Culture

The Story of Patel Brothers, the Biggest Indian Grocery Store in America

May 25, 2017
Photo by Celeste Byers

When he was 23, Mafat Patel headed for America. It was 1968, and he had just received a visa to get his MBA at Indiana University.

This trip would mark his first time outside his home country of India. Born the eldest of six siblings, three sisters and two brothers, he’d spent most of his life on a farm in the village of Bhandu, nestled in the Mehsana district of the state of Gujarat. He'd never traveled beyond the neighboring district of Patan, where he went to school to get his degree in Mechanical Engineering.

He completed his business degree within two years and moved to Chicago, where he fell into a vocation most other recent male South Asian transplants had, working the assembly lines of factories as a quality control engineer. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had done its fair share to usher in an influx of educated immigrant minds who could turn into a skilled workforce.

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But Mafat would later admit he found this work somewhat isolating. This bloomed into a unique quarter-life crisis: Though Mafat was surrounded by a number of recent immigrants like him, he still found himself unable to make America feel like somewhere he belonged.

The Patel family in Mehsana. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

It was an issue of appetite, mostly. His meals were the places where this alienation became most stark, dinners like small marches of misery, with American flavors he found difficult to find comfort in— nothing like the khichdi or curries he had grown up eating. Where was rice flour? Turmeric? This was an era in which Indians had to stuff canisters of these ingredients inside their checked luggage.

Mafat began to notice that others in this demographic subset had similar feelings; they were young Gujarati men like him, far from home for the first time, knowing they couldn’t forfeit their American livelihoods but still in search of any conduit to India. He took small solace in the fact that he wasn’t alone, and began to wonder what he could do to solve this problem.

Mafat saw a potential profit in this loss. He wanted to open a grocery store. It’d be small, but it’d have everything he, along with those in his community afflicted by his same pain, may need to cook the dishes from back home. And it showed signs of falling into place: In 1971, Ramesh Trivedi, an enterprising businessman, approached Mafat about a storefront on Devon Avenue that he wanted to sell, some shanty edifice that suffered from poor insulation.

Mafat didn’t mind. He dropped everything.


He quickly realized it was nearly impossible to mount a full-blown grocery store alone. So he asked his brother, Tulsi, still in Gujarat, for help. Though Tulsi and his wife, Aruna, made the pilgrimage to Chicago in 1971 just to aid Mafat in this undertaking, it took three years for them to sort out the logistics and open the first Patel Brothers store in September of 1974. It began as a modest operation, a sparse, dingy 900-square foot store with little in the way of anatomical logic. Shelves were disorganized and cluttered, while the then-three family members, the store’s sole staffers, traded shifts between 9AM and 9PM; on their off-hours, the men would go to their second jobs.

From the private archives of the Patel family. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

Today, Patel Brothers has splintered into an $140-million emporium. On that stretch of Devon Avenue in Chicago alone, there is now Patel Air Tours, a travel agency; Sahil, a clothing boutique meant for Indian weddings; Patel Handicrafts and Utensils, which sells religious memorabilia and trinkets; and Patel Café, an eatery. Today, the stores are managed by a rotating cast of family members that stretches over three generations. The establishments are patronized by a motley of ethnic groups beyond the South Asian diaspora. Patel Brothers has 51 locations, most concentrated along the East Coast, some stretching to Texas and the American South, and one in California. The franchise has proven resilient throughout the ebbs and flows of the American economy.

“The most novel aspect of Patel Brothers is how accessible it has made Indian ingredients for non-Indian customers,” Priya Krishna wrote in a short paean to the chain a few months ago. She notes the store’s skillful ability to market itself to an America beyond the South Asian diaspora through a technique as straightforward as listing its ingredients in both Hindi and English.

Patel Brothers is a store that exists at the juncture of pragmatism and fantasy; the store has realized a possibility for pluralist cultural exchange without sacrificing its Indian DNA. Patel Brothers has spawned a subgenre of Indian grocery stores, from Subzi Mandi to Patidar Supermarket, yet it towers over this ecosystem like a citadel of the Indian-American grocery chain.

A scene from the first Patel Brothers in Chicago. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

The brothers' narrative is what we call American Dream, that story of the hard-working, industrious immigrant who proves his worth through serving others, defying preordained odds and obliterating those obstacles for others who follow. I contacted the Patel family multiple times for the purposes of this story, and was met, effectively, with the same response each time: They were just too busy to field my questions. Running an empire takes work.


