Emily Hays Photos
Lazeez co-owners Aman Kant (left) and Mohammed Ayub: Bringing the Thali band back together at new spot up the block.
Tossing together onion, tomato and puffed rice, Lazeez co-owner Mohammed Ayub recreated one of his childhood treats — with a twist he has picked up working in the restaurant industry.
Lazeez is a new restaurant at 40 Orange St, between the parking lots on George Street and the colorful, mural explosion on Crown Street. It’s also just a few feet away from Thali, the now-closed Indian restaurant that molded all of the Lazeez founders.
Ayub was the general manager at Thali for 10 years. His current business partner, Aman Kant, ate there sometimes every week. When Thali closed, the two decided to make Ayub’s long-term goal of opening a restaurant a reality.
Take-out and delivery orders will prove crucial to the ability of local restaurants like Lazeez to weather the pandemic during the coming months as Covid-19 cases climb and cold weather sets in. Pick up bhel poori and other dishes to go by ordering from the restaurant’s website. Deliveries are also available through Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash and Snackpass. The restaurant is open Tuesday through Sunday for lunch and dinner.
Ayub set out the ingredients for his bhel poori recipe at a corner table: puffed rice and dry lentil noodles, onions, tomatoes, mint sauce and tamarind chutney. Sitting innocuously in another silver bowl were slices of avocado, Ayub’s twist on the classic street food.
As a child growing up in India, Ayub would go on vacations to Mumbai (now memorialized in Lazeez’s decor, pictured below) with his extended family. He and his cousins would demand bhel poori poured into paper cones by street vendors as soon as their feet hit Chowpatty Beach.
The rest of the year, Ayub lived in Hyderabad, one of India’s biryani capitals. Cooking was mostly women’s work, but his father would throw himself into slow cooking the spiced rice dish for special occasions.
Ayub started working at an airport catering company and then moved on to the coffee shop at the five-star, revolving restaurant, Bhaskara Palace.
Ayub has lived in New Haven for 14 years. As the manager at Thali, he scoped out the local market and absorbed culinary innovations.
He first saw a chef substitute bhel poori’s usual base of potato pieces for avocado in 2015 at a cooking competition where Thali took back a first place award.
“I’m a very foodie guy. I love to try a lot of things at home. My hobby is cooking,” Ayub said, delighted that he can introduce those recipes into Lazeez’s kitchen.
Bishno Sammar Khadka (left) turns those ideas into meals for Lazeez’s customers. Like everyone else in Lazeez, the chef is an ex-Thali employee. He spent a decade cooking in Japan before then and originally hails from Kathmandu, Nepal. Khadka specializes in Indo-Chinese food, and Lazeez is harnessing that expertise to carve out a niche in a local market without the fusion cuisine.
Amit Jaiswal (center) is Lazeez’s manager-server-bartender-delivery man. He worked at Thali for eight years as the accountant and manager of part of the Thali group of businesses.
Kant is the cash — and stomach — behind the venture. Kant is the chief business officer for a pharmaceutical artificial intelligence company called InveniAI.
“I plan to keep eating for the rest of my life,” Kant joked.
He moved from New Delhi to New Haven in 2010 and honed in on Thali as, in his mind, the best Indian restaurant in town.
“I tried every single restaurant in town. Because of my profession, I travel a lot and I know Indian restaurants in every city. Thali is as good as you get anywhere in India,” Kant said.
He and Ayub settled on the space on Orange Street because it was small enough to have low overhead as they expand the business. They signed a lease with Beacon Communities, which allowed them to pause on paying rent until they officially opened in September, they said.
Kant and Ayub went through hundreds of names before they settled on Lazeez, which means “delicious” in Urdu.
The food lives up to the name.
After Ayub mixed the avocado together with the other bhel poori ingredients, he used a silver cone to mold the snack into a cylinder. No paper cones this time, the snack stood tall, topped by elegant microgreens and flowers.
As we talked, the concoction started to sag as it soaked up the mint and tamarind sauces. Ayub disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a new container of the snack, with the sauces on the side.
I ordered hakka noodles as well to try Khadka’s specialty and biryani to taste Ayub’s father’s legacy. Ayub slipped a box of paneer chilli into my takeout bag unbeknownst to me, because I had hesitated about whether to order that too.
Arrayed on my plate at home, each dish was perfect. Each tasted exactly right, with no bite falling flat. The tamarind sauce for the bhel poori tasted silky sweet, and the mint chutney tasted so fresh it reminded me of the gazpacho I ate growing up.
The batter wrapped around the paneer was surprisingly sweet and light, and I realized that was the taste I always missed in paneer chilli. I liked the thin, crispy slices of cabbage and carrot stir fried into the hakka noodles. I was perhaps least surprised and impressed by the noodles. My partner, on the other hand, devoured them.
Easily my favorite dish was the biryani, accompanied by a yogurt raita. I ate bite after bite, trying to figure out what was creating this balance of flavors. Was it caramelized onion mellowing out the cardamom and anise in the rice? Did Khadka use multiple kinds of cardamom with different flavors, or roast the whole spices enough to change how they taste?
Sweta Panwar, who is married to Kant, and her friend Swati Malik wait for their order.
Kant and Ayub claim that they represent the highest quality Indian food in town. I’m not sure how to test that. Maybe the answer lies in that perfect balance of flavors and the careful taste-testing that achieved it.
Previous coverage of recommended take-orders to help keep local businesses survive the pandemic:
• Today’s Special: Haci’s Napoletana Pie
• Today’s Special: Fred & Patty’s Brie On Baguette
• Today’s Special: Nieda’s Moist Falafel
• Today’s Special: Qulen’s Vegan “Wings”
• Today’s Special: Aaron’s Peruvian Rice Bowl
• Today’s Special: Singh Bros.’ Chana Kulcha
• Today’s Special: Grandma’s Chicken Soup
• Today’s Special: Woody’s Steak & Shrimp
• Today’s Special: Shilmat’s Yemisir Sambusa
• Today’s Special: Arjun’s Vegetarian Manchurian
