Industry Night: Passion Built The Empire, This Chef Brought It To Life
Ashok Bajaj and Chef Vikram Sunderam built the modern Indian dining scene in Washington DC, and in this chef interview they tell Nycci Nellis exactly how, starting with the night Ashok found out his landlord thought a building worth 40 million dollars still deserved a rent increase.
Ashok Bajaj is the founder and CEO of Knightsbridge Restaurant Group, the man Forbes calls DC’s gastronomic power broker. Since opening the Bombay Club in 1988, he has built a ten restaurant empire that includes Rasika, Bindaas, Sababa, Rosselli, and his newest concept, Malabar, a coastal Indian seafood restaurant in Van Ness. On this episode of Industry Night, Nycci Nellis sits down with Ashok on location at Malabar, along with his partner of two decades, James Beard Award winning Chef Vikram Sunderam. They talk about Ashok’s path from hotel management in India and London to building an empire in Washington DC, why he tore down a struggling concept called Rosedale to build Malabar in its place, and his honest read on downtown DC’s post pandemic restaurant economics. Vikram walks through his own path from Mumbai to Rasika, the technique behind the restaurant’s famous palak chaat, and what excites him about coastal Indian cooking at Malabar. This is a DC food podcast conversation with two of the people who actually built the DC dining scene, thirty five years and ten restaurants in the making.
