about the social

I started my first brand-building endeavor in the middle of a tepid blue summer in 2020; laid off from my first job as a bartender, I turned meekly back to cooking from my strip-sized kitchen as the only way to pay rent. It seemed at first blush to be a decent, uncomplicated strategy that maximized my skills and relieved some of the guilt of the hefty dollar tag on my culinary degree. But as I spent days rifling through books and cuisines, feverishly devising scores of menus that I hoped would compel people to believe and invest in me, the obvious hit me in the face: for an exercise like this where ‘authenticity’ was key, there was no outrunning myself anymore the way I had for years. The story that made the most sense was for me to cook Indian food for the people 🤷🏽‍♂️

So that summer, I reacquainted myself with flavors I grew up with and found ways to translate them into food for Boston. I reconnected with family and revivified dishes from my past with their blessings from afar, typically with my mother propped up on FaceTime snapping at me to follow her recipes correctly as I stirred bubbling pots and fanned away plumes of steam from the camera lens. But most notably, as I slumped back onto the couch after delivering food on my rollerblades all day long and sat with the idea that the parts of me I’d spent a decade minimizing were now my most merchantable attributes, I began sifting through my guilt for the first time.

That brand came to a quiet end that year as life picked back up, but the question of how I could embody being a first-generation immigrant full of melanin and memories with no place to put them never left me. Five years later, I have my first stab at an answer. Versova Social Boston is my attempt to sincerely put the bartender I am today and the immigrant I’ll always be in conversation with one another; to funnel ideas, spices, textures, stories that animated my time in Versova with color and vibrancy into my craft; to put them into menus I believe in, in cups for folks to sip on; to practice the kind of living remembrance that is a lifelong part of the diasporic experience.

If social clubs in India today are places where more and more kinds and hues of people can congregate and drink and make memories together, then I hope that VSB can provide a place where you’re able to do the same…and where I can too 🌿