kid in when I was in Ohio and I said, “Hey, so you really liked to cook Dahl everyday? You can have my pressure cooker. It’s brand new. I’ve not used it. You can take it.”

Karthika Gupta: That is so funny. So for me it was kind of the flip, right? Because I didn’t know how to cook and I am a Vegetarian. So Dahl and rice and I’m actually from the south so a lot of south Indian food is done in the pressure cooker, but I never knew how to use it. And it’s funny you say your mom blew the top of the cooker because my mom did the same thing. She ruined so many pressure cookers because she didn’t know how to use it, but still she thought maybe I would, so sends me here with one and I’m looking at it going, I have no idea. I have no idea how to use this thing. I’ve never stepped foot in the kitchen. I don’t know what mom and dad we’re thinking, but if it makes you feel better, all right. I’ll just keep it. A lot of fun stories around the pressure cooker for sure. So what happened after school?

Nik Sharma: So I passed my qualifying exams for my Phd and I still had two years left, but I just wasn’t happy where I was and I wanted to get out of it and I needed a change because I’d also come out and had all this emotional baggage with me, so I kind of wanted to change. I’d also switched labs on the and the professor that I was with had also quit and left. So I did switch labs and I wasn’t happy with the way the research was going and then funding was also all messed up with the government moving research funding to defense. And so I said, this is just kind of depressing watching my professors who are so highly educated trying to beg for funding. And so I said, maybe I need to change. How about you take a break, go and do some research somewhere then if you really want to do it, you know, I’m going to reapply for a Phd. So I went to Georgetown in DC and I worked at the at the department of Medicine and I did a physiological research over there for awhile. And then in DC I was interacting with a lot of people who were in politics or in the policy field and I suddenly felt that could be a nice transition because I did love the policy and the human behavior and the economic aspect of trying to understand how science and health work. And I said why not go to public policy school at Georgetown? So I was throwing myself completely into academia again. So it was work at the hospital during the day and then in the evening go to school. And it was fun because I was doing something completely different and it was actually exciting, but at that point I was still just in academia all the time and that’s when the blog began because someone told me, “hey, you know, there’s something called a blog, why don’t you do it, you like to cook” and about this point I was also entertaining a lot more people than I had in Grad school, so I become much more confident in my skills. And so that’s how the blog transpired.

Karthika Gupta: And now the blog is A Brown Table. Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired that name and what is, what is the kind of message that you’re sharing with the blog?

Nik Sharma: Sure. So the blogs name, A Brown Table, is two things. One is that it is metaphorical where I’m basically referring to me being brown. And the second thing was there was actually two brown planks that I would shoot on and I will rest them on the recycle and the regular trash can and photograph. And, that’s how I’m the name transpired for the blog. And so what I wanted to do with the blog, I had noticed that when I moved to America, every restaurants that served Indian food, was Indian food, that I really didn’t eat at home. And so for me that was really surprising. Like I could eat south Indian food in restaurants and I like those Dosas were really popular and they still are. And then the Punjabi side of things, the north Indian and those were the two predominant versions of India that was being marketed to people. And so one of the things, even in Grad school, but I will cook something different because I was familiar with those recipes people would say is that really Indian? And so I realized that there was this pile of regional cuisine that was not being spoken about. And so I figured that maybe I should talk about that a little bit because no one knew anything and I would get all these questions and I realized that people really don’t know it or have not been exposed at. The second thing I wanted to do was I noticed also over time that my style of cooking had changed. I was cooking with things that were available in front of me and make, you know, kind of learning how to deal with that and make it what I wanted and I realized I didn’t have to fit any mold. So I said if I’m going to do things, a blog while also rehash stuff that’s already out there, let me do something that I’m really passionate about and I enjoy. And so I went with that attitude, whether people like it then great, if they like it that’s always amazing, but if they don’t like it, they can always go somewhere else and find what they want.

Karthika Gupta: Well you have an amazing following and I know people love your work. I would say that you being different and thinking outside the box and wanting to do things your own way has really paid off. And it’s inspiring also because like you said, leavesand dosas and north cuisine is all done to death, everybody does it. Why not show something a little different, something that you are close to but still different so that you can inspire people to think outside the box. So that’s amazing. Now let’s follow along your journey. You’ve fallen in love with this point and you’ve gotten married. Has marriage changed the way you look? I mean, cook now?

