How Chef Cheetie Kumar Sustains a Community and a Music Career

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

On this episode

Cheetie Kumar is — by pretty much everyone’s accounts — one of the coolest people ever. At the 2024 Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, the Raleigh-based chef, restaurateur, and guitarist made time for a quick chat about how she rethought restaurants through Covid, created the structure of her new restaurant — Ajja — to make sure it benefitted the neighborhood and the people who work there, and found joy introducing new flavors to a population that maybe hadn’t experienced them before, plus the bands she absolutely will not play in the dining room.

Meet our guest

Cheetie Kumar is the chef and co-owner of Ajja restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, business partner, and bandmate Paul Siler. In 2023, Ajja was a semifinalist for the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant and named a Best New Restaurant by Esquire. Kumar is a two-time nominee and five-time semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef: Southeast accolade as well as the guitarist for the band Birds of Avalon. She and Siler opened the music venue Kings in 1999 and the bar Neptune’s and now-shuttered restaurant Garland in 2013.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s podcast, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On what she learned from closing her first restaurant

“I don’t think there is any such thing as failure, or really even success. Everything is transitory, and it’s about how you feel at that place in your life. When the outcome doesn’t go the way that you want it to, it feels like a failure. But you’re still here and you’re moving on, so you’re leading towards success.”

On redefining priorities

“I’m exploring the idea of what it means to be a restaurant owner and a chef. I don’t know if I’ll have another restaurant or not — I probably will — but I wanted it to be sustainable on a lot of different levels. A couple years into Garland I was like, ‘This is not sustainable for me, and maybe it’s not a sustainable business model in the city that we’re in.’ But we pushed through anyway. The one thing I really wanted to make room for in my life is to be playing guitar again.”

On the responsibility that comes with being a chef

“To be a chef is so much more than being a cook. To be a chef is to be responsible for how you source, how you teach, and the story that you tell about the food. You’re responsible for keeping your staff employed and in a meaningful and gainful way. You’re responsible for having a growth plan. You have to have a business that makes sense in the place that you’re in. We have to make a profit to an extent, but we also have to make sure that we take care of our people. That means our staff, and our guests, and our neighborhood, and our community.”

On childhood dreams

“My sister always said she wanted to be a doctor, my brother was going to be something academic, and I never knew. I could never picture myself as an adult. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but we’re an Indian immigrant family and going to graduate school was absolutely necessary. Having a career that was academic was absolutely necessary, but I never found myself fitting in. Honestly, I wanted to be [Pretenders founding member] Chrissie Hynde.”

On not being pigeonholed

“When Garland opened, we got a lot of really bad reviews. And a lot from Indian people that were like, ‘Why is it so expensive? Why is it only one chicken dish on the menu?’ All of those really narrow-minded, flattening, one-dimensional kind of expectations of what somebody who happens to be Indian in her DNA, what kind of restaurant am I allowed to have? And that was a difficult internal conversation because I thought I didn’t really have an identity. ”

On finding permission in fear

“When you look at losing everything, and everything is crumbling, it’s devastatingly scary. But also there’s so much permission, because when something isn’t quite right, you know that it needs to change. It’s really hard to change when everything’s going all the time. [During Covid] with everything stopping, there was a certain permission like, ‘Well, what the hell, we’re all going to die anyway. This could all go away tomorrow. Let’s try something. It’s just money.'”

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Daniel Boulud, Rodney Scott, Asma Khan, Emeril and E.J. Lagasse, Claudia Fleming, Dave Beran and Will Poulter, Dan Giusti, Priya Krishna, Lee Anne Wong, Cody Rigsby, Kevin Gillespie, Pete Wells, David Chang, Christine D’Ercole, Channing Frye, Nick Cho, Ti Martin, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.