Two James Beard winners, one chaat house: Chai Pani has arrived at Union Market

Two James Beard winners, one chaat house: Chai Pani has arrived at Union Market

August 29 was, by most measurements, an ordinary Friday. But on 5th Street NE, something worth paying attention to happened: Chai Pani DC opened its doors for the first time, and the line formed early.

The restaurant is the DC debut of Chai Pani Restaurant Group, the Asheville-based outfit founded in 2009 by chef Meherwan Irani and his wife Molly. With Chai Pani in Asheville, the Iranis created a wholly new genre of Indian restaurant in America by spotlighting everyday Indian street food through their downtown chaat house - one that was named the country's most Outstanding Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation in 2022. No small claim, and it stuck. The Asheville original became a kind of pilgrimage site, the sort of place food writers flew south to eat at and came back talking about for months.

DC's Indian food scene is hardly thin. Rasika has held the fine-dining end for years. Daru on H Street NE does genuinely exciting things with the category. But Chai Pani occupies its own lane entirely. The name is Indian slang for grabbing a tasty little bite. That casualness is the whole point. The food at Chai Pani has always been fast, loud, joyful, and deeply serious at the same time.

The chef doing something he's never done before

The person running the kitchen at 1325 5th St NE is not Meherwan Irani. It's Vishwesh "Vish" Bhatt - and his presence here is the real story.

A two-time James Beard Award-winning chef and Southern food figure, Bhatt formerly ran the kitchen at Snackbar in Oxford, Mississippi, and shares what Meherwan himself has called an "instant brotherhood" with Irani, a friendship that formed about 15 years ago. The alliance produced the cult-followed Brown in the South dinner series, spice collaborations, and travels to India together.

Chai Pani DC is the first time Bhatt will professionally cook his home cuisine. "There's a lot of emotion there," he told Axios. "I've had to unwind myself from the menus I've been writing for 20 years." A Gujarati native who spent his career interpreting Southern food, Bhatt is now turning that same rigor toward the dishes of his own upbringing. The irony is sharp and the results should be, too.

Bhatt also wrote a 2022 memoir, I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes from a Southern Chef. The book made clear he'd thought hard about identity, food, and what it means to cook someone else's traditions with total conviction. Now he's cooking his own.

What's on the table

The shareable menu honors both street food and Irani cafe traditions: chaat (street snacks), uttapam (savory fermented pancakes), chhota plates (truck stop-style small plates), sigri (grill), and pav (street sandwiches, pronounced "pow").

Expect Chai Pani classics - okra fries, sev potato dahi puri (SPDP), bhel puri, kale pakoras, Meherwan's signature Sloppy Jai, vada pav, and homestyle thalis - alongside exclusive DC menu items inspired by Vish's upbringing in Gujarat and his years at Snackbar. Those new dishes include an Indian corn bread, grilled okra, and pork ribs - a Southern accent woven into the fabric of something distinctly Indian.

The Sloppy Jai deserves a word on its own. It's an open-face pav topped with a spicy lamb hash, sweet yogurt, and green chutney - an aromatic bite that, by all accounts, pairs perfectly with a cold beer. Order it first. Figure out the rest from there.

The room itself

The vibe, Axios noted, is Disney-like - Chai Pani is nearly as famous for its over-the-top technicolor decor as its food, and the team went even bigger for DC. Inside, kaleidoscopic colors, hand-painted signage, garlands of bougainvillea and marigolds, and museum-worthy murals by local District artists are meant to transport you to the streets of Mumbai. The 4,000-square-foot space seats 150, with a 1,500-square-foot kitchen behind it.

The interior was conceived by Chai Pani's Art Director Michael Files, who designed all of the group's other spaces and the Spicewalla brand identity. Meherwan has described the Asheville original as "Bollywood wedding meets Bombay Gymkhana meets Tata truck parking lot." DC's version is bigger, and apparently, louder.

The Union Market moment

The address - 1325 5th St NE - puts Chai Pani squarely in the Union Market District, the stretch of Northeast DC that has spent the last decade pulling off a slow reinvention. After falling into disrepair in the 1980s and 1990s, the area has been revived as a destination for restaurants and nightlife near NoMa and H Street, with the food hall anchoring a neighborhood that now includes restaurants, a small movie theater, an ice cream factory, and new apartment buildings. Landing here, rather than somewhere more predictably safe like Penn Quarter or Bethesda, says something about where the restaurant group sees its audience.

The Chai Pani Restaurant Group is also expanding elsewhere in DC, with a Botiwalla fast-casual branch slated for Tenleytown. Botiwalla - the group's more streamlined concept, built around grilled meats and charcoal sigri cooking - would give the District two distinct expressions of the same culinary philosophy.

Walk in on a Thursday night and order the kale pakoras. They're battered, fried, and slightly spiced - not the sad-salad version of kale that DC menus spent a decade over-using, but something crunchier and considerably more fun. That alone justifies the trip to 5th Street.

Sources

• Chai Pani DC - Official Site
• Chai Pani Restaurant Group - Official Site
• Union Market DC - Chai Pani Opening Day announcement
• Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington - Chai Pani DC
• Axios DC - Chai Pani opens near Union Market
• PoPville - Chai Pani Now Open in Union Market
• OpenTable - Chai Pani Washington DC