Nik Sharma: The way I look at me, I feel like sometimes I aged,

Karthika Gupta: Haha, I know I said the wrong thing there.

Nik: Haha, well I think marriage does age you a bit!

Karthika Gupta: Kids even more, perhaps.

Nik Sharma: That hasn’t happened yet, but to cook it has changed because I remember when I lived alone I could just call it today and eat whatever I want now. My husband travels a lot and so when he’s home then I need to also cater to his needs too when it comes to eating because I could easily just toss a salad together and call it a day, but he prefers something a little more substantial, so then I have to plan ahead and think about that. I try to do my best, but it is different. I mean you have to think about someone else all the time.

Karthika Gupta: Correct, very true. You said when you were in school, you came out and you’ve now married, so how did your family react to all these changes in your life?

Nik Sharma: Well, I had a fortunate experience that my family was open-minded. There was some obstacles initially for the first few months where my mother was having a hard time because she comes from a Catholic family so that she was really afraid as to how our family would react. It all worked out really well in the end, but she had a lot of emotional baggage and then I had to deal with that, but it wasn’t about her. That was the main thing for her to understand. And thenI think they had a harder time with me career changing more than anything. That was like, a big stressful thing. Even for my dad. He’s like, are you sure you want to do all this nonsense and you don’t know anything about all this and they’re going to jump, so need to be careful. When you’re going and taking on something risky, those thoughts are already in your head, so you don’t need someone amplifying them constantly. And so when I took the jump, that was probably the scariest time for them. And eventually, once they saw the public being appreciative about it. I think that’s when they kind of relaxed and now they’re cool. Now, they behave as if all that never happened.

Karthika Gupta: Right. I have a technical background, so I have a double masters in computer science and up until 2014 I was actually working in corporate and did love my job. But something in me was sort of, you know, I want to get creative. I always thought I’d never had that creative gene. And when I finally picked up a camera and I started sort of working with a camera and taking photographs, I was like, Hey, this is pretty interesting, this is cool. And I think I’m good at it because people are paying me to kind of take their photographs. I remember telling my mom, I was like, okay, I’m now don’t freak out, but I’m giving her quit my job and I’m going to do this full-time. And so there was this long pause and I was like, okay, are you still there? And she’s like, Yup, I’m here. But you know, you can always just try it for a year and then get back to work in a year, you know, a break in a year is not a big deal. And I was thinking great mom, but you know, you turn to like four years later and she is pretty happy with the way things are for us. I think parents all they want is for us to be happy. So you know, they come around eventually so I’m glad that it worked out.

Karthika Gupta: Now you also have a column, right? Can you tell us a little bit about the column?

Nik Sharma: Yeah, so the column is called A Brown Kitchen, which is basically an extension of my blog. I’m really lucky that I have an editor who lets me do and write what I want, but the column is basically about what it means to be an immigrant today. And so I try to do that with food. So I share often I share like a personal anecdote or a story behind the recipe and then I tie that in somehow through food. Then it’s also a way for me to show people that what we think of something or perceive as something isn’t always what it is. Like I mentioned before, a lot of people think Indian food is naan and curries, so I wanted to kind of get away from that and I did that on my blog and that’s what the editors wanted me to do as well, do what you want to do. And I did that. So it’s been fun having this new platform to write because you’re also reaching a different audience. And so it’s been fun. So I get to write about things that I could go back to the basics. When we first started out I wrote a special thing on spices and Indian cooking and then I did one on rice and I wanted to stray away from basmati even though I love Basmati rice, but there’s so many different varieties of vices in Indian cooking and you know that they can easily use a special kind of rice instead. I kind of wanted to draw attention to those things and show people that there is a lot of diversity within Indian cooking as regional cooking and then even within a region there are so many variations. And then how does that apply from an immigrant’s perspective, because I am not always the norm so to speak at home. And so that’s not what I’m going to share with you. There is the occasion that I will share something a like a dahl or something on the column. But that’s very rare. It’s more about using those flavors because at the end of the day I’m passionate about what makes something different as well as the pursuit of flavor. And so that’s pretty much what the column is about.

Karthika Gupta: It’s beautifully written and when you said you have free hand and you write more than you photograph, I mean you share relevant things and you share things that really give a perspective into an immigrant and also an Indian immigrant, and also food. I have a niece who was studying in Berkeley and always ask her to please keep the Sunday newspaper? Because I’m old school and I like physical books and papers. Even though I have a computer background, I’d much rather read a book and I much rather write. So I had her send me a few clippings.

