Flaunting flavors from home, Besharam style
The tea Heena Patel served me at her restaurant, Besharam, in San Francisco’s Dogpatch district, reminded me of the kind of chai you get when you go to someone’s home in India. The milk and sugar were clearly added at the brewing stage and there was none of the fuss of stirring it at the table. “By the time you do all that, it goes cold,” she said. My desi palate sated, I launched into my interview thinking to myself, “She gets it.”
Heena Patel was born in the ‘60s in her mother’s hometown of Balasinor, a village in Gujarat. Her father was from a nearby village called Thasra. She grew up in Mumbai but vacationed in Gujarat every summer.
She has poured all those flavors and memories into her dishes— Anand na gota, Vadodara nu chivdo, Mumbai ka jaelbi-fafda during Dassera, midnight khichu with the extended family in Gujarat.
Her culinary career began around 10 years ago through a program at La Cocina, a non-profit that helps women of color kickstart local food businesses. After running a catering business in San Francisco for a few years, the opportunity to work on Besharam came in 2018. It began through a partnership with the Daniel Patterson-owned Alta Group. Patel subsequently took full control of the business and even changed the menu to a fully vegetarian fare.
In 2019, Besharam was named Eater SF’s Restaurant of the Year.
Mumbai-London-San Francisco
Patel runs Behsaram with her husband Paresh. She was 20 when she married Paresh and moved to London from Mumbai. After around five years, they moved to California in 1992.
She inherited an appetite for immigration from her father who made the difficult transition from rural Gujarat to the bustling city of what was then Bombay. Back then, it was a big move.
“And not always accepted as well. There was the ‘zamana kya kahega’ thing, they always worried about social pressures. Seen from his eyes, it was a brave move,” Patel said. “One of his sisters was settled in London. As a teenager, he wanted to go out of India as well, but it didn’t happen.”
But he made sure it happened for her. “I never thought in those deeper terms,” she said about the legacy of moving far from home. “I didn’t think of it as immigration. I see it that way today, now that I’m older, wiser, and more experienced. But when I was leaving India, coming from the middle class, I was excited about a life where I didn’t have to worry about having running water!” she said, with a smile. “I didn’t know what immigration was, I didn’t articulate it more than ‘I am leaving my family, I am getting married, I’m trying to get a better life than here…’ I had no idea about ‘first generation’ and ‘second generation’…”
“I was raising human beings”
Patel feels similarly about her children, one of whom was born in London, the other in the U.S. In theory, both her children have several identities to claim as their own — their Gujarati roots, a mom from India and an Indian-origin dad who was born in Kampala, Uganda, who then moved to England and finally settled down in America, where they were raised.
“I was raising human beings,” Patel said. “I never had any kind of talk with them about you’re Indian-not Indian, you don’t want to wear Indian clothes, don’t. You want to wear a saree, go for it. Same for teeka-no teeka, mandir-no mandir…” There was no compulsion around any of those things and identity was not a topic of conversation in the household.
“I want them to be proud, kind. Without saying it, they’ve seen where their parents have come from. They’ve seen how we raised them at the back of the shop. That’s something I can’t erase or change,” she said, referring to the liquor-cum-flower store she and her husband ran in California for two decades before starting Besharam. It was here that they learned how to run a business and the meaning of customer service.
“To make their life stable, I was so engrossed in getting citizenship, getting my permanency here so they don’t have to worry about things like ‘Are we leaving?’, ‘Is my visa expiring?’,” she said. “For young children going to school here, this is home. I thought that was important. For me this is my second home or third home, but for them this is it.”
“You can’t even speak English!”
Patel is open about her experience with racism. “I’ve been called down upon for not speaking English by the locals here,” she said. “How are you running a business here? You can’t even speak English!” they’d say to her.
“I saw racism late in my life; in India you don’t see it, because everybody looks like you. You only read about racism in books. But when I experienced it…” she trailed off, then added, “London was worse.” The first time it happened, she recalls thinking, “So this is what Gandhiji felt like…”
London was also her first experience outside India. Simple activities like buying vegetables were challenging. “Today India is so advanced but back then I didn’t know what a supermarket was, I didn’t know how to open a milk carton. Simple things like that make you think ‘Am I an idiot?’ But it’s just a different everyday life,” Patel said.
These experiences made her stronger. “It was not easy. You realize that something shifts inside. Resiliency comes through. When somebody says ‘You can’t do it’, I say ‘I can do it!’” she said.
Patel faced racism in California too. Does she think things have changed today? “I think more changed within me,” she said. “I’ve been here for over 30 years. Racism never went away. But I changed. I have changed my answer to it; I see life differently. I am not as naive. When somebody tells me to ‘go back to my country’ or that this is ‘stinky food’ I know how to answer back.”
A Besharam act of defiance
Besharam in Urdu translates to “shameless,” and is in many ways the persona of the restaurant, said Patel. “Opening Besharam, my first restaurant, felt like a shameless act – something I was finally doing for myself. Besharam was a giant leap for me as I was putting myself –and my food that is deeply personal to me — into the spotlight after a lifetime of feeling as though I was living in the shadows as a woman and an immigrant. I had to work hard to get to a place where I felt seen and respected as a culinary authority, so I hope that my story helps to break down barriers that have traditionally held our communities back.”
Today, she employs first-generation immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico in her kitchen. “I want to pay it forward, I want to give them opportunities, I want them to dream bigger,” she said. “I’m learning Spanish!”
Language is not a criterion while hiring. “I want to see the hunger to learn in their eyes and pride in who they are.”