It is funny to think that the existence of Patel Brothers owes itself to a matter as mundane as one man seeking relief for a deep human impulse: his hunger. Had I known of the store’s origins growing up in New Jersey, perhaps I would not have taken its very existence for granted. I must have been three or so when I first visited Patel Brothers. It became a permanent fixture of my childhood, so much that it never occurred to me that there was anything vaguely special, or revolutionary, about this store’s being.

The Patel Brothers store in Chicago in the 1970s. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

This was the mid-90s. By then, the store had expanded to such cities as New York, Houston, Atlanta, and Detroit, due to the brothers’ realization that Indian families from various neighboring states were driving to Devon Avenue on weekends just to shop there. As I grew up, I saw my local store’s interiors gain more order and take on the characteristics of its larger, more mainstream competitors.

Swetal Patel, Mafat’s son, came of age in a family of ten in Chicago, with few students at school who looked like him. He spent a lot of time in the store as a kid, bagging groceries and pulling shopping carts from sidewalks to customers’ cars. Though he loved his mother’s cooking, he was too humiliated to bring any foods with some markedly alien odor with him to school.

“It was hard growing up, where we growing up in Skokie," Susan Patel, Tulsi's daughter, admitted in a 2013 interview. "I was one of very few Asians at the time in my school." She had an experience similar to that of her cousin: The enclave of Skokie she inhabited was saturated with white and Jewish kids, and with it came an element of insecurity in her heritage. It didn't quite help that the business of Patel Brothers surrounded her growing up, so much that it swallowed her adolescence. She’d help her father weigh grains after school and play tag in the store aisles as a way to pass time.

From the private archives of the Patel family. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

Having a childhood defined by her proximity to the store, a dynastic heirloom she didn’t ask for, occasionally overwhelmed Susan. Like her cousin, the pain stung doubly when Susan encountered an outside world that could feel harsh, incurious, or judgmental of her family's Indian food. Everything she was told to question or suppress about her own heritage was refracted in her father’s store.

What changed? In the early 1990s, Swetal and his brother, Rakesh, both decided to put their degrees in Finance and Marketing to use. Rakesh recognized that there was a new generation of Indian-Americans now experiencing a clamoring much like that of their predecessors who'd come to the States from India: They were working long hours, and they missed their parents’ food.

In 1991, the pair launched a subsidiary of the Patel brand called Raja Foods, a response to the beckoning call for more pre-packaged Indian foods that could be heat up as easily as TV dinners: ready-made chapatis, pea-and-potato samosas, meals that resembled TV dinners, but with paneers. It had grown out of Rakesh’s senior thesis, wherein he devised a distribution company that could fulfill this very need. He decided to name it after his childhood nickname, Raja.

From the private archives of the Patel family. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

Susan was a bit more resistant to dedicating her life to the family business: It wasn't until she went to college that she began to take an interest in her own culture, studying abroad for two semesters in India. The visit made her reconstitute her understanding of this store’s service to her family. She took the reins of Patel Handicrafts and Utensils in her early 30s. This business, once a source of turmoil and grievance, became a site of reconciliation.


Albeit a few decades younger than them, I grew up in a similar America to these second-generation Patels; I yoked my family’s foods to shame. I was a child of the Jersey suburbs, where I became profoundly distrustful of the outside world, believing onlookers would to write them off instead as evidence of belonging to a subspecies, that they would find the store's delicacies—from kulfi to kachori, those fine-flour pockets filled with dal and fried until they pop like pockmarks—grotesque. As a kid, I would fib that my favorite cookies were Keebler’s El Fudge rather than Bourbon, with dark chocolate buttercream sandwiched between two biscuits topped with sugar.

Inside the Chicago Patel Brothers. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

I would come to see Patel Brothers as the source for the great shame I carried with me in public: A visit to the store could carry with it associations of everything I was instructed to despise, from a certain scent that clings to my clothes to a box of mango juice that didn't look a thing like Capri Sun. It became tempting to disown even the simplest of pleasures, condiments like spiced tomato Maggi sauce, the more astringent sister to Heinz Ketchup, to consciously distance myself from them outside the safety of my own home. I played it safe, associating myself with these snacks' more favorable American analogs.

