Meherwan Irani, Vishwesh Bhatt, and Cheetie Kumar
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“We Belong”:
How Chef Vishwesh Bhatt Is Defining the Future of Southern Food
By Eric Barton | Aug. 22, 2025
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Vishwesh Bhatt has a way of boiling down everything he believes into two words: we belong. It’s a mantra, but also a reminder, one that has carried him from family dinners in Ahmedabad, India, to a prep station in Oxford, Mississippi, to the opening of Chai Pani’s first Washington, D.C. outpost this summer. His new kitchen sits in the Union Market District, a fittingly loud, colorful corner of a city that thrives because people from everywhere show up and stay.
Bhatt is no stranger to starting from scratch. When he landed in Oxford in the late ’90s, he didn’t know how to work in a professional kitchen. He took a prep cook job at John Currence’s City Grocery, where the first lessons had less to do with technique than humility. He learned to clean shrimp, to handle meat, to understand the South through the foods its people held dear. “Never stop learning,” he says now, a credo that’s still stitched into his daily work.
Butter Chicken, Credit: Tim Robison
He rose to run Snackbar, a restaurant he opened in 2009, and there he began writing a story that was also his own: a menu that connected the fried okra of Mississippi with the bhindi his mother cooked in Gujarat. “The knowledge that one can learn about a culture through its foodways was a revelation,” he says. Cooking Southern food made him look back at Indian food differently, the parallels surfacing in stews, pickles, and rice dishes that told overlapping tales of survival and ingenuity.
Those ideas would become I Am From Here, his 2022 cookbook, a collection of recipes and essays that argued for the obvious: that the South is big enough to include him. The title, he admits, is partly a response to being seen as perpetually foreign because of the color of his skin. But it’s also broader than that. “We are living in a time where Americans of all ilk are under attack and are subject to scrutiny,” Bhatt says. “The title and the recipes are just a reminder to myself that we belong.”
Kale Pakoras, Okra Fries, Sev Potato Dahi Puri, Credit: Molly Milroy
Food, in his view, is one of the last ways to prove that to each other. He points to the sold-out Brown in the South dinners he and Chai Pani founder Meherwan Irani staged with chefs like Cheetie Kumar and Maneet Chauhan, where a roomful of strangers could be reminded that breaking bread matters more than divisions. “When given a chance to get together and eat good food, people are able to put their differences aside for a short while,” he says. It doesn’t erase the work, but it makes space for it.
Kale Pakora Chaat, Credit: Tim Robison
The D.C. team, From left: Daniel Peach, Sam Kramer, Ben Goodrum, Vish Bhatt.
Now Bhatt is bringing that spirit to Chai Pani D.C. The North Carolina original has long been a technicolor temple to Indian street food (and one of my favorite spots in Asheville), but the D.C. version will reflect the Mid-Atlantic too. Bhatt is quick to credit Chai Pani culinary director Daniel Peach—“a walking encyclopedia on Indian cuisine”—as one of the reasons he took the job. Together they’re already imagining how farmers market produce and regional traditions might sneak into a menu otherwise anchored in India’s roadside stalls.
Vishwesh Bhatt
When Bhatt isn’t in the kitchen, his perfect day off in D.C. sounds suspiciously like research: shopping the Dupont Circle Farmers Market, picnicking at the Arboretum, and ending with cocktails at Copycat Company. It’s an immigrant’s itinerary, a newcomer learning the city not through monuments but through food and people.
That’s the point, though. Bhatt belongs here, just as much as he did around his family’s dinner table in Ahmedabad or in a Mississippi kitchen learning to cook catfish. His cooking makes it clear: America is best when everyone is invited to eat.
