Divya’s Kitchen, New York City’s first authentic Ayurvedic restaurant, cares not just about your taste buds – although it rewards them very well – but also about your health and wellbeing.
Whether you’re a New Yorker or an ISKCON devotee, as soon as you walk into the East Village eatery, with its homey amber lighting, pure cedar wood furniture and live plants, you’ll know you’re in for a new kind of casual fine dining experience.
Divya’s Kitchen, located on the ground floor of the Bhakti Center in Manhattan, opened in October 2016. The cheery face behind the food is Divyambara Dasi, a beaming, hard-working woman recognizable by her personalized chef’s coat (the inscription reads “Chef Divya Alter”) and her clear love for serving others.
It goes a long way back. Divyambara’s first service upon joining the ISKCON ashram in her native Bulgaria in 1990 was cooking. “Bulgaria was just emerging from under the communist regime at the time,” she says. “Devotees were underground, and there were no books translated, but we had two cookbooks. So cooking and distributing prasadam was our main service.”
Divya refined her skills learning from local cooks in India. Later, she settled with her American husband Purusa Sukta Das in the U.S., where in 2008 she began offering vegetarian cooking classes at the Bhakti Center with her non-profit Bhagavat Life.
But she really found her path when she had a major health crisis, suffering from auto-immune disease. She was cured by Vaidya Ramakant Mishra, a teacher and doctor of Shakavansiya Ayurveda, an ancient lineage mentioned in the Puranas: Dr. Mishra’s ancestors are said to have treated Lord Krishna’s own son, Samba.
With her health transformed by Ayurveda, Divyambara wanted to use it to help others. She began studying intensely with Dr. Mishra, becoming certified in Ayurvedic pulse reading and marma therapy.
Happy customers await their meal at Divya's Kitchen
She also became an Ayurvedic Shakvansiya nutritional consultant, and began teaching Ayurvedic cooking in her cooking classes, which became immensely popular, drawing more than 10,000 students over the past eight years.
Now her restaurant utilizing the same principles is proving to be a hit too, getting rave reviews from publications like Observer.com, AM New York, and Bon Apetit magazine.
Divya’s Kitchen is a healing experience from the moment you step inside.
“First of all,” Divya says, “We want mainstream New Yorkers to feel comfortable, not intimidated that they’re not devotees and don’t fit there.”
So unlike the typical devotee-run restaurant, there are no intense colors, no bombardment of devotional accessories and pictures, and no buffet. Customers sit down and are served by waiters, a fine dining experience that simultaneously has a relaxed, inviting feel as if they’re in the host’s living room.
The simple yet elegant décor represents the five elements emphasized in Ayurveda – space, air, fire, water and earth. So there are unfinished cedar wood shelves adorned with nature art, clay pots and cooking utensils from different cultures. There are live plants, pure cedar wood tables, and chairs upholstered with natural fabrics. This all creates a very nourishing atmosphere.
Carrot risotto
A lot of attention is given to hospitality, caring for guests’ needs in a very personal way. And then there’s the food itself.
“Ayurvedic cooking is really Vaishnava cooking at its highest standard,” says Divya. “It’s all about selecting the best quality ingredients and combining them in the right way for the best digestion.”
Divya’s passion is to make Ayurvedic cooking accessible to all and to apply its principles to all kinds of cuisines – she says that Ayurveda is a universal science, not limited to India.
So Divya’s Kitchen includes dishes from all over the world, presented with beautiful gastronomic flair. For instance there are Italian dishes like an Italian-style salad with steamed fennel, beats, arugula and olives; lasagna made with broccoli, carrots, and spinach; a roasted vegetable fusion with fresh herbs; quinoa and wild rice pilaf; and black lentil soup.
There are also Indian-style dishes like vegetable curry, mung dahl soup, and panir cutlets. And there are delicious desserts like the famous vegan carob coconut cake, and a gluten-free pineapple upside down cake.
Classically in Ayurveda, Divya explains, there are no good or bad foods – depending on each individual’s constitution and environment, different foods are recommended or avoided. But with today’s stressful lives, polluted environment and weakened digestive systems, Ayurveda does favor and avoid different general categories of foods.
Lasagna made with fresh homemade cheese and almond milk bechamel sauce
So Divya’s Kitchen completely avoids nightshade vegetables like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and peppers, which are very inflammatory foods.
The restaurant makes its own spice blends, and mills its own flours every day with a stone-grinding machine, making gluten-free oat, barley and spelt flours. For wheat flour, it uses Einkorn, the first cultivated wheat before hybridization, which contains much less gluten and is much easier to digest.
While there are vegan options, Divya says most who avoid dairy due to allergies are reacting to conventional commercial dairy, which is full of poisonous artificial hormones, antibiotics and chemicals. Thus Divya’s Kitchen uses only organic milk from grass-fed, well cared for cows from a local New York farm. It also makes its own fresh cheeses and ghee from organic heavy cream.
Meanwhile for its lasagna the restaurant uses béchamel sauce prepared with freshly squeezed almond milk made on site, since according to Ayurveda, the combination of dairy milk and salt causes toxicity within the body.
Desserts are also made with extraordinarily healthy, natural ingredients. The vegan carob coconut cake, for example, is made with Einkorn flour, coconut oil, and coconut sugar, which is low gylcemic and, Divya says, “doesn’t give you that sugar spike.”
None of this takes away from the taste, however. “Make sure to stay for the coconut carob cake, which tastes so good it’s hard to believe it’s healthy,” wrote an Observer.com reviewer.
Delicious coconut carob cake made with coconut sugar and coconut oil
After eating at Divya’s kitchen, many guests comment on how they feel full and satisfied after their meal, but not tired or heavy – a common experience when eating out. They love the atmosphere, and are amazed at how tasty vegetarian food without onions or garlic can be. After such a pleasurable culinary experience, many are interested in visiting the temple upstairs or attending Bhakti Center lectures.
They can also sense that they’re eating prasadam, even though they don’t know what that is. “People often tell me, ‘I can feel the love in your food,’” says Divya. “Sometimes they say it with tears in their eyes. And that is the biggest compliment for me.”
Some returning customers also start taking Divyambara’s Ayurvedic cooking classes upstairs on the fifth floor of the Bhakti Center, which include a 250-hour culinary training for those who want to take it to a professional level.
Because Divya teachers Vaishnava standards, students don’t taste as they cook, and many become vegetarian, stop eating onions and garlic, and pray over their food, which they believe makes it extra tasty. A number of qualified graduates from the classes are now teaching Bhagavat Life cooking classes themselves.
In April, Divyambara will release “What To Eat For How You Feel: The New Ayurvedic Kitchen,” which will be the first Ayurvedic cookbook to be published by a major publisher, Rizzoli.
“My hope is to offer a humble contribution in furthering Srila Prabhupada’s mission by making a sattvic lifestyle more accessible, and helping people to appreciate prasadam and benefit from it,” she says. “Our philosophy is that everything begins with the tongue, so the food that goes into our mouth tremendously effects our mind and thoughts. I hope to inspire people to put the best food into their mouths, so they will have clearer, kind, and good thoughts to put out into the world.”
She concludes: “I also hope that my cookbook and classes will inspire devotees to take better care of their health so that health does not become their main obstacle to devotional service, as it once did for me.”
Source:http://iskconnews.org/nycs-first-ayurvedic-restaurant-serves-up-more-than-just-a-tasty-meal,6021/
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