Nik Sharma: That’s so cool. Thank you.

Karthika Gupta: I think one of them is a mango one that I really like.

Nik Sharma: Yeah, I did go through a mango phase.

Karthika Gupta: Now your last one I have to bring this up because it was beautifully written and you shared a lot of personal stuff and perhaps we can talk about that, especially in terms of the section 377 ruling that just happened in India. You talk about your experience and you also tied it very beautifully into figs. So could you expand a little bit on that?

Nik Sharma: Sure. As a child I always knew I was different and one of the reasons why I left India was because I knew I was gay and I knew it would not be accepted at that point there. And so there was always this fear inside of me that is something was wrong with me because I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I couldn’t confide in my parents or anyone because I just did not feel confident or comfortable enough because back then because it wasn’t talked about. You didn’t see it on TV and even when it was mentioned even Bollywood and the media portrays gay people as like a section of society that you don’t really interact with, but you make jokes with them constantly. And so it’s looked down upon in every possible way. And then the other thing was I was also bullied heavily in school because, I mean I’m pretty sure like a lot of the kids suspected and so I just had a miserable time and so India never felt safe. So that’s one of the big motivating factors for me to leave India and come to America was because I was gay. I moved here and this, 377 happened a couple of weeks ago. It was a very interesting experience for him because for the longest time now I am so accustomed to being out and I’m comfortable with my sexuality and I speak openly about it. I’ve never had to hide. And I’ve taken a lot of things for granted. So when the 377 ruling happened, it was like an emotional moment for me because I had to learn that and remember that a lot of the people that are in countries like India don’t have the same rights or the freedoms that I do now. I’m living my life now, but they don’t, so for me it was like I had like a flashback thinking about when I was in India growing up like how I felt and then when you move here you don’t think about those things. I’m also trying to think. It was also trying to put myself in someone else’s shoes that is the kid who might be gay, who is thinking about these things and wondering do I fit in? Should I be born? Should I have been born? I mean that was like an actual question that crossed my mind often. Do I fit here? Is this right? Is this wrong? You just don’t know because you have no comparative scale. And I mean of course I was fortunate that I did not have any terrible instances, they’re bad, but they’re not like some people lose their lives. I was fortunate to get away and my life worked out fine, but it’s always been at the back of my mind. After I wrote that piece, I had a lot of gay Indians are both male and female write to me and write to the newspaper and say that was a big reason for them to escape because it’s not easy. You have societal pressure too, but if you’re coming from a much more conservative family, then you have to get married.

Nik Sharma: I didn’t have that so I was lucky. But then there’s also like this pressure about how to behave in public, so you have to go and date a girl or you have to take a girl to the prom and you don’t want to do that and you just don’t even want to go to the prom. There were all these things that I feel that even with the ruling, I’m sure it’s not gonna happen overnight. It is going to take awhile, but it at least sets the precedent eventually for people to kind of phase out that this is okay. There’s nothing wrong with being different.

Karthika Gupta:  I absolutely agree and I think for the country to take that stance, especially a country like India, I mean that’s step. You’re right. Things are going to take awhile to change, but the fact that they did it just shows that okay, it’s sort of getting a little progressive. It’s okay to be who you are. It’s okay to live your life the way it’s meant to be lived as opposed to trying to be somebody you’re not. I’m definitely going to link that article to the show notes because I thought it was brilliantly written and you have such a poetic reference to fig when you compared it to the fruit and the tenderness of the sweetness, so it was just beautifully written, so thank you for sharing that. I’m glad that it opened a lot of people to talk about it because we should, we need to kind of address these issues and we need to bring it out in the open. So let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about the new baby in your life. Your book has just been published and it’s a phenomenal book. Tell me why did you want to do the book and how does all your experiences, your things that you have gone through in life and your hopes and dreams. How does that sort of play out in your book?

