Kasa Indian Eatery Home Catering and Private Vending Click Here or Call (415)944-ROLL

Author Archive for Suresh

Kasa Indian Food Truck “Squared”

Published on June 28, 2011 in Kasa Behind The Scenes and Kasa Indian Food Truck. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

We’re in the final sprint preparing for next week’s Off the Grid launch for the Kasa Indian Food Truck.  The truck is completely built out, the wrap is being wrapped as we speak, our Public Hearing is this Wed Jun 29 to secure our FiDi locations (not too late to help!), the initial menu is more or less decided and the operating plan is operating.

One of our goals is speed — we want to keep our (hopefully long) lines moving quickly!

At first, we figured we should keep it simple and launch the truck as cash only.  But that didn’t sit right with us for a few reasons:

  1. We pride ourselves on being tech savvy.  You can’t have a Kasa co-founder from Google and be behind on this stuff!
  2. We always try to do right by our customers.  You don’t always have cash, ATM fees suck and credit cards are more convenient.
  3. Square made it so damn simple to accept credit cards on a truck!  Square is this super cool startup in SOMA designing beautifully simple transaction systems for local merchants.  We signed up on Friday, got a free square fob in the mail on Tuesday and were up and running swiping credit cards within minutes.
  4. Even better, we shamelessly begged the Square team and got into the beta test for their new Square Register point of sale app on the iPad.  This hopefully will allow our truck customers to set up tabs where they can order and pay for our classic Indian street food without having to even take their credit card out of their wallet!

So…beta Indian food truck, beta point of sale system running on a 4G iPad 2.  Only in San Francisco!

Wednesday March 9: All Star Punjabi Night Pop-Up at The Corner

Published on March 6, 2011 in Events and Indian Culture. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Thanks to everyone for a fantastic first pop-up event last Thursday at The Corner.  Our next event is this Wednesday, March 9 at The Corner (18th St and Mission) from 6 – 10pm.

This week’s menu is an All Star Punjabi Night featuring some of our all-time favorite dishes.  We highly recommend reservations —  please email popup@kasaindian.com or leave a message at 415-690-8512.

All Star Punjabi Night Menu

Option 1: Non-Vegetarian Course ($25 prix fixe)

  • Amritsari Fish — tangy fish pakoras from the home of the Golden Temple, served with mint chutney
  • Sarson Ka Saag – mustard greens with a dollop of butter, this is the heart of Punjab
  • Rajma – red kidney bean curry served by grandmothers across Punjab on Sunday afternoons
  • Karahi Chicken — wok-cooked chicken in a tomato-garlic sauce, because Punjabis love their chicken!
  • Phirni – a lovely almond custard dessert with rosewater and a fresh fruit topping

Option 2: Vegetarian Course ($20 prix fixe)

  • Vegetarian Pakoras — the ultimate punjabi snack food, served with mint chutney
  • Sarson Ka Saag – mustard greens with a dollop of butter, this is the heart of Punjab
  • Rajma – red kidney bean curry served by grandmothers across Punjab on Sunday afternoons
  • Phirni – a lovely almond custard dessert with rosewater and a fresh fruit topping
Accompaniments for both courses include:

Phirni with fresh cut strawberries and rosewater

  • Fresh Chapatis – light, whole wheat bread cooked on a tawa
  • Basmati Rice
  • Fresh Mooli salad —  daikon served with lime and chaat masala
  • Lime-marinated onions
  • Cucumber Raita
  • Chili Chutney – super sonically hot but flavorful sauce for those who always want it hotter.  This is Kasa’s “Hot Sauce” if you’ve tried it in the restaurant

Make Mine Spicy! Introducing The Hot Sauce, by Kasa

Published on October 3, 2010 in Recipes. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

There are certain basic human needs which, if not met,  can lead to dire consequences.

No Food / Water / Sleep = Death
No Love / Family / Friends / Sex =  Deep Seated Psychological Problems

(Wait this post is heading into the pits of despair!!)

There’s a different category of needs which, if not met, lead one to getting Really F’ing Annoyed!

For me, eating GOOD food well flavoured with herbs, spices and green chilly falls into this category.  I literally need the SPICE of life, or else I’m just pissed.   But I’m not a fan of over-spicing or abusing the use of the green chilly.  I cherish my ability to enjoy simple pure tastes.  I have the utmost respect for this beautiful, slender, powerful little pepper.

But there’s a rather large contingent of Kasa fans who have some seriously Hot Needs.  You can spot them by the devilish look in their eyes as they ask, ‘Do you have any HOT SAUCE???’  For the past two years, I’ve been sending them straight to the source of the heat by throwing in cut up green chillies in their rolls and letting them knock themselves out.  I watch them sweating, smiling and looking at me with real gratitude, as though I just put crack into their rolls.

Recently I decided to show honor my fiery-hot chilly fiends and work on that much requested HOT SAUCE.   To my surprise, I’ve created a truly impressive gem.   It’s a green chilly emulsion, simply named ‘The Hot Sauce’ for now.  It really is amazing and hot, hot, hot. And it has super powers that I wasn’t expecting!

