How do you get a crowd to show up for dinner in Bristol at 5 p.m. on a Monday? If you’re Katherine Patel, you blast some Bollywood music and serve Western Indian flavors that don’t miss.
Patel, 26, founded Garam Tava Club in March. Now, she’s self-employed full time with catering gigs and regular fall pop-ups at Tandem in Bristol and Red Wagon Plants in Hinesburg. The business is a tribute to her wife, who is from Mumbai.
“She was teaching me all of her recipes, sharing stories and memories, re-creating it in a really diasporic way,” said Patel, an avid home cook with a professional background in coffee and wine. “As someone who’s as into food and taste and flavor as I am — and to impress her — I wanted to learn and to bring that flavor of home here and share it with people.”
Western Indian food is hard to find in Vermont, where North Indian and Indian-Nepali dishes dominate. Cuisine from Mumbai and its surrounding provinces is “really textural; it’s really fragrant,” Patel said. “It’s very light but also sustaining.”
It’s also largely vegetarian, and that’s been Patel’s focus with Garam Tava Club so far.
“I haven’t run out of things to do with vegetables yet,” she said with a laugh.
To introduce Vermonters to as many dishes as possible, Patel rotates 40 to 60 percent of her menu monthly — and even more for the complex desserts that take days to prepare. She does some traveling to hunt for spices but sources many ingredients from Naan Sense Grocery, an Indian store in Williston.
I was an instant fan after trying Patel’s food in May. When I saw that Garam Tava Club would kick off a Monday-night series of women-run global food pop-ups at Tandem in October, I preordered too fast to remember to ask my husband what he wanted.
We showed up early to find Jess Messer and Lauren Gammon’s multiuse space packed. Between 4:30 and 6:30, Patel made 269 plates for takeout and dine-in customers, she said.
We grabbed drinks from Messer, who served her Savouré sodas and clever cocktails to match the menu. I slowly sipped an autumnal pear, fig leaf and gin Tree of Life ($12) at one of two long communal tables. My toddler slurped his mango lassi ($5) in mere minutes.
Garam Tava Club’s most popular item is the Bombay Frankie ($11), a “cult classic” street dish from Mumbai, Patel explained, of roti filled with richly spiced potato; shredded carrot, cabbage and onion; green chutney; and fresh chile vinegar. Patel rolls each flatbread by hand with a thin belan rolling pin and cooks them on a tava, a flat steel pan used on the stovetop.
“It’s the most auspicious utensil in the kitchen,” she said. She named her biz after the pan for good luck — the full moniker translates as Hot Skillet Club.
The dish is a perfect example of the textural contrast Patel loves: chewy roti, soft potato and crunchy vegetables amped up with vibrant spices and a touch of heat.
She also sells a lot of pav, an impossibly soft eggless dinner roll originally brought to Mumbai from Portugal. We had one on the side of a very tasty samosa chaat ($12), and friends dipped theirs into misal pav ($10), a sprouted moth-bean curry. Continuing the texture trend, I somehow found room for a bowl of bhel ($9): crunchy puffed rice with fried chickpea noodles called sev, peanuts, cucumber, tomato, onion, lime and Patel’s tangy homemade chutneys.
Whatever’s on the menu next, I’ll be there. Garam Tava Club will host Friday pop-ups in the beautiful Bake Shop at Red Wagon Plants on November 7 and 21 and will return to Tandem on Monday, November 17. The Bollywood tunes will be blaring.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Bollywood to Bristol | Garam Tava Club pops up with the flavors of Western India”
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
