“It was my dream. When I was in India, I made a plan so that when I’m here I will open some food business. It's hard to find a restaurant here since it was very expensive.
My name is Alisha and this is my dad, Rajinder Mehndiratta. This is Delhiwala Chaat.
As for the inspiration, I love to cook the food at home and that's why I was thinking I should do something for the customers. That's why I opened the business. We started off as a food truck in Sunnyvale and we were one of the first food trucks to be in the area. We are from Delhi, India so this is where the name inspiration comes from Delhiwala. We wanted to bring Indian street food into California where we live and have the Bay Area people try it out as well.
He (Rajinder) cooks everything fresh every day. That's why our customers like to keep coming back. We cook everything fresh from scratch every morning and then everything goes when we finish by the end of the night. We cook everything again the next morning so that's what takes up the most time. That's where all the effort goes into. We don't believe in frozen food.
As for the community, we honestly live in the heart of the Bay Area. There are so many Indians who live here so we fit in very well because Indian people love Indian food So we thought we can't go wrong with that and especially Indian street food is like another level of love.
We love our customers! We love when people come in with their families. We love when people talk to us and have interactions. We work every single day. We come into the business to you know say hello to people and people ask for my dad. They'll be like,” Hi, is your dad here? Can we speak to him?”. Whatever it may be, you build a connection with our customers and that is the goal. It's not just to sell food. It's also to meet new people and have them come in like it’s a home for everybody.”