Going to Patel Brothers became a sort of utilitarian pastime for my family, yet my mind engaged in its own, cruel form of trivialization as I grew older, seeing it as the sorry sister to Shop Rite, A&P, or Pathmark. These were “American” stores my mind coded as white and thus aspirational. I carried this mindset with me for years until I moved from the East Coast to California for college, where there is one Patel Brothers store, in Santa Clara, a forty-minute drive from where my campus was. My diet had dulled in those years, revolving mostly around platefuls of quinoa, which I’d never consumed before college. Perhaps as an overcorrection for my ignorance, I ate quinoa as much as I could. It was a remarkably boring diet.

But there was an aspect of social performance to this, my attraction to dishes that gave me sustenance without the requisite gratification. It gave me the chance to deflect from any criticism that my palate still existed in the amber of my backward, brown childhood, that I hadn’t grown up yet.

My appetite for the foods I could find inside Patel Brothers became bottomless in that period, though in private. I craved chana chor, a spiced, fried chickpea snack that my parents and I mixed with Rice Krispies and had during tea in the afternoon. In the store’s absence, I grew weary for the thrills it offered.

Inside Patel Brothers in Chicago. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

When I returned home to New Jersey on vacations, I indulged in anything I could find on my visits to the store. I practically mainlined them when I got home. But I made a pact with myself to confine that experience to my parents’ place. I grew adamant about not bringing these snacks back on the plane with me.

It didn’t quite work. In my senior year, my parents stuffed a box full of soan papdi, flaky, cubelike clusters of besan (gram flour) and sugar, into my carry-on against my wishes. I was dreadfully embarrassed to have this on my person once I landed back on campus. Though I thought very briefly of putting it in the kitchen for everyone to share—I spent that year living in a house with nearly 40 other students—I wondered what they’d think, and I braced myself for the awful things they’d say when they saw its packaging.

Since there was no greater fear than not being liked, where did that leave me? I took my box of soan papdi with me into my room and kept it there, until I realized there were four other South Asians living in that house that year. I decided to share it with them. We reveled in its delights, careful not to reveal them to anyone else, because we were scared of what others might say.

We are taught to be ashamed of our appetites. We are told to actively suppress our hunger when it becomes too large. Distance made me understand that keeping these longings private was unsustainable if I wanted to be a functional adult. Spending time apart from Patel Brothers provoked a rigorous self-examination about what this store meant to me, and the first step was to acknowledge that it meant anything at all.

After college, I moved back East, a train ride away from my hometown. In this migration, I had undergone a mental maturation, finding permission to love the foods I had, thus prior, eaten only in solitude. I could put my cravings on display.


A visit to Patel Brothers can feel like emerging from a plane: Your sense of the world becomes radically slower, the activity of grocery shopping gaining a more leisurely glean than the frantic stress that can ordinarily accompany a trip to the supermarket.

The Patel family in Mehsana. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

One soggy Saturday in April, I trekked to the Patel Brothers in Edison, the one I remember most fondly from childhood. I hadn’t been there in months, because I hadn’t given myself much reason to be there lately, but my family found ourselves in the area. As I wandered the aisles, arranged like banks of baby mangoes and jackfruits, I was blanketed by dialects that were distinctly South Asian.

We go to the supermarket to get what we need. But our needs are determined by who we are and how we feed our obsessions. At the grocery store, everything we’d ever want is presented to us matter-of-factly, and we are forced to confront the extent of our desires. Our needs are not simply material. These are selfish, soulful wants, and they come from pits deeper than our stomachs.

The brothers in their home village in Mehsana. Photo by South Asian American Digital Archive

I have lived in a world without Patel Brothers, so I can say this much definitively: It’s terrifying to imagine a world where this store does not exist. Here is a business venture born out of one man’s hankering for home and his family's willingness to ease it. How comforting that they were brave enough to wield these desires openly, so that the rest of us could satisfy the hungers we don’t always realize we have.

I left the store with very little from that visit, drawn to what had long been my objects of affection: cake rusks for dipping in tea, a packet of wheaty and flat-baked Parle-G biscuits, and bag of frozen spinach-paneer samosas. These were items that others may characterize as inessential, but I needed them.

Celeste Byers is an illustrator in California.

All photographs of the Patel family courtesy the South Asian American Digital Archive and Susan Patel.

