The Unshakeable Indian Restaurant I’ll Go Out of My Way to Visit
This is part of our series that celebrates America’s Favorite Neighborhood Restaurants. We asked 80 of the most interesting people we know to reveal the local spots they love the most.
Singling out a favorite Indian restaurant among Edison, New Jersey’s dizzying array of them is, plainly, a real idiot’s errand. Why even bother? This exercise forces you to succumb to the irrationalism of your silly heart. And for the better part of two decades, mine has guided me to Swagath Gourmet.
Swagath Gourmet is on a retail-populated stretch of Edison’s Oak Tree Road, nestled between a sari shop and a jewelry store. I feel as if I was born at Swagath; I can’t remember the first time I visited, but it must’ve been around 1997, when I was five years old.
Swagath’s menu includes vegetarian South Indian staples. There are dosas padded with potatoes and onions; there are medu vadas, deep-fried doughnuts made from lentils; there are uttapams, those thick, savory rice flour pancakes that are cooked with onions and chiles, tomatoes added in as the batter sits on the hot pan. Everything is served on stainless-steel platters and cups. Its cotton tablecloths are a pleasant shade of turquoise dulled by overhead lighting; the air inside is thick with the sweat of batter from idli, a steamed fermented rice cake that’s served as an appetizer. There’s a pleasant little shrine of Ganesh, draped in garlands of red and yellow roses, at the entrance. The restaurant usually has the faint sound of Hindi music rumbling in the background, high enough to be recognizable but gentle enough not to disturb.
We ate there out of habit: My family visited Swagath frequently because of the extremely boring fact that it was just down the road from the YMCA we all went to. Through this repetition, it became one of my late father’s favorite restaurants: the service dependably vigilant, the food unimpeachable. The man would basically inhale the rasam, a muddy tomato-and-tamarind–based soup that’s served before dosas. I’ve inherited this fondness from him; Swagath’s rasam wields understated power, spiced with such restraint that it has staved off some of my worst head colds.
Swagath was the place where my clueless hands learned how to mangle a dosa and dip it into a shallow, sludgy pool of coconut chutney. This was where I learned that you can’t just drink a blisteringly hot cup of filter coffee, served in a stainless-steel tumbler, because you’d potentially lose your tongue in the process; you’ve got to pour it into a dabarah, a tiny bowl with lipped rims, to cool it down.
Our family moved a few suburbs away from Edison in 2001. We would visit sporadically, gravitating to Swagath when we found ourselves there, as if our Toyota Corolla had developed a mind of its own.
My mother and I last ate there in June 2017 after my dad’s funeral. Swagath was convenient: The restaurant was down the road from the storage unit where he’d kept some of his belongings, belongings we now had to sift through and decide what to do with while we did the same with ourselves. Swagath has become one of life’s constants. It is an unfluctuating hamlet in the armpit of America, fostering the illusion that restaurants can be immune to the dumb ravages of time. The faces at the table may disappear, but the dosas are never stale, the rasam never loses its flu-vanquishing kick, and the tablecloths stay the same color. If I’m corny, forgive me. Blame Swagath.
Mayukh Sen is a JamesBeard Award-winning food writer in New York.
