Chef Aarthi Sampath’s Drāvida explores Indian diaspora cuisines shaped by migration across Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Guyana, East Africa and beyond, rejecting rigid ideas of “authenticity” in favor of honesty, specificity, and research. Drawing on her New York fine-dining experience, she builds an equitable kitchen culture while spotlighting dishes like Trinidadian doubles as living records of memory, migration, and cultural exchange.
A fried piece of bara bread, stuffed with curried channa and eaten on the streets of Trinidad, might not be the first thing most people picture when they hear “Indian food.” But for Chef Aarthi Sampath it represents a culinary story of migration itself, about indentured laborers taken from India to Trinidad in the 1800s, and how a food born out of displacement and scarcity became one of the most beloved street foods on the island, and then made its way, generations later, onto a menu in New York.
Sampath's new restaurant in New York's East Village, Drāvida, is built around the many lives Indian food has taken on as it travelled with people, across oceans, through generations and into new communities. Opened in May of this year, Drāvida is Sampath’s first restaurant and the realisation of a concept she began developing in 2019. Born and raised in Mumbai, she spent more than a decade working in New York kitchens, including Junoon, The Breslin, Rainbow Room and Chinese Tuxedo, before creating a restaurant that looks beyond the familiar label of "Indian cuisine". Its menu traces culinary traditions shaped by South Asian communities in places including Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Guyana, East Africa and Southeast Asia, asking what happens when recipes encounter new ingredients, landscapes and histories.
In conversation with Homegrown, Chef Sampath discusses the politics of authenticity, the culinary histories of the diaspora, the culture she hopes to build at Drāvida, and why a humble Trinidadian street food embodies the spirit and the story her culinary practice represents.
Drāvida brings together regional Indian flavours with food traditions shaped by migration across Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond. How do you approach the question of authenticity when working with cuisines that have themselves evolved through movement, adaptation, and cultural exchange? What does it mean to tell these stories responsibly, without flattening their differences or treating the diaspora as a single, homogenous experience?
I actually think "authenticity" is the wrong question to start with, because it assumes there's one fixed version of a dish to be faithful to. The food I grew up around, and the food on our menu, was never static. It moved with people. A Gujarati recipe that landed in Kenya picked up something local. A South Indian family in Trinidad started cooking with what was available on that island, and that became its own tradition, not a lesser copy of the original. So for me, authenticity isn't about purity, it's about honesty. Am I being honest about where a dish actually comes from, who taught it to me or told me its story, and what changed along the way?
What I try hardest to avoid is flattening. "Indian food" gets treated in this country like it's one cuisine, and "the diaspora" gets treated like it's one experience, and neither is true. A dish from Sri Lanka and a dish shaped by the Indian community in Guyana are not interchangeable just because they both trace back to South Asia. So on the menu and when we talk about the food, we try to name specifics, this dish, this region, this community, this migration story, instead of reaching for a generic "fusion" label. Responsibility, to me, looks like research, like crediting where something came from, and like resisting the urge to smooth everything into one easy narrative just because it's more marketable.
You’ve spent more than a decade working in New York kitchens, from Junoon and The Breslin to the Rainbow Room and Chinese Tuxedo, before opening your own restaurant. What did you learn from those kitchens that you wanted to carry into Drāvida and what did you feel you had to do differently? As a woman who has built a career in a male-dominated industry, what have been the particular challenges of moving into ownership and leadership, and what does a more equitable kitchen culture look like to you in practice?
Every kitchen I worked in taught me something I still use. Junoon gave me a real technical foundation in Indian cooking at a level of precision I hadn't seen before. The Breslin taught me how a kitchen can have real discipline without losing its soul. Rainbow Room and Chinese Tuxedo taught me a lot about hospitality and spectacle, how a room can be part of the experience, not just the food. I carried pieces of all of that into Drāvida: the technical rigor, the discipline, the idea that a dining room should feel considered.
What I wanted to do differently mostly comes down to culture. I spent years being one of very few women in the kitchen, often the only one, and I know exactly what that pressure feels like, having to be twice as certain to be taken half as seriously, watching leadership roles go to men with less experience than me. So building my own kitchen was never just about the menu. It was about who gets a seat at the pass. In practice, a more equitable kitchen means real mentorship for women coming up, it means promotions based on skill and not on who's comfortable in the boys' club, and it means building a culture where someone can push back on a chef without fearing for their job. I don't think I've solved it, no one restaurant does, but it's something I think about every single day I'm running this kitchen.
New York’s Indian dining scene is already having a significant cultural moment, with restaurants such as Vikas Khanna’s Bungalow, Chintan Pandya’s Dhamaka, Adda, Semma, and Masalawala & Sons adding to the conversation around what Indian food can be in the city. What do you think Drāvida brings to this conversation? How do you hope to stand out in a city where diners are increasingly curious about regionality, diaspora, and the stories behind their food?
I have so much respect for what Chintan, Vikas, and the Semma and Masalawala & Sons teams are doing, honestly, it's a great time to be eating Indian food in this city, and I don't think of them as competition so much as a shared project of expanding what people expect when they hear "Indian restaurant."
Where I think Drāvida is distinct is the lens: we're not telling the story of a single region of India. We're telling the story of the Indian diaspora, Trinidad, Guyana, East Africa, Southeast Asia, communities of Indian descent who built entirely new food cultures far from India, sometimes generations ago. That's a different story than regional Indian cooking, and it's one that hasn't had much of a stage in New York.
I hope Drāvida stands out because it asks a slightly different question than "what is Indian food," and instead asks "what happens to a food culture when people carry it somewhere new and have to remake it with what they have." That's a very New York question too, honestly, this whole city is built out of that same process.
Drāvida’s menu invites diners to think about the connections between food, migration, and memory. Is there a dish on the menu that is especially personal to you, or that captures something you want people to understand about the restaurant? And if you were to share one recipe with Homegrown readers, which would you choose, and what story would you want to tell alongside it?
If I had to pick one, it would be the doubles. It's such a humble dish — fried bara bread with curried channa, but it's doing so much work. It's Trinidadian, it's rooted in Indian indentured labor history, and it's street food, which means it was never precious about itself; it just had to be delicious and fast and cheap. When people eat it here, in a sit-down restaurant in the East Village, I want them to understand that this dish is Indian food too, even though most people wouldn't clock it as such on sight. That gap, between what people expect "Indian food" to look like and what it actually is across the diaspora, is basically the whole thesis of the restaurant in one bite.
If I were sharing a recipe with your readers, I'd give them the doubles. And the story I'd want to tell alongside it is about migration itself, about indentured laborers taken from India to Trinidad in the 1800s, and how a food born out of displacement and scarcity became one of the most beloved street foods on the island, and then made its way, generations later, onto a menu in New York. That's the story I think about every time we plate it.
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