EDITOR'S NOTE, 5/26: This article originally misstated the number of siblings in Mafat Patel's family. He is the eldest of six siblings, not five. We've updated the text to reflect these changes.

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Mayukh Sen is a James Beard Award-winning food and culture writer in New York. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Bon Appetit, and elsewhere. He won a 2018 James Beard Award in Journalism for his profile of Princess Pamela published on Food52.

47 Comments

SarahDC April 18, 2020
I'm not one to post comments but I used to go to Patel Brothers in New York and now in DC where I live. Until I discovered that their leadership has used revenue to support a lot of genocidal policies against lower castes in India and does on a regular basis. http://southasiajournal.net/activists-plan-boycott-of-us-companies-backing-indias-anti-muslim-policies/

I'm so sick of seeing violence and discrimination in the diaspora. Patel Brothers hiring policies are also to never hire an Indian Muslim and this has been shared widely as well. You don't have to listen to me, it's your life. However it's something to inform your decision. Remember there's tons of other south Asian grocery stores! They need our support too! At least by going to a smaller grocery store, you'll be putting money in the pockets of a family in your community and you'll see that the difference is huge!
 
Gajendra April 18, 2020
Have you ever been to Indian continent? You are getting fed by media. Please do not discuss what you do not know. Recent laws passed have been proposed for long time. Also Zina asked for Pakistan for Muslims so they to have stay there and only minorities driven out by jihadi government and military of Pakistan are to be accepted and given citizenship. What is wrong with it. We go every year there and do some charity work without any reservation. One of our close friend is Muslim and he act like one of the family member, it is not problem in India. It is problem in Pakistan which is supported by US $. Open your eyes and see how many came to protest versus how many Asian origin people live in this are, very small. Do not get drag into this stupid propaganda.
 
SarahDC April 18, 2020
Obviously you haven't taken the time to read the article I included in my original comment. Furthermore, your anecdotal response does nothing to respond to the human rights crisis happening in India regarding the caste and Muslim genocide. Countries around the world have called it out, this is not a personal opinion. It seems like you're the one brainwashed by propaganda which is ironic and unfortunately a reality for many who hold your position. Good luck!
 
Patriot April 26, 2020
Only an ignorant / low IQ individual can make such a comment. Learn India's glorious history and current events before posting dumb comments here.
 
Ketki July 20, 2019
I am very happy to read this article . So true , when we come to America, we missed our food and our people . I am in NY. When i missed my people i always go to patel brothers in Hickswill , and hillside store . To talk with girls who works there . I fill so good . They all Gujarati girls , with very affection they talk and i fill very good and comfort.
Thanks to Mafatbhai and their family , to open the store in USA .
 
Urvashi P. October 2, 2017
I really enjoyed reading this article. I came to this country when I was 20 so I don't always appreciate what children go through growing up here. My kids were exposed to a very varied diet, of which Indian food was just one component. But I appreciate that is not always the case. Our family very much enjoys its trips to Patel Brothers, and I always come back laden with too many groceries and a head buzzing with ideas for all the recipes I intend to create. Thank you for this thought-provoking and informative article.
 
David September 11, 2017
I have been following these guys for quite a while! When i was looking for my local indian grocery store on htttp://www.aapnabusiness.com they would pop up just about everywhere! Great to see that they have done so well! :)
 
WoooPigSooie August 15, 2017
What a great story! I have lived in Chicago for 10 years, visiting Patel Brothers routinely for Indian groceries. I had no idea the story behind the chain -- or that my store on Devon was the original store!
 
Windischgirl August 9, 2017
Recently found the PB here in Philadelphia...what a revelation! I had to resist the temptation to load my car with pulses, rice, atta, and produce (full pantry right now). Prices are reasonable. Delighted to find asafoetida and poppadums. Bringing friends next time to share in the wonders. Thanks for the article--I would have never learned about PB on my own.
 
BabaLou C. July 20, 2017
I did not know how to cook in India. I started shopping at Patel Brothers in 1979 in Chicago. In 1982 I opened a restaurant Gourmet Chicken and Chef Luciano. American and Italian foods infused with Indian Spices. Cooked over 4 Million Meals and may I say thanks to Patel Brothers. Proud to say to this day that I shop at Patel Brothers.
 
