Since early on in the history of the almost 36-year-old New Delhi Restaurant (160 Ellis Street, SF), the San Francisco Legacy Business has been a place for major Democratic candidates to hear the concerns of the Bay Area’s Indian community, and to raise money to help children in both San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, India, via chef-owner Ranjan Dey’s nonprofit Compassionate Chefs Cafe. Oakland native Kamala Harris has been eating and speaking here since before she ran for District Attorney of San Francisco.
“New Delhi Restaurant is the epicenter for everything to do with the Indian community and empowering social justice in the Indian community, whether it is LGBTQ, whether it is women-centric, whether it is immigration-related, or finding student housing, and everything in between,” says Dey, who also heads the food operations for the Bhangra & Beats Night Market events that have been infusing nights of joyful Indian life and culture into downtown San Francisco for the past year.
“Bill Clinton to Nancy Pelosi to the late Dianne Feinstein to everyone else [running for office in the Democratic Party] has been through the door of New Delhi Restaurant.” Both the California Assembly and Senate have declared November 3, the restaurant’s original opening day, as New Delhi Restaurant Day, for the 30th and 35th anniversaries, respectively.
Dey grew up in Kolkata, India and has been a respected part of the international hospitality community for decades, running restaurants in several countries before moving to the Bay Area. At New Delhi, he also cooked for late culinary luminaries such as Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme.
Representing the only ancient civilization which still exists that has been using spices for 5000 years, New Delhi’s multi-regional Indian food menu reflects what Dey likens to an “opera on your palate.” It’s been a personal favorite since first meeting and writing about Dey over 10 years ago, and has been instrumental in educating this Western palate about all of the most common major spices and spice blends that are used there. Dey even created a whole line of spice blends inspired by Indian royalty for his wife—the height of romance.
Dey’s position on Harris is clear.
“We’re at the juncture where I want to make sure what we stand for is in focus and that is supporting Kamala Harris,” says Dey. “We need to win this election. We need to go forward. We cannot be going backwards. It has been a lot of effort, a lot of struggle for our forefathers and our multigenerational immigrant parents to see that we have rights. Without Kamala’s leadership, that will not happen. So we need to support her.”
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