Whilst creating the sauce, I had to keep tasting it along the way and I’ve finally seen the light.  I see where all the chilly freaks are coming from now.  Me and all the Kasa crew are on a serious ‘Hot Sauce’ addiction.  Just a little of this fiery, zingy, garlicky sauce on my lamb curry and rice, and I’m awake, buzzing, happy and ready to move.  I definitely feel the rush!!

Surprised by this intense euphoric reaction of my body and mood (and being the dork I can be), I researched the biological science behind my reaction to the Birds Eye Chilly.  It turns out the capsicum in the chilly reacts with the body’s pain receptors.  My body then tells me that I’m being burned, and the result is that I feel pain.

A little sadistic?  Yes.  But why are billions of people addicted to this taste bud torture?

It’s the pleasure that follows soon after, the rush you receive as the body releases endorphines in response to the pain.  Endorphines are natural morphine like compounds that are just about the strongest drugs you can do without doing drugs.  AND they are not addictive (although I wonder), don’t incapacitate you or dull your senses.

To add to my increased admiration of the green chilly, I also learned that it is a micro miracle worker.  It’s loaded with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, calcium and heck, it even boosts your metabolic rate.

To all of you who have ‘Hot’ needs, next time you are in, just ask for the Hot Sauce in your Kati Roll or Thali.  But be careful, it’s hot! And for those who are not yet ready to go there, we still have all our dishes appropriately spiced :)

Anamika

Doubling Down With K2

Published on November 7, 2009 in Kasa Behind The Scenes and Running A Restaurant. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

We were crazy enough to get into this restaurant business in the first place, and then held on for dear life as the economy went to hell.  After a year and a half of the hardest and most fulfilling work of our lives,  we’ve come to the realization that:

1) you have to sell a heck of a lot of $4.50 kati rolls to make a living for two families in San Francisco; and

2) it’s time to spread the gospel for simple, fresh homestyle Indian food to other parts of the City.

So…we’re doubling down and opening our second Kasa location (dubbed K2) in the Marina next month!

The space is at 3115 Fillmore Street (b/t Union & Lombard) and is a little bigger than K1.  We’re converting the space from an old furniture store, so the permitting, design and construction process has been intense. (K2 “Coming Soon” sign)

We kept things really really simple at K1 with a handful of dishes and a clean aesthetic so that we could focus on making amazing food from scratch every day, and we plan to keep the Heart of Kasa the same at K2.

Of course, we have some twists that we’re adding this time around, most notably: late night weekend hours (open til 2am Thursday thru Saturdays) and pitchers of beer and Sangria, but mainly we don’t want to mess with a good thing.

So…tell your friends, help us spread the word, and as always let us know your comments and brilliant ideas.

K2 Construction Site, circa Mid October

Cooking the books for Kasa

Published on April 3, 2009 in Kasa Behind The Scenes and Running A Restaurant. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

So I’m the third member of the Kasa ownership team, the most invisible because I kept my day job in order to keep the lights on should Kasa stumble and, most painfully, the one who chose the short straw and became Kasa’s Chief Financial Officer.

The best thing about being the Chief Financial Officer is that I get a fancy sounding title.  The list of the worst things about being the Chief Financial Officer is much longer and includes:

  • Having to enter around 20 fields of data into Quickbooks for each day of sales.  Typically the fields of data include numbers that were illegibly scribbled by Tim, Anamika or one of our other great staff during the hustle and bustle of the day.  Trust me, it’s exactly as fun as it sounds.
  • Having to organize, 3 hole punch and enter all our bills into Quickbooks.  That includes our daily deliveries from our produce and meat vendors, twice weekly deliveries of our spices, thrice weekly trips to farmers markets with scribbled (yet again) receipts, payouts to our nightly cleaning service, beer and wine deliveries, dry good deliveries, flower receipts from the vendor down the street and so much more goodness.
  • Paying all our bills on-time so our vendors continue to love us.  This is…stressful.
  • Reconciling all of our accounts each month.  Now you might ask…what does it mean to reconcile each account?  Great question.  It means going back through every single transaction — every bank deposit, every individual expense, etc — and categorizing it, confirming that it’s accounted for in our bank statements and that our ending balances in Quickbooks are the same as they are in our bank statements.

This may not sound like much, but when you factor in the many unexpected laptop crashes, accounts that don’t balance, receipts that have gone missing and so much more wacky fun, one can start to understand why many restauranteurs advised us to outsource the bookkeeping function as quickly as we could.  But that would be far too easy (and expensive).

I’d much rather be in the restaurant, rocking a dinner shift  and chatting up our customers, but for now, you can find me at home many nights after work, watching Eastbound & Down, engaged in an epic battle with Quickbooks.

If you want to share tips, or want advice on how we set things up financially, or just need moral support as you struggle through restaurant bookkeeping, feel free to hit me up (contact at kasaindian dot com or @kasaindian on twitter).

Suresh