Viral M. June 13, 2017
When any new immigrant coming from India (Specially from Gujarat)and searching for place to settle down in new suburb, town, city, state or even country other than India, He/she will look for distance from Patel Brothers to his/her new home/neighborhood.
 
Nance June 2, 2017
The author alludes to the shame (or fear?) of being seen as "the other" by his choice of foods. This is a sad commentary about the lack of curiosity or inclusivity by students in the dominant culture. As a white girl in school with many Chinese students who brought lunches of rice mixtures wrapped in banana leaves and tied with string, I was curious but felt no desire to tease them for their different foods. I'd hope children these days would be more open-minded about other cultures.
 
Panfusine June 3, 2017
It was an issue even when I was growing up in India, there was always a reluctance for some of us to take the uber traditional fare that got packed into the lunch boxes, esp. the ones with a potential to make a mess (automatically brings to mind many dishes with rice which were mixed with liquid gravies, ) and the cool foods somehow always involved sandwiches and more 'stylish' fare. It may just have intensified in a new country.
 
Barb June 2, 2017
I've been shopping at my local branch for years, thanks for the back story, I had no idea.
 
Carmas June 2, 2017
My wife and I discovered Patel Bros a few years ago, in a suburb of Dallas. Growing up in Los Angeles and routinely visiting local, ethnic (Hispanic), grocery store's was part of my youth. To walk into Patel Bros was such a treat for all the senses, to be sure. The story "rounded out' the rest of the experience, as it's become such a guilty pleasure to walk the aisles from Produce to frozen pakora's, to fresh-made naan. Many thanks!
 
ccsinclair June 2, 2017
Thanks for the back story on Patel Brothers. Louisville's outpost is cannily located next door to one of the best Indian restaurants in town, Shalimar, making it irresistible to drop in after a meal to pick up ingredients or snacks. It's like walking into an alternate universe, where all the flavors have been dialed up to 11--and the deals on produce can't be beat.
 
Spud G. June 2, 2017
This is a good story about the contributions of well-educated immigrants. It's good to understand what it's like to be in someone else's shoes. However, the tone in the section on Skokie seemed overly negative. Perhaps that wasn't how it was meant.
 
Rebecca W. June 2, 2017
Thank you for this amazing in depth story about the Patel history, I'm so grateful! I've been leading food tours on Devon Avenue for many years so this is particularly interesting to me.
 
Nancy H. June 2, 2017
I shop at Patel Bros. all the time up on Devon Ave. here in Chicago. Devon itself is a hub of activity for all kinds of immigrants to the US. From South Asians of all stripes, to Southeast Asians, Orthodox Jews, Russians even a Georgian bakery making khatchapouri. It is a true cook's delight.

The residents, visitors and businesses on Devon capture the very finest attributes of America where we welcome immigrants and immigrants in turn expand and enrich all of us. Everyone gets along even if they don't always in their homelands. And yes I think of this every time I shop for my amchoor powder, curry leaf, black salt and marvelous Indian desserts.
 
Martha P. June 2, 2017
As a child in the 50's in Dallas, I loved Chinese food. In 1963 my dad gave me a Chinese cookbook and a Chinese cleaver. I was determined to cook a great, multi-dish banquet for my family that summer but couldn't find the ingredients at the local A&P so I called the food editor of the local newspaper and was told there was only one oriental grocery in town. My mom and I went and what a revelation!.. The aromas and sights transported me to a different world, likely not China but certainly not Dallas either. There are now many oriental markets in Dallas along with Indian, Middle Eastern and African that I frequent. I have always been an adventurous eater but if I were to find myself in a foreign country for years I should miss BBQ brisket and other foods from my childhood. But what a wonderful world it is that we are able to expand our palates here at home.
 
susan G. May 29, 2017
Italian/garlic; Eastern European/cabbage... many cultural pitfalls for immigrants who want to be Americanized come from the food and the smells of the food. I see this in my Jewish family, and I see that foods like bagels and sour cream, which seem totally American now, had an uphill period of integrating into the mainstream.
I see a variant of this in my family: we moved to a small town in New England to buy a natural food store. The kids all worked in the store with my husband and me, and learned to want foods that we would not bring into our house. However, they loved Japanese seaweed snacks (which we sold), but offended their classmates when they ate them with their school lunch (and the kids didn't let that stop them).
In the 1970's we lived in the DC area, a fortunately multi-cultural environment where we shopped in Indian markets, as well as Japanese and more. From our move, the 1980's on meant that we had to bring at least some of those foods onto the shelves of our own store, even asafoetida.
 