Nik Sharma: Yeah, so I wrote a book called Season that I wrote, styled and photographed and I was never ready to write a book because I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. And I think that for me was the biggest challenge. Once I figured out what I wanted to tell people, it made sense then for me to write a book, because like I said before, I really didn’t want to rehash any information that was already out there. People can go buy those books and they really didn’t need to hear me yap about something that they had already had in their houses. So when I wrote season I really wanted to talk about my passion, which is flavor, so not only spices, but also the techniques that draw out flavor in food. Uh, so something as simple like caramelizing a butternut squash makes it taste different. Even an onion, right? It changes so much in complexity or you add like a spice or an acid and how that changes. But I wanted to do that from a home cooks perspective where people feel confident and comfortable in the kitchen. And then I also wanted the book, since it’s my first book, to introduce myself to people and say, Hey, this is who I am. I’m an immigrant. I came from India. I’ve lived in America and married someone from the south and I’m also gay. And so these experiences have all shaped the way I think about food, the way I write, the way I cook, the way I season my food. And so season in itself, the word, the title for the book is not only is that the verb to season food, but it’s also metaphorical where I’m referring to the seasons in my life that changed me.

Karthika Gupta: Wonderful. I mean, that’s definitely unique about seasons. You’re thinking about all these different changes, but to take it in a metaphoric level and kind of look inward, drawing from your own experiences. That’s beautiful.

Nik Sharma: Well thank you.

Karthika Gupta: How do you draw very strongly from your cultural heritage and yet you kind of are open and you encourage people to like break the rules and start your own traditions. Have you ever encountered any sort of resistance or pushback from, shall we call a purist or do you find most people kind of really appreciate it and are on board with your take on recipes and food ?

Nik Sharma: Now I do, before I didnt. I used to have a lot of resistance, where I would get comments from people saying this is not how my mom cooks it, or this is not the way it’s done and that’s fine. There are so many nuances to everything in Indian cooking if, and being traditional has never been my thing because at the end of the day I don’t identify. I actually don’t even like the word traditional, I don’t like the word authentic, and I try my best to refrain from using that when I write because if you think about it, there’s nothing that is traditional, right? The authentic. Because if I’m cooking a dish that my mom prepared, she’s learned from, say for example, her mom, my grandmother then learned it from someone else, probably my great grandmother or like her mother in law. So it’s like that game where you whisper somethingand it changes a little bit. Every time I feel the story and the narrative keeps changing and that’s okay for it to change. I think people sometimes are so tied up into what this dream of tradition is and they’re trying to sell that and I don’t think that does justice to a culture, especially Indian food because there’s so much variety in Indian food and if you’re going to stifle yourself with holding onto things, how do you move on? How do you expand, how do you grow? The only way to grow is to experiment and to bring new things in, keep your mind open. One of the things for me to do this was I watched my parents and my parents, like I mentioned before, come from different faiths, different backgrounds, different parts of the country. Their families were not for their marriage. And so that for me, I think has been the biggest example in my life. Watching how tradition stifled their families initially. And so I never wanted to do that to myself. And so with cooking I feel it’s the same thing, it plays out where there is this desire to hold onto a dream that doesn’t exist. Sure, you need to know how to cook certain things because they’ve been perfected and they work well, but it’s okay sometimes to just stray away a little bit. Why wouldn’t you? I don’t understand the idea of tying yourself up and forcing yourself to do something a certain way because of guilt maybe. I don’t know. And so I was fortunate that never to have had that experience, and I do things my own way.

Karthika Gupta: You’re absolutely right. I think, you know, you’re taking a stance that you want to put your own spin to something, right? You are an individual, you’ve had these experiences. You’re in an environment or you’re in a country where there’s so much diversity and culture and everything anyway, so why not just be open to those things, if you want to have caramel in something that doesn’t ask for it, why not try it? What’s the worst that can happen.

Nik Sharma: Right. I feel like for home cooks, it was a very interesting experience for me to see home cooks never getting that freedom. But chefs do. And this happens in India too. If you look at home cooks for some reason, there’s this expectation that you have to follow your grandma. It’s like this exoticized fantasy of what it should be, but then you look at chefs, even in India, they are playing with flavor, they’re bringing Japanese food into Indian cooking, you know, those umami flavors, now you can go to Indian restaurants and you’ll see curebeing served with a raspberry compote and why can’t a home cook do that in India. And so why is there this bias? And so I said if people don’t like it, it’s a recipe. You can move on and cook something else. No, I’m not holding it at gunpoint and saying you have to make. You have an individual, an individual and have the choice. It’s your freedom to agree or disagree with me, but it’s also my freedom to do what I want.

Karthika Gupta: You’re giving people freedom to experiment through food. You do it well. Do you miss home? I feel like we both lived in so many miles away from home and we’ve grown up there. Do you ever miss it?

