Chicago’s Coach House is a 22-seat tasting menu restaurant that aims to educate patrons on South Indian cuisine. Helmed by James Beard Award-nominated chef Zubair Mohajir, Coach House serves dishes from Mohajir’s home in Chennai and across the South Asian subcontinent. Mohajir’s menu combines recipes that are hundreds of years old with ingredients that customers may be more familiar with. “It helps our guest connect with something they’re familiar with when it comes to the texture of food,” says Mohajir of his South Indian khichdi, made with rice and lentils. “But then at the same time, we’re just blasting them with something that they’ve never had before.”
Mohajir sees his role at Coach House as expanding people’s understanding of Indian food. “I always joke that in this part of the world, we’re still living in ‘butter chicken world,’” Mohajir says. “Butter chicken is the first introductory dish for a lot of people when it comes to Indian food.” But at Coach House, dishes like his soft shell crab chaat (crispy fried soft shell crab served with yogurt and mint chutney) and meen molee, a spicy seafood dish with coconut milk, ginger, garlic, serrano, and a variety of spices, take center stage.
Coach House’s dishes provide a snapshot of South Indian history. The duck Numidian recipe, for example, comes directly from a 1,000-year-old recipe that was handwritten by an unknown person, found years later, and translated by historians. The result, a heavily spiced sauce that pairs perfectly with red khichdi and duck. “When you take a look at the sauce,” Mohajir says, “it really tells you how long we’ve been communicating across the world as humans.”
Watch the latest episode of Mise En Place to learn more about how Coach House is bringing South Indian cuisine to Chicago.
