Interview with Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez

Posted on 23. Jan, 2010 by admin in Interviews/Stories

A broken leg and a chance encounter with a generous culinary student inspired renowned pastry chef Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez to open Lassi, New York’s most authentic taste of home-cooked India. Making delicious use of farm-fresh ingredients and unbridled creativity, Carlucci’s ever changing menu reflects her sense of adventure and a love of rich, comforting cuisine, both sweet and savory.

NAC: With a background as an American pastry chef, how did you end up opening an Indian restaurant?

CARLUCCI: I was pastry chef for 20 years, and then I ended up teaching because I broke my leg and couldn’t go into the kitchen full time! I couldn’t not work, so I started to teach. And it was a student who brought food to class and a couple of other things that made me fall in love with the home cooking of Indian cuisine. Suddenly, I was more aware of my friends who cook Indian at home. There was suddenly a windfall of Indian home cooking. The homestyle parathas, (Indian breads) keema matter (ground lamb with peas), those were some of the first couple of things that I fell in love with.

NAC: Lassi is almost as famous for its small size as it is for the food!

CARLUCCI: There are only five seats in the actual place. I only wanted three so that whoever was at the counter would have tons of space, but then a magazine mistakenly said that we had five, so we added! If people are coming in and want to sit, you’ve got to seat them.I do most of the cooking at the restaurant, but I have, altogether, about ten people on staff including front and back of the house. We do get an enormous amount of press for such a small place, but I didn’t try to get it; it carried over. I got a lot of press as a pastry chef, so I get a lot of press now.

NAC: How did you design your menu?

CARLUCCI: A couple of the home-cooked dishes inspired the menu, but the menu changes every day. And I didn’t take anyone else’s recipes; I tasted the food and then worked on the recipes myself. A lot of Indian home cooks are very much about their recipe. I’m a chef, I have been for years, so I thought, ‘hey, let’s figure this out.’ We add new things to our repertoire all the time. The keema matar, the butter chicken, the chana punjabi (chick pea stew) and methi chicken make recurring appearances. Those are the four things that stuck around. Because we change the menu every day, things rotate in and out. We always have all the paratha, the lassis, always a chicken dish, a lamb dish, a fish dish, and a bunch of veggies.

NAC: Does any of your pastry training ever sneak onto the menu?

CARLUCCI: There’s always a dessert on the menu. Anything from traditional to, if I’m in the mood, well, you’re getting a mascarpone chocolate chip coffee cake. It’s not always very Indian, but I’ll make whatever I’m in the mood to do or whatever is available marketwise. Sometimes I’ll put an Indian bend to it, but sometimes not so much. A nice fresh fruit with something creamy will always go well after Indian food; something to cool the spice. There’s something ethereal about some Indian flavors. How they layer their spices is different from how we’re used to doing it in American or European techniques. I don’t consider myself a former pastry chef. I just get to add ‘chef’ onto my title.

NAC: Staying true to the restaurant’s name, you offer quite a few types of lassi. Some of them seem pretty unusual.

CARLUCCI: The mango, the cardamom and the rose lassis are very traditional. The lemon is done [in Indian cooking] but the way we do it isn’t very traditional. We don’t just add lemon juice; we make our own lemon curd. We garnish it with a little rooh afza, which is a pineapple and rose based syrup. It’s usually served over ice as a summer drink. Also it’s really nice because for a lot of our Indian clientele, it rings very home for them. Not a lot of people use rooh afza in restaurants; it’s usually a home ingredient. The coffee lassi we ended up doing because I have always had a love for coffee yogurt. A lot of the stuff we use here are pastry ingredients. In our rose lassi, we don’t use rose water, we use a rose compound that’s a typical pastry ingredient. For coffee, we use one of my fancy pastry coffee syrups. The vanilla lassi is not at all traditional. We came up with that because we have a lot of kids that come in here since we’re next to a big school.

NAC: Do you have any favorite summer dishes?

CARLUCCI: Indian soups are amazing and we have right now a tomato soup on the menu that I love. The tomatoes now are big and red and gorgeous. We cook them down with carmelized onions and ginger and a little bit of turmeric. We do a bend on chats, the Indian layered salads. It’s a lot of sweet and sour layered onto hot and cold and smooth and crunchy, so we incorporate a lot of the local ingredients with that. We’ll do a tomato salad on top of a really nice organic fingerling potatoes that we cook down in tamarind and then put the chutneys and rice on top. We work a lot on that for the summer. We do a lot of greens, great mustard green dishes. They’re really beginning to come into their own. I roast the peaches for the lassis. We do roasted strawberry and peach lassis.

NAC: What should our readers know about Indian cooking?

CARLUCCI: I think there’s a tendency for a lot of American cooks to be intimidated by Indian spices. I think there’s also a tendency to grab pre-mixed spices, and there’s nothing better than making a spice mixture of your own and really playing around with it. It’s just like any other cooking, you find out how you like something. I will always like things with a lot of garlic, but not everyone will! If you’re not really familiar with the ingredients, figure out your own palate, and don’t be scared to experiment. Everyone thinks everything about Indian food is spicy and full of turmeric. And it’s not! Do not be afraid of new ingredients. Indian seems very intimidating to everybody because it hasn’t been in the mainstream as long. If I can walk out of pastry and into opening an Indian joint, anyone can do it.

Tags: Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez