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Founder of Keya&Co and Candy Valley Cake Company Keya Wingfield (Photo courtesy Keya Wingfield)
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Keya&Co's paneer meatballs with pasta and tomato butter sauce (Photo courtesy Keya Wingfield)
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Butter chicken hand pies from Keya&Co (Photo courtesy Keya Wingfield)
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Gulab jamun cake with rose syrup, saffron and cardamom cream, and pistachio is on the menu at the forthcoming restaurant Nama. (Photo by Eileen Mellon)
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Keya&Co's dishes are influenced by the flavors of Mumbai, India, and Virginia. This pimento cheese is made with achaari, an Indian-style pickle. (Photo by Eileen Mellon)
Flaky butter chicken hand pies, pimento cheese with achaari pickle, and pani puri — bite-sized, crisp hollowed dough balls stuffed with yellow beans, potato, mint and date chutney then dipped in mint-cilantro water — were just a few of the offerings chef and baker Keya Wingfield shared recently during the debut of her Mumbai-inspired "microdining" series, Keya&Co. The 34-year-old is best known for Candy Valley Cake Company, the local cake pop business she launched with her husband, David, in 2010.
Although Wingfield found success through Candy Valley and pumps out an average of 600 cake pops a week, she often caught herself dreaming of the street food from her homeland of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), India. While reminiscing about the lively streets in the country’s largest city, the buzz of crowds of people, the pleasant smells of cardamom and saffron, and street foods that brought her comfort, she was flooded with nostalgia.
Now, through the recently launched brand Keya&Co, Wingfield hopes to shares the flavors of the city where she grew up with the Richmond community. Her next event is a cooking demo at Ellwood Thompson’s on Aug. 28 from 6 to 7:30 p.m., where she will make the classic Mumbai street snack known as Frankies, followed by a pop-up experience in September. Diners can also find one of Wingfield's desserts on the menu at Nama, a new Indian restaurant opening Thursday, Aug. 22, at 15 W. Broad St.
Richmond magazine: How long have you been in Richmond?
Keya Wingfield: I’ve been in Richmond for 14 years now, and I moved here to get married to my husband; he grew up in Mechanicsville. We met in Bombay; he used to travel for project work. For the first few years in Richmond, I did crazy odd jobs at Barnes & Noble and art galleries. I always had a thing with baking and cooking and got a job at Williams Bakery. I worked the counter, and I asked if I could learn to decorate cakes.
RM: Did you have baking experience before?
Wingfield: Before I moved here, I had never used an oven. I attended J. Sargeant Reynolds [Community College], though, and did their pastry program and graduated from there. Six months after, they asked if I wanted to come and teach, and I have been teaching there now for eight to nine years, until recently when I took a break because of my 8-month old.
RM: When did you start Candy Valley Cake Company?
Wingfield: I started that almost 10 years ago, when I was looking for portion-controlled desserts. I saw a blogger who had been talking about them and kind of started making them from there.
RM: Has cooking always been something you’ve enjoyed?
Wingfield: I think it has always been a huge part of me. We love to eat. With Candy Valley, I had lost my mom seven years prior and then my dad two years ago, and I just kind of got in the kitchen more and started making stuff; it was my therapy. My father was a photographer, and my mother was a brilliant cook. It was my way of conversing with them.
RM: How would you describe the Indian food that you make?
Wingfield: It’s definitely a modern take on some of the classics as well as modernized versions of the food that comes from Bombay. It’s not as shocking to the American palate and completely different. For example, the paneer meatballs — that is based on paneer [fresh cheese] you may get in a restaurant, but it is paired with spaghetti and butter sauce; that’s kind of my take. My roots are Indian, but my training is in Virginia, and I’m always trying to mix the two and force them to meet.
RM: Why did you decide to launch Keya&Co?
Wingfield: I’ve been [cooking] for a while, and people kept asking me if I would open a restaurant. I don’t see that happening, and what I wanted to do instead is create microdining experiences and change the menu and have the freedom to be creative. Restaurants can box you in a little bit and are also so much work, which is not the issue, but [it becomes a] daily lull of making the same thing, and I want to avoid that.
RM: What is microdining?
KW: You don’t have to have the same experience [each time], and it’s personalized. I think the culture is conducive to the way I work, plus the term pop-up has been used so much, so I thought, maybe microdining. It’s an experience where there is no set menu, no specific location, no specific lunch, dinner, etc. Very much like a pop-up but a completely different experience each time. It’s a new concept.
RM: How do you hope people react when they attend your events?
Wingfield: I think I want them to forget that Indian food means tikka masala and naan. It is such a huge country, and every little area has its own food, and there’s so much more to learn. I think Bombay is like New York on steroids: It’s so electric, and the food you get there, you can’t compare it to the rest of the country. It has a lot of sass.
