by Robert Isenberg
Sreevardhan Mekala has dark skin, a big smile, and an unflappable mustache. He looks both relaxed and eager at the same time, like an aikido instructor, and his low voice sings in welcoming: “Khelp you, sir?” There isn’t much small-talk with Sree, but the moment he pours steaming tomato dal over a bed of basmati rice, you feel a certain kinship. You are poor, and Sree offers cheap, delicious food. Your lunch-break is brief, and Sree is the master of efficiency. Sree’s is a Hyderabadi quickie: Wham, bam, thank you kitchen-wallah.
Sree has quite the résumé – raised in Hyderabad, earned his Masters in India, became a biologist and researched for the Pittsburgh Oncology Center. According to legend, Sree’s wife, Vydehi Mekala, used to do marketing, but she tired of all the travel and paperwork. “But I don’t mind cooking 12 to 16 hours a day,” she told her husband. It may sound like a chauvinist fantasy, where a wife turns away from a high-profile job to toil over a burner, and customers call her “Mrs. Sree” instead of her real name. And Sree has also forfeited his career in medical science to a run a store, exchanging one stereotype for another. But when you meet them, none of this seems to matter. They clearly love to serve food. And they love to do it fast.
The moment you enter Sree’s, you are caught in a current of activity: You join a line and peruse the menu, which only offers five different items. The items change daily, but you’re choice is limited – on Tuesday, it’s Tamarind chicken, mixed-veggie tofu, chickpea potato, grape leaves curry, and broccoli with lentils. If you go vegetarian, you get three items; if chicken, you get a vegetable side. That’s it. Sree says hello and takes your order, and within 35 seconds, he ladles rice, chicken, dal and a piece of unleavened bread into a Styrofoam container, seals the container and rings you up. Within a minute, you have a $5 lunch and 50¢ can of soda. There are no individual tables, per se, just a ring of tables pressed against the wall; diners are forced to sit next to each other, like drunks at a dive bar. Napkins are paper towels torn from a freestanding roll; silverware is disposable plastic, stuffed into cubbyholes. A standard-issue Sree’s meal will fill you up in 15 minutes flat, leaving 35 minutes of lunch-break to mill around Downtown.
If you come alone – and most people do – Sree’s is the ultimate place to people-watch. It’s not easy; the layout forces you to stare at a blank wall, away from the other diners, but if you take the time to covertly crane your neck, you’ll see every type of customer: High-powered attorneys meeting between court-cases; Point Park students loudly bitching about their stupid dance coach; and a small army of bike-couriers sucking up rice and curry in a desperate attempt to replenish calories. The great equalizer is the can of Pepsi or Mountain Dew; despite Sree’s commitment to healthy, authentic Indian cuisine, chai never makes a cameo.
Not everyone like Sree’s, or even Sree himself. “He used to order large batches of samosas,” recalls a waiter at Peoples, one of Pittsburgh’s most beloved Indian restaurants. “Samosas are really hard to make. It’s slow, tedious work. And Sree would buy them from us so he wouldn’t have to make them himself, and then he’d mark up the price. So it was low labor, high profit. We got tired of it, so we don’t sell them to him anymore.” The waiter pauses. “But other than that, he’s a really nice guy.”
And it's true: Whatever his minor trespasses, Sree's has become a local institution, where hundreds of disparate diners visit every afternoon to feast on low-fat goodness. Sree's cuisine is so popular that there is a satellite restaraunt -- a little red "food-truck" -- parked on Carnegie-Mellon's campus, and students line up for the window, their ulges bulging with hunger.
Pittsburgh is said to boast a conspicuously large number of Indian-Americans, as measured against the city’s total population. Given how many Indian restaurants there are – a half-dozen in Oakland, the city’s university district, another half-dozen Downtown, and dozens more scattered through the environs – Sree’s is wholly unique. There’s no dinner menu, no reservations, no bussers, no place-settings or TV playing Bollywood dance-numbers. At 3 p.m. the restaurant closes. Pity the bike messenger whose lunch-break is delayed.
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