In a little over seven months, Leda Scheintaub and Nash Patel, owners of Dosa Kitchen, has been able to transform a kitchen at the Winston Prouty campus into a factory kitchen where they are able to get some of their dosa products into local stores.
BRATTLEBORO — In a little over seven months, Leda Scheintaub and Nash Patel, owners of Dosa Kitchen, have been able to transform a facility at the Winston Prouty campus into a factory kitchen where they prepare food for distribution into local stores. They also operate a food truck adjacent to the kitchen three days a week.
“We feel so lucky that we found the space, and the Winston Prouty management and community has been super welcoming,” said Scheintaub. “We are figuring out all our production, setting everything up. We currently have three distributors.”
Scheintaub and Patel call their cuisine “South Indian soul food.” A dosa is a thin pancake or crepe made from a fermented batter of ground black lentils and rice, often served with chutney and sambar, and fillings such as curried chicken, beef or vegetables.
Locally, their dosa batter, sambar, and mysore chutney can be found at the food co-ops in Brattleboro and Putney, at the Monadnock Food Co-op and international food market in Keene, N.H., and several stores and CSA locations across the two states.
Scheintaub and Patel started their Southern Vermont journey in 2009 when they opened a booth at the Brattleboro Winter Farmers Market under the name of Pepperwater, an Anglo/Indian soup dish. Their dream of having their own food truck became a reality in 2014 when they opened the Dosa Kitchen food truck in back of the Hooker-Dunham building in Brattleboro, overlooking the Connecticut River. In 2015, the couple moved the food truck to the Retreat Farm, where it stayed for four years.
Very quickly, the food truck became so popular that people would drive from all over New England to sample the food.
That success — and being the grand prize winner of the 2022 business plan competition by the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation — allowed them to expand their operation to sell their product in area stores.
Scaling up does come with its share of challenges, however, such as figuring out how much capacity is at their current location, how much they can make and how much they can store. One of the bigger issues right now is finding enough cold storage space for their products as they continue the slow but steady growth of their business.
PHOTOS: Expanding the business
Nash Patel, owner of Dosa Kitchen, prepares the ingredients to make sambar in their commercial kitchen at the Winston Prouty campus on Thursday, May 18, 2023. They currently make three main products that is sold in 40 stores.
Nash Patel, owner of Dosa Kitchen, prepare three products at a commercial kitchen at the Winston Prouty campus. Purchase local photos online.
“We are going after accounts based on what we can do,” said Scheintaub. “We’ve been told over and over again, that if you try to get too big, too fast, that could be very detrimental to business. So we’re trying to grow sensibly.”
They do have large goals: they hope to someday be in every co-op in the Northeast. That is years in the future, but they still stay grounded to their roots with the food truck, continuing to operate that three days a week at the Winston Prouty campus.
They currently work Tuesday through Thursday on the mass production side of the business, and Friday through Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. cooking up fresh dosas for customers in the food truck.
“Our larger goal is to make dosa a household name in the United States,” added Scheintaub.
