The following is a sneak peek from our September issue, heading to newsstands soon.
Image courtesy Nama
Talk to Kunal Shah about his forthcoming Broad Street restaurant, and you will hear the word “experience” a lot.
Like, a lot.
“I want to give people who come to us an experience,” he says.
And: “It’s all about the experience.”
And: “Creating experiences, that’s what we do, that’s what we’re about.”
Photo courtesy Nama
Shah is a native — he grew up on the South Side and graduated from Collegiate School in 2000 — but in a way, his arrival back in town, and the restaurant and bar/lounge he has envisioned (Nama is the name of the former, Switch is the name of the latter) represents something new in the world of Richmond food and drink.
Call it — for a lack of a better word, and for better or worse — the dawning sexification of the scene.
Shah, who also owns Kabana Rooftop and Belle, as well as places in D.C. and Raleigh, comes to restaurants by way of event management, a background that brings to mind the name Stephen Starr, a Philadelphia-based concert promoter who turned his talent for staging into a restaurant empire of 30-some restaurants from New York to Florida.
Starr understands that people go out to restaurants not so much to eat and drink well; they go to live large. Accordingly, his spaces are dramatic set pieces, blessed with lighting that flatters even the plainest of faces and the sort of voluptuousness of detail that invites you to study the room as if it were a Renaissance fresco.
It is an aesthetic that stands in striking contrast to that of most Richmond restaurants — small, intimate spaces that eschew anything that might smack of staginess and artifice.
Shah is just getting started, comparatively speaking, but he talks the slick talk of a born salesman — speaking of “different appeal factors” to explain why he opted to break the 7,200-square-foot space at 13-15 W. Broad in two, using “curate” without irony, vowing to switch up the theme of Switch every six, or three months, or every two, or every 30 days, who knows, and, not least, hyping his most commercially attractive asset.
Jay Sean (Photo by India Bulkely | Neon Tommy)
One of his two partners (Neal Patel is the other) is Jay Sean, a name that might not mean much to you if you're not plugged in to the worlds of hip-hop and R&B. (Shah managed him more than a decade ago, before he signed with Cash Money Records.)
What Sean, a British musician who has collaborated with Lil Wayne and Sean Paul, brings the venture is a selling point, a sexy marketing piece for a group intent on bringing a new model to the city: the restaurant as club.
Interestingly, in a 2015 interview with FunX in Rotterdam, the muscled Sean, born Kamaljit Singh Jhooti, let slip that “I don’t eat Indian food” — though he did also say that he loves it.
Shah laughed, caught off guard when I shared that little nugget with him.
Immediately, as the best salespeople do, he sought to turn what might have been an extended moment of awkwardness to his advantage, stumping on behalf of the stellar cooking of his chef, Mel Oza.
If Sean will not be known to most Richmonders, Oza will. The chef was seen most recently behind the stove at Curry Craft in Carytown.
The chef says he wants to get away from curries and tandoor and expose Richmonders to a wider range of dishes from the subcontinent, including street foods, the kind of bright, bold and crunchy treats travelers find when they step off the plane in Mumbai and Delhi.
Indian restaurants in the U.S. tend to be either high-end operations — like Richmond’s Lehja, the finest Indian restaurant in the mid-Atlantic, or Rasika in D.C. — or low-end, like the innumerable curry houses with their heavy, greasy gravies. Nama is aiming for the middle — more of a “trattoria” meal, to use Oza’s word.
Oza is in something of an ideal situation for a chef, in that he can focus on his strength, cooking, and leave the marketing to the owners.
Shah is already fired up for that task.
“What I learned being a promoter,” he says, “is that you have to go the distance. You can’t just sit and rest and hope they come to you.”
He tells me he intends to sell the restaurant by way of occasional, ticketed dinners for, say, 45 people — in this way creating “exclusive” events that he hopes will create buzz. “An ideal date night is not going to a restaurant,” he insists.
No?
“No, you want to take your wife or significant other to an experience. Having a one-on-one with a chef, experiencing a cuisine, makes you feel special.”
The idea, he says, is to get those early adopters hyped up and willing to spread the word. “In the music industry, you call them ‘promoters,’ in the restaurant industry they’re your fan base.”
He makes no apologies about actively, ardently targeting the young.
“We’re dealing with millennials, they have a different view on restaurants. They like new things. So if you’re a restaurant, you gotta curate new stuff.”
He adds, "This isn’t Edo’s Squid,” where the entire objective is to not change a thing, ever.
In other words, you want to give them an experience? I ask, hoping he’ll rise up to snatch the fish.
“Yes, exactly,” he says. "The experience is everything.”
The Nama/Switch team is aiming for a November opening, according to partner Neal Patel.
