Featured image: Discover Durham
“When our palate craves something, it may not be because the body is hungry,” says chef Preeti Waas, owner of Durham, North Carolina’s award-winning homestyle Indian restaurant Cheeni and the adjacent Bollywood-influenced Bar Beej. Perhaps instead we may be “craving a place, a hug from someone, or the memory of our 20-year-old selves on the beach at dawn,” she suggests. The back of Cheeni’s menu speaks to this idea, including in-depth descriptions of Waas’ personal connection to many of the restaurant’s dishes, from savory aloo chaat to warm chocolate chip cookies. “This space is personal, the menu is personal, the stories are, and so is the food.”
Where many restaurants are “inspired by” mom’s cooking, Cheeni actually is mom’s cooking — with all the wonderful complexities and personality of a whole person rather than a removed matriarch or an archetype. Cheeni serves food Waas enjoys making and eating, food attached to her memories of growing up in India, and, yes, food that connects to her role as a mother. “Every time I put a chocolate chip cookie on a plate,” she says, “I instantly flash back to both my daughters in pigtails, eating them as a snack with a glass of milk at the first cafe I opened when they were eight and five years old respectively.”
When dialing in dishes at Cheeni, Waas says she usually starts with a memory. Her Muttakos Medallions, for example, are a take on poriyal, a homestyle cabbage side dish from her childhood in South India. She serves her version with a tart lime pickle-yogurt sauce that has achieved cult status with restaurant regulars, she says. Her influences, however, do not stop at childhood — Waas’ life in the American South is also evident in Southern-fusion dishes like “grits” made from Tidewater Grain rice middlins and seasonal watermelon chaat. The food celebrates the difference between her homelands, but also what connects them: Ingredients like okra, seafood, greens, and rice, are typical in both cuisines, she points out.
A two-time James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast, Waas says the accolades she’s earned as a chef and restaurateur have taught her to trust her instincts and to serve her food “with true hospitality, but without compromising our ideals.” While she says there have been times that diners have visited Cheeni with antiquated beliefs about how James Beard-recognized chefs or restaurants should be, she feels pride in providing an experience that’s true to herself — rather than worrying about trying to be all things to all people.
This confidence comes from the wealth of industry knowledge Waas has gathered as an industry veteran and entrepreneur. “I will never regret my failed attempts and closed businesses,” she says. “Every one of them built up something essential within me, and my hope was that it taught my children how to get back up — a lot more wary, a little stronger, and most of all, with hope.”
These have indeed been valuable learning experiences, according to Waas’ daughter and restaurant and bar manager, Amy Waas. “I credit my mum for pretty much everything I’ve learned about the industry,” she says. “Watching her journey to where she is now taught me that there is no prescribed path to becoming exactly who you’re meant to be.”
In turn, Amy believes she and her late sister, Ellie, have helped teach their mother the power in her maternal identity alongside the importance of expressing herself outside the structure of their nuclear family. Due to the success of Cheeni and Bar Beej, Amy says her mom has a newfound sense of community facilitated by being a part of the hospitality industry. “Working with her so closely reminds me daily that the industry is changing — and that the authenticity and integrity of a chef and restaurant that operate against the grain is distinctly appealing, valuable, and important.”
