Review: Thattu pioneers with Kerala cuisine, just as much as its innovative tip-free pay model

On a leafy corner near the North Branch of the Chicago River, in a stretch of low brick buildings with a former factory life, Margaret Pak and Vinod Kalathil have opened their new home for Thattu, a refuge for fellow nomadic souls.

The Avondale neighborhood restaurant shares their interpretation of Kerala, the state on the southwestern-most coast of India.

“It’s beautiful, lush and filled with coconut trees,” said Pak, chef and co-owner with Kalathil, the general manager. “I fell in love with Vinod and the cuisine about 20 years ago.”

He’s originally from Kerala. She’s Korean American, originally from Northern California.

“I thought I had experienced and enjoyed Indian cuisine,” Pak said. “But when Vinod first cooked for me, that’s when it really hit me, like, this is so different.”

That first meal included an egg curry and a shrimp dish.

“But also a crab curry that I was eating with my hands,” she said “That was a whole new experience.”

Two years later, they married.

“That was my first visit to Kerala,” Pak said. “My first visit to India, also the first time I met Vinod’s whole family.”

That must have been one intense trip.

Every time they went back, that was pretty much the only time they got to eat Kerala food, Kalathil said. Almost all the Indian food commonly served in the United States is northern, he added.

“And even when we do get southern Indian food in the U.S., it focuses on dosa and idli, which is just more commonly known,” Kalathil said about the emblematic golden thin pancakes and white steamed rice cakes. “Indian food is much more diverse.”

The Kerala fried chicken sandwich, however, is their own creation. A so-called naked thigh is anything but, fully dressed in striking dark spices, accessorized simply with spicy housemade cucumber pickles and a curry leaf aioli, all held within a brioche bun.

It’s minimalist in form, but maximalist in spice, though not numbing with heat. That holds true throughout the thoughtfully concise menu.

The ChaaterTots should be a required side. There’s an art to perfect tater tots (never from an oven), and here they’re further gilded with a generous dusting of chaat masala, the house powdered spice mix, and a side of chunky beet ketchup.

Do note the sandwich and the tots are available at lunch only, as is the chorum kariyum, the rice and curry of the day you’ll want every day, served on a round silver thali tray, with two changing sides plus a crisp papadum to crumble and a tangy rasam to sip. A curry moru, traditionally made with buttermilk in Kerala, becomes a buttery yogurt and green plantain bowl here. The dish is paired so beautifully with a green bean coconut thoran and a kadala black chickpea salad, you might start wondering about adding the sides to your family Thanksgiving dishes.

The fish fry is a stunning main event. Banish any thoughts of a British colonial-style mashup. A pair of pristine fillets get the naked spice treatment, and then they’re offered with a watermelon cucumber salad, on an herbal fenugreek leaf chutney, with a supersized quenelle of chilled yogurt curd rice alongside.

They use catfish, unlike in Kerala.

“The most common fish there are Indian mackerel, sardines, pomfret and king fish,” Kalathil said. But at Thattu, they chose catfish, because it’s fresh and local.

At dinner, the black chickpeas return as a kadala curry with a deeply roasted coconut gravy. It’s been with Thattu since day one, Pak said. You can choose an appam or jeera rice on the side. For me, there was no choice but the appam, which I first fell in love with at the former Thattu food hall stall in the West Loop. They transform coconut milk and rice into a fermented batter, then irresistible lacy white crepes, torn with your hands.

“I really hope we can keep going with the appam,” Kalathil said, citing India’s rice export bans. “I went around to stores, but they won’t give us more than two bags.”

The payasam uses a different rice from Kerala. A warm rice pudding cooks coarse matta rice silky soft with coconut milk and jaggery, the caramel-hued sugar. I burned my tongue, too tempted after the first taste, but I do wish the cashew and raisin garnish had been toasted or otherwise enhanced.

The masala biscuit has clearly raised my expectations. Their signature sweet and spicy shortbread, another long lost food hall love rekindled, contains cashews and multitudes. They were the beginning of Thattu, inspired by cookies from the historic Delecta Bakery in Kerala, where Kalathil’s late father bought the treats for his son and daughter-in-law. He eventually obtained the original recipe for her, but it would take years and a world away before she made it her own.

They’re packaged individually now; I wish they weren’t, since the wrappers hide a rustic beauty, but they do mention a pairing with coffee or tea.

But there’s no masala chai.

“Because we like lime tea,” Pak said.

“And the way south Indian tea is made, it’s typically kept boiling all day on a samovar,” Kalathil said. “And to keep that steady temperature, you need a dedicated stove or equipment. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it the right way.”

What they do offer is kaapi. The south Indian coffee with chicory, the frothiest scalded milk and sugar has taken off like crazy, he said.

“That type of coffee is not even from Kerala,” he added. “It’s from our neighboring state of Tamil Nadu that’s very famous for their coffee.”

On their last trip to India last year, they spent some time in Kodagu, a rural district in the neighboring state of Karnataka, and stayed on a coffee farm.

“We had really great coffee every day for four days straight,” Pak said. When they opened, it became a non-negotiable. “We had to figure that out.”

After months of tasting, they finally got the right blend with Veloria Coffee, owned by a Filipino couple in Portage Park.

“Part of the fun of enjoying that coffee is that it usually comes scalding hot in the dabra,” Pak said about the small stainless steel cup and bowl set. “They almost hug each other.”

You can pour, or pull, the coffee back and forth to cool it down or make it even frothier.

The Sarbath cocktail is their version of a street drink in Kerala by the same name. There it’s a shaken sweet and spiced lemonade with basil seeds. Here, it’s a refreshing and balanced mix of Tanqueray Rangpur lime gin, fino sherry and nannari, the Indian sarsaparilla root. The Sassy Spritz, a nonalcoholic translation, substitutes passion fruit, yuzu and Topo Chico into a fun and elegant drink.

The Kerala fried chicken bites, dinnertime nuggets of the lunchtime bird, don’t fare quite as well, losing the complexity of other components, despite a nice yogurt sauce. A Malabar chicken biriyani, bone-in chicken layered with basmati rice and baked, was surprisingly undersalted as a whole, in defiance of the tiny but electrifying lime pickle side. The chicken ishtu, a classic Kerala stew, seemed more of broth, but the jeera rice on the side with cumin flecked basmati was so flavorful and flawless that I wanted more of that alone.

