Chopped's Maneet Chauhan Knows You Have to Drive to Truly See America

Between her restaurants in Orlando and Nashville and filming in New York City as a judge on Food Network’s long-running Chopped, Maneet Chauhan puts in some serious travel miles. Her friends at the airlines joke that the chef’s schedule is wilder than a flight attendant’s. And that doesn’t even account for a lifetime of journeys logged on trains, highways and backroads.

Chauhan recalls, for example, a favorite road trip that took her from Nashville to Toronto during her mother-in-law’s first visit to the United States from India.

“We were like, ‘Okay, this is the best way to show her,’” Chauhan recalls. “To see the real country, you’ve got to drive.”

The family of five, including Chauhan’s two children and her husband, Vivek Deora, headed north through Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan to cross eventually into Canada. On their way home, they passed through New York for a stop at Niagara Falls and Buffalo. They hugged Lake Erie to Cleveland before turning back south.

“I think we had barely reached the Nashville airport on our way out of town when the kids started asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ We're like, ‘Oh this is gonna be a long trip,’” she says. “It makes you very creative. I was the DJ—old Bollywood music—and we started playing ‘I Spy.’ Not only is the trip an adventure, but as a family you get to bond and spend time together, which I think is precious.”

Her travels, near and far, help inform the vibrant color and spice on plates at her restaurants, Chauhan Ale & Masala House and The Mockingbird, both in Nashville, and eet by Maneet Chauhan, which opened late last year at Disney Springs. Her menus feature dishes like chile-tinted tandoori shrimp over grits and pomegranate-spiked vegetable dishes in golden hues of cumin. A trip to Montreal inspired her popular tandoori chicken poutine. Meanwhile, hot-chicken pakoras unite her Indian roots and her current home.

“Hot chicken is such a Nashville thing,” she says. “But pakora evokes a sense of being back in India growing up—it’s raining outside while hot pakoras are being fried with some chai on the side.”

Chahuan’s two cookbooks tell of her travels, too—especially the latest, Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchens, Markets, and Railways of India. “The windows are open, the doors are open,” she recalls of train travel as a kid. “Based on which station we were stopping at, I would look forward to what I'm going to eat.”

The book is an homage to the food vendors at railways stations and on roadsides, whom Chauhan calls the “best chefs ever” due to their creativity with limited resources, space and ingredients. She continues to seek out such places. Notably, on a trip to Peru, her curiosity led to an epiphany about her professional path to food.

After a long road trip to a tiny Peruvian village (and stops at gas stations for local snacks along the way), Chauhan separated from her companions to browse a market, where she met a Peruvian grandmother.

“My Spanish is not fit for polite company, and she didn't speak English, but she was selling potatoes and making these potato cakes,” Chauhan recalls. “I got so fascinated. And I don't even know how it happened, but Vivek found me about an hour later making those pancakes and selling them with her.

“I think that was the moment I fully comprehended why I'm in the food world. I can walk into a room or country, and even without knowing the same language, we can make a connection.”