Nalini Sadhu is Keeping Kashmiri Pandit Cuisine Alive, One Recipe at a Time

Nalini Sadhu did not set out to become a guardian of heritage. She set out to stop a cuisine from disappearing. When she founded Matamaal, the pan-India restaurant chain dedicated to Kashmiri Pandit food, it was not an act of entrepreneurship first, it was an act of grief management. “I began Matamaal, because I could not bear the thought of our food disappearing quietly from memory.”, she says. 

That instinct has since grown into something far larger. Matamaal now operates across India, and has earned a reputation not merely as a restaurant but as what many guests describe as a living archive, a place where the culinary memory of a displaced community is held, tended, and served. Sadhu is careful, however, to resist the language of ownership. Her recipes came from her grandmother, her mother-in-law, the unhurried rhythms of family kitchens. What she carries is an inheritance, and with it, a responsibility she accepts in full. “When chefs cook cuisines born from loss, they must cook with accuracy and humility. We are not recreating nostalgia for commerce; we are safeguarding continuity.”

Completing the Story

Kashmiri cuisine is widely recognised, but it is largely understood through a single lens: the ceremonial, meat-laden grandeur of Wazwan. This, Sadhu argues, is not the complete picture. Kashmiri Pandit food is its own tradition entirely: aromatic spices rather than onion-garlic bases, yoghurt gravies, fennel, dry ginger, asafoetida, and a cooking philosophy shaped by ritual as much as flavour. It lived inside homes. It was intimate and seasonal. And when the community was displaced in 1990, it retreated even further from public view.

“Dominant narratives often belong to what is most visible, politically supported, or commercially scalable,” she observes. “Wazwan became the global shorthand for Kashmiri cuisine because it was ceremonial, structured, and already institutionalised.” Pandit food, by contrast, was never designed for banquet halls. Matamaal exists to bridge that gap, not to compete with existing narratives, she insists, “but to complete the story.” The misconceptions she encounters daily reveal something broader: how cultures are consumed in simplified formats, and how nuance disappears when complexity is reduced for comfort.

The Spice Chain Behind the Soul

Control over ingredients is not a peripheral concern at Matamaal, it is the entire foundation. Sadhu spent the early years of the restaurant struggling to source Kashmiri spices of adequate quality. The masala balance in Pandit cuisine is precise; small variations alter the outcome entirely. Her solution was to build her own supply chain from the ground up.

Kanz & Muhul (K&M), her vertically integrated spice and agro brand, now works directly with farmers across Jammu & Kashmir to source saffron, chillies, dry ginger, fennel, turmeric, and other core ingredients. The brand oversees grading, processing, and grinding, and supplies Matamaal’s restaurants across India, direct-to-consumer customers, marketplaces such as Amazon, B2B partners, and export markets including the United States, where K&M has a corporate presence in San Jose. “Authenticity, for me, is not about geography alone,” Sadhu explains. “It is about method, proportion, and ingredient integrity.” Kanz & Muhul, then, is not simply a retail venture, it is what makes honest cooking possible outside the Valley.

When Memory Sits at the Table

Everything at Matamaal is intentional. The brassware. The breads. The pace of service. The festivals observed. The music that drifts through the dining room. None of it is decorative nostalgia; all of it is designed to produce emotional familiarity for a community that lost its home more than three decades ago.

The moments Sadhu describes are quiet and arresting: “I have seen guests fall silent after the first bite of haak. I have seen elders correct their children’s pronunciation of Kashmiri words at the table. I have seen people who had not returned to the Valley in decades feel momentarily at home. I have also seen childhood friends from Kashmir meet after 30 years.” These are not marketing outcomes. They are the proof of a mission that has always been about more than food. For Nalini Sadhu, the plate is never just a plate, it is a means of returning something to people who were made to leave it behind.