Laynas M. May 27, 2017
20 years in the USA never set foot in the PB a few miles away. It is a big world and tasting the mind boggling variety of food is natural. Sorry for those who never immigrated in their souls.
 
Panfusine May 29, 2017
Sorry to hear that you had such a horrid experience with your native Indian food growing up Supratim Sanyal, that 20 years later you still avoid it.
 
Laynas M. May 31, 2017
Interesting conclusion, though I crave from mangsho-bhaat and tangra-style sweet&sour chicken - not options at PB :) The point I was trying to make is the founding Patel seems to have no will to experiment with the mind-boggling variety of food in the huge melting pot that is America, which is probably true for some part of PB customers. There is no conflict with my "native" food and the paleo-diet I am experimenting with currently.
 
Panfusine May 31, 2017
Not nearly as interesting as your assumption that folks who frequent PB somehow never ever venture out of their 'comfort zone' and that they're unaware of the variety of cuisines available on this side of the Atlantic !
 
Laynas M. June 1, 2017
Could be a stupid assumption, yes. Need data - maybe you or I could do a pseudo-scientific survey - ask 50 people coming out of PB how many times they have tried non-Gujarati food in the last year ...
 
Laynas M. June 1, 2017
Just to be clear, the "tried" should be qualified with "volunteery", i.e. Decided to see what other food was like even though an Indian restaurant was open in a four-mile radius. I suspect your guess to the results of such a survey will not be too far off my assumption :)
 
Amba June 4, 2017
Laynas Mitarpus, your comment shows how little you know about Americans of Indian descent in this country. Most people I know who shop at Patel Bros. also shop at their neighborhood grocery store. Many Indians in India have been exposed to international cuisines and enjoy them. First and second generation Americans of Indian descent grew up eating varied ethnic cuisines such as Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Korean and others. Just because they stop by Patel brothers to pick up samosas and other food stuff doesn't mean they don't appreciate a varied diet.
 
Laynas M. June 5, 2017
Thanks Amba, you are probably right. It is easy to get misleaden by casual observation of, for example, the Niagara Falls (US) on any summer weekend.
 
Gajendra October 4, 2017
Not only we know other food, we consumed other cuisine on regular basis. We do not have problem finding other varieties of food even though we are vegetarian. It all depends, PB is not sole supplier of our diet.
 
Ashwin May 27, 2017
Great recording of our history in USA. We made trips from Syracuse - upstate NY - to NYC's Kalyustian (only store to carry Indian spices and lentils) for Indian groceries in late sixties. Round trip about 700 miles.
 
Donamaya January 7, 2021
Hi Ashwin- Thank you for supporting Kalustyan’s all those years ago. I’ve been the manager for 7 years and I can’t tell you how many people have come in saying in the 60’s/ 70’s they were students here from India. They would drive their station wagons to the city, meeting friends from Boston, Philly and DC, and load up on Dals, Rice, spices,etc. as Kalustyan’s was the first and for many decades the only place in the U.S. to buy Indian Groceries. We are now in our 77th year and carry products from 80 countries. This neighborhood, now called Curry Hill, was ‘originally’ an Armenian neighborhood and Mr.K Kalustyan was a Turkish Armenian spice trader. He started importing other products from India with his spices- being the first to do so. We work with the chef at the Pierre Hotel that told us when he was looking thru the menu archives he found that in 1948 they had an Indian restaurant! Surely purchasing from Kalustyan’s!
Patel Brothers is a fascinating story as well!!
 
Sanjiv S. May 26, 2017
What a great story. Patel Brothers were definitely the pioneers. When I moved to the US in the early 90s - Indian stores were well established in the major metros but were still relatively basic in their offerings. Here in Dallas, we had Taj Grocers that really ruled the roost. Now we have some that are so large that they have taken over traditional American grocery store locations. My wife grew up in the US and I grew up in India. Her experience is similar to the author's in that she had to keep her Indian-ness in check growing up. Our kids on the other hand, don't think twice about taking Indian food to lunch or expressing their love for Parle G, Bourbon(biscuits), Cholle Bhature or Samosas to all their friends - any color. BTW - Bourbon Biscuits have sugar, not salt on them.