The Charlottesville 29

They say grief is love with nowhere to go.

Unless it finds somewhere.

To many chefs, cooking is love. Think of the hours that go into a dish that can disappear in seconds. What motivates it? The person who eats it. All the training, the practice, the preparation – they’d mean nothing if no one ate the food. They’re acts of caring for another human being.

Where does that love come from? Different places for different chefs. Some chefs say they weren’t hugged enough as a child, and are trying to hug the world back. Others have experiences that sparked their passion.

For chef Keith Sarasin, it’s grief. Losing two people he loved to cancer – a close friend and his mother – changed Sarasin forever. At first, he was broken, unable to make sense of what he was feeling. Eventually, food gave those feelings somewhere to go.

Sarasin calls grief unexpressed love. When life ends for a loved one, our love for them does not. Food became his way to express it. What once felt crippling now inspires him.

That may explain how much of himself Sarasin pours into food – as a chef, cookbook author, speaker, and lifelong student. Though he loves all kinds of food, his greatest passion is Indian cuisine, which a friend introduced him to as a child. Sarasin likens that first bite to Neo seeing the Matrix for the first time. For reasons he never expected, it opened a door he wouldn’t fully walk through until years later, awakening a passion that now takes him to India to listen, learn, and eat.

The culmination of that passion is Aatma Curry House – the Boston restaurant he opened last year, where seemingly no detail is too small to obsess over. Each morning, Sarasin freshly grinds spices flown in from his favorite producers he found in India. Twelve of those spices season the ground halal beef in Aatma’s burger, inspired by a favorite food from his India travels: chapli kebab. The flattened beef patty struck him as kin to American smashburgers. So he brought the two together.

Aatma’s burger layers smashed, spiced beef patties with Amul cheese, achari pickled onions, and a sauce Sarasin spent three months developing. His target was chatpata – the combination of spicy, sour, sweet, and salty flavors common in the accompaniments served with chapli kebab. The Indian-American hybrid dazzles. Aatma sells more than 1,000 burgers a month.

Sarasin was just as relentless in mastering benne dosa – a deceptively complex fermented crepe whose preparation combines the art of cooking and the science of baking. He played with ratios of urad dal, rice and methi in the batter until they were just right. He figured out how poha (flattened rice) and mumra (puffed rice) can impact hydration and structure. And he learned the hard way the importance of precision in pan heat.

And then there is the butter.

Benne means butter in Kannada, and Sarasin doesn’t simply buy his. He makes his own fresh cultured white butter, or loni. This does three things. The butterfat helps blister the dosa’s dark, crisp exterior. Water in the loni turns to steam, producing a soft interior. And the cultured dairy contributes a delicate, sweet-lactic tang.

All for a single crepe.

Dine at Aatma and you’ll find the same creativity and attention to detail in everything Sarasin makes – Egg Salad Parsi Style, New England Gulab Jamun, even tater tots, spiced with chaat masala, that may ruin you for all other tater tots.

Why all that effort?

What emerged was a shift: from lamenting his loved ones’ deaths to appreciating their lives. As grief rekindled his childhood passion for Indian cuisine, Sarasin discovered that loving can feel as good as being loved. Channeling that love into food, he found that the people eating it weren’t the only ones being nourished.

He was too.

As Sarasin puts it: “Grief and gratitude are often closer than we realize, and food is an extraordinary way of carrying both.”

Learn more about Sarasin, his cooking, and the Indian cuisine he loves in his new cookbook The Soul of Spice.