No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World: At-Home Recipes from the Streets, Truck Stops, Villages, and Palaces of India - Hardcover

Irani, Meherwan; Feldmar, Jamie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593836138 ISBN 13: 9780593836132

Publisher: Ten Speed Press, 2026

Synopsis

People of the earth! James Beard Award–winning chef Meherwan Irani is here to tell you that Indian street food is the best food on the planet—and that with more than 100 of his recipes you can have it at home any time you want.

“If you love Indian food, Irani decodes the entire canon for the home cook without oversimplifying or diluting the most delicious of global cuisines.”—Andrew Zimmern

Entering Meherwan Irani’s restaurants feels like walking into a party—and opening his cookbook is no different. With warmth, affection, and a bit of swagger, Irani makes a compelling, delicious case for adding Indian food to your weekly rotation, providing you with clear instruction on how to build layers of flavor and texture, putting beloved favorites like bhel puri, vada pav, kathi rolls, and more within your grasp.

In the No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World, Irani takes you through the depths of this (liberally defined) subgenre of Indian cuisine that’s filled with delicious snacks, flavorful sandwiches, and curries and chutneys galore. He covers classics like pakoras and chaats as well as stews from roadside cantinas and Chinese-Indian stir fries. Through more than 100 recipes, Irani shares his tips for making street food with minimal time and effort, like sweet, bright, and crunchy Corn Bhel and a Mumbai Toastie, which provides one of the best uses you’ll get out of white sandwich bread. From Dhansak, the triple lentil stew his mom used to make, to the golden-crisp Dosa that’s now found itself in the lexicon of street food, these recipes are rooted in childhood memories, travels through India, and deeply conducted research on the cultures that have contributed to Indian cuisine. Essays throughout dig into areas of Indian cuisine that Irani loves to talk about, like why naan isn’t eaten with every single Indian dish and why chai should be made with substandard tea leaves.

With more than 100 recipes for sandwiches, chaats, fried goodies, and more, you’ll quickly see why this is the No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World.

About this title

About the Author

After spending time as a jewelry importer, car salesman, computer builder, and luxury real estate agent, Meherwan Irani is currently a chef, restaurateur, and spice mogul. Along the way he’s been named one of Time’s People Changing the South, a Food & Wine Gamechanger, Southerner of the Year, and has won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant. Meherwan lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his wife and business partner, Molly, and a minimum of two goldendoodles at all times.

Jamie Feldmar is the co-author of five previous cookbooks and one memoir, including the James Beard Award–winning Taste & Technique and IACP Award-recognized Italian American. After starting her career as a Gourmet magazine intern in New York (while moonlighting as a farmers market manager), she has gone on to write and edit for many of the country’s top food publications. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Hello, friends! My name is Meherwan Irani, and I’m here to tell you that Indian street food is the best food on the planet.

It’s an audacious claim. But check out the people in line for my restaurants, Chai Pani and Botiwalla. It’s all of the people. The adventurous foodies, the comfort food conformists, the “I don’t like okra” crowd, aunts, brothers, kids, grandparents—the entire freaking family tree. On any given day, a banker in a suit is perched next to a graduate student with a backpack, next to a plumber in overalls, next to an Indian auntie in a cardigan.

They are your neighbors and mine: people who’ve heard about this restaurant that makes Indian food that is exciting and approachable. What brings them all together is the craving for delicious flavors; the desire for warm, hospitable service; and the pleasure of dining in an over-the-top-styled space that both surprises and delights. We give them all of that and more, gladly—because along the way, we’re quietly ushering them into the cult of the greatest cuisine known to mankind.

With its mind-blasting combinations of colors, flavors, and textures, Indian street food has some of the best bites you can put in your mouth. And I’m not just talking about kathi rolls and samosas (though kathi rolls and samosas are both delicious and have their places in this book; see pages 78 and 119). There’s a whole universe of Indian street food out there, from the crunchy-soft-spicy-cool world of chaats to the constellation of hearty homestyle cooking at roadside dhabas (truck stops) to the seemingly limitless sandwich iterations Indians have invented. Not all Indian food is street food, but all Indian street food, taken together, represents the best of what Indian food has to offer.

This is why I’m such a vocal proponent of the stuff. I see street food as a gateway to the whole, wide, glorious world of Indian cuisine. I believe that once Americans get a taste of a golden-crisp vada pav, or a crunchy-sweet-sour bhel puri, they’ll go all in.

According to the food media, Indian food has been teetering on the brink of its breakout moment for about a decade now. I call bullshit on that. Between the explosion of award-winning Indian restaurants across the country, Oprah’s inclusion of my Indian spice blends as one of her favorite things, and the fact that Chai Pani won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant in 2022, the truth is: We’re already here. I just want to democratize it.

This all means the timing is near perfect for a cookbook that brings Indian street food home. This book is for both hungry fans who are ready to embrace the Indian food revolution and anyone who doesn’t yet know what they’re missing. Learning to make Indian street food at home is a blast—and it’s really, truly, not that hard. If my mom could come visit me in South Carolina when I was a broke-ass grad student thirty years ago and find 90 percent of what she needed to cook the foods of my youth at the Piggly Wiggly, you can, too.

A whole lot of people out there are dying to eat this stuff, and I feed many of them every day. But those who can’t make it to a Chai Pani or a Botiwalla—and those who have and want to recreate the magic at home—need someone friendly to show them the way. That someone is, much to my own surprise, me!

My entire culinary career has been built around translating Indian food to appeal to American eaters. I grew up eating across this particular East-West divide, with my mother cooking for Westerners at our bed-and-breakfast in India, and it’s part of why Chai Pani and Botiwalla have been so successful. Not to toot my own horn, but I’ve found I’m eminently qualified to help Americans figure out how to do this stuff at home—it’s literally how I’ve eaten and cooked my entire life.

I’m all too aware that cooking Indian food at home can seem intimidating to people who aren’t used to it. It truly is not as complicated as you may think. I won’t call for many specialty ingredients— instead, it’ll be lots of ginger, garlic, onions, chillies, vegetables, meats, and yogurt. The only slightly complicated ingredients might be spices and spice blends, though many of these are becoming increasingly common in even the most mainstream grocery stores (and for any that aren’t, I conveniently happen to run Spicewalla, a direct-to-consumer spice company). That said, I’ll offer plenty of hacks, including substitutions for anything that isn’t easily accessible—true to the spirit and beauty of Indian street food, which is about cooking with what you have on hand and not about rushing out to buy a bunch of stuff you don’t really need.

In addition to the recipes, I’m also throwing in a handful of asides on Indian street food and culture—the great debate over rice versus roti, the time-honored tradition of auntie holdbacks (those little home-cook hacks your aunties never want to reveal), and so on.

Though this isn’t a Chai Pani or Botiwalla cookbook, many dishes from my restaurants are the foundation for recipes you’ll see here. And because it’s a book, it can and will go beyond my restaurants, diving into all the mind-blowing, wide-ranging, sticky-sweet-spicy-fragrant-crispy-chewy-hearty-refreshing glory of Indian street food. There are chaats and kebabs, of course, but also hearty stews cooked at roadside cantinas for long-distance truckers, sweet-and-sour Chinese-Indian stir-fries, Parsi-style omelets that somehow look and taste like the Southwest scramble of your dreams, and more—so much more!

Edition details

• Publisher: Ten Speed Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593836138
• ISBN 13: 9780593836132
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288