It is one of the most uttered phrases by gringos here: “Rio is a paradise, but I really miss ______ food.” That blank may be filled by “Korean,” “Ethiopian” or “real Mexican.” Very often, the object of the foreigner’s wander-gastro-lust is Indian.

But subcontinent aficionados have a respite in the home kitchen of Rashmy Naik. She moved to Rio in 2010 for her husband’s work. Cooking had long been her forté; she had already given cooking classes in Bombay, “just to keep nice and busy,” she says.

She got married young and said her culinary prowess has matured in the years since. “Twenty-one years I got married. Cooking, cooking, cooking,” she says, smiling and shrugging.

The year after she moved to the Brazilian coastal city, a cool 8,344 miles from Bombay, she began catering and doing occasional parties. Her first client in Rio was a British Pakistani expat who bought takeout dishes. Three years ago she began a home buffet, which became a hit as diners spread the word through social media. Nowadays she does a buffet about once a month, usually on Saturdays in her own bright and charming Leblon apartment. Takeout is usually every other day; watch her Facebook page to know what’s being made each day.

At a recent vegan buffet, two elegant Eastern European expats, a loud group of Americans and a Brazilian family with a child piled into Naik’s small but well-organized dining room.

Thankfully, in addition to being one of the few offerings of Indian food in a situation of extreme scarcity, Naik’s cooking is also superb. She avoids the worst of restaurant food, like greasiness and oversalting. Instead, her fresh dishes are punctuated by flavor and not fattiness. Her vegan buffet included yellow lentil dal, flavored with onions, ginger and tomatoes, an okra fried with coriander, cumin and chili, a mixed vegetable basmati rice pulao with carrots and onions and a ground lentil and coconut sauce. Even her silver serving dishes will make an Indophile sigh.

Organization-queen Naik becomes charmingly bossy as she serves freshly cooked dishes. “Dosa? Dosa?” she calls out as she patrols the dining room with the freshly toasted, potato-filled thin pancakes typical of southern India. She chastises a latecomer for risking missing the dosas fresh off the skillet. For dessert, she serves semolina ladoo (small, sweet coconut balls with raisins, saffron and cardamom) along with her standard spicy chai.

She gets her ingredients both locally and through a network of expats, who bring them back from trips. “Brazil, you can get everything but it’s expensive,” she says. Cardamom, for example, may cost 140 reais a kilo here (about US$45). She says it’s half that price abroad.

Attracting a Brazilian clientele is an uphill battle of tastes, and Naik says her clients are largely foreigners and Brazilians who have lived abroad. Remember that flavorings in Rio rarely vary from the onion-garlic-salt kind; Indian cuisine, on the other hand, has been scientifically studied for its flavorful complexity. Still, Naik is winning converts. She tones down the spiciness of her dishes for Brazilians, and exclamations from carioca diners at her table show that the formula is slowly taking root.

Her bestsellers are her chicken tikka masala, the chewy flatbread naan and fried samosas.

As far as Indian cooks in Rio go, the pond is small and she’s one of the very few fish. Asked how many Indians there are in Rio, Naik responds with a head count: 18 families.

That selection has made for some star encounters. During the World Cup in 2014, she got a call from an agent who asked her, “Is your kitchen closed? You would open it if I told you who wants to eat there.”

It was none other than the silver-haired Bollywood titan Amitabh Bachchan. With a three-digit number of films over more than four decades under his belt, he’s been called a “one-man industry.” He had come in his own jet from London to Rio for the World Cup final and some tourism. His son liked the buttered chicken; Bachchan is vegetarian. They ate lunch and dinner with her each day for three days.

In his whimsical blog, Bachchan ends a post about his Rio de Janeiro trip with a reference to Naik: “A generous Indian family that lives and is settled in Brazil, has most kindly delighted us with home cooked Indian food and we are so gratified by this … thank you so much! It has been devoured most gluttonously and with some to spare!!”

Does it stress her to allow a stream of gringo and carioca eaters into her home and dispatch home cooked deliveries across the city? The alternately demure and commandeering Naik seems to blossom among the diverse grubbers who find their way to her dining room. “I like it! I meet so many people,” she says.

For takeout options and the buffet schedule, join Rashmy’s Facebook group. Her public page is “Authentic Indian Cooking.”

(photos by Nadia Sussman)

Published on March 27, 2015

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