Nik Sharma: This is a very deep question. Yes and no because I had such a traumatic childhood being gay, I do not miss it in that aspect, but I ended up becoming an adult in America. America is my home to me and I can separate like that. It sounds weird and I might be sounding like disloyal to India in some way, but the truth of the matter is America made me feel safe. I didn’t have that in India. So for me, I love going back to India and when I go to visit my family, I’m on vacation. It’s, it’s an amazing experience for me and I do enjoy that. The first few minutes when I’m on the plane, it does stress me out because I started thinking about the past and then once I’m there with my family and everything, it’s better. But the other thing is a lot of my family doesn’t live in India anymore and so I don’t really have a lot of like cousins and stuff that lived there. My friends have also all moved away and so things are different so I feel like now when I go it is a second home, but I’m also in many ways a tourist so to speak because I’m also looking at it now with a different lens. I’m trying to understand India and see what it, you know, appreciate the culture, things that I never paid attention to when I lived there, you know, looking at different things. And so I appreciate it more now as an adult because I’m more conscious about things and am a little more mature hopefully. But in that sense I also never went back to India after I moved to America. After two years in the first two years I went once and after that I never went. I went back to India for the first time four years ago and then again last December. So I’ve also not gone continuously to see family and then my family kept visiting. Correct. So in that sense it’s very different for me.

Karthika Gupta: And that’s totally fine. Just because you don’t miss it, doesn’t mean it’s not a part of your life. I think you the way I see it, you bring about your culture and you know where you are from in a different way and that’s through food and your work with The Brown Table, The Brown Kitchen, you’re sort of paying homage to where you are in that sense. So it’s still there and whatever level it is, like I don’t have much family back home from my side. But, and like you said, like when you go back, you start looking at things from a different sort of lens, you know, things like you didn’t pay attention to before when you were growing up. All of the sudden, it’s like your senses are heightened and like you said earlier, the guy who rolls the vegetables in the cart, it still happens today in India. And it’s fascinating because it’s such an interesting experience to interact, it’s, it’s not like you just go to a supermarket and you pick up something from a shelf, you walked and you have no interaction. So much of introduction in that simple process of buying fruits and vegetables. So it’s, that’s definitely an experience. So do you have any comfort food that you find that you sort of gravitate towards or you know, that you cook for your husband or anything that’s your go-to that you like above everything else?

Nik Sharma: I do like rice a lot, surprisingly enough dosais my thing. My mom could never like roll out of batter and everything. And once I learned how to do it and she couldn’t do it, I was like, oh, I can do it, you can’t do it. So I’m really proud of that and when she comes, I make herdosanow, which is kind of funny, but I love making those. And so dosahas become like my go to comfort food. I’m not even south Indian so it’s kind of funny. But I make dosaonce a month for my husband and me and we both love it.

Karthika Gupta: Excellent. Dosa does have universal appeal. My husband is also from India, but we come from two different backgrounds. So he’s from the north,  and he loves, loves, loves south Indian food and I’m like, it’s the same thing. I mean it’s nothing special. And he’s like, can you please make dosa?And I’m like, can I make something else? And he’s like, no. This has been amazing. Nik. Perhaps a couple of questions to wrap up, but you said at one point your goal was to go to culinary school. Is that something that’s still on the cards?

Nik Sharma: I don’t think so. Now I feel I’m actually more interested in maybe traveling and experiencing the world more and learning about people and the food that they cook, especially stuff that no one writes about. I’ve become really kind of fascinating from a scientific as well as a cultural, like historical perspective to understand what’s going on and that’s something that I think I would like to pursue as time goes on.

Karthika Gupta:  Wonderful. That’s definitely a lot of learnings there. So lies ahead for you? What’s next? Are you sort of fully living your dream?

Nik Sharma:  As of now, I hope people like it and appreciate the book and that’s kind of my focus right now for the next couple of months and then we’ll see where things go in the new year.

Karthika Gupta: Now it’s gotten a lot of publicity and a lot of good publicity. I know you share a ton on your Instagram and it’s just, I can’t wait to get my hands on the book and the pictures and I think just the way you write and the way you storytell is very unique and very fascinating, so thank you.

Nik Sharma: Thank you so much.

Karthika Gupta: Thank you so much for being here and for sharing all this stuff and I wish you the very best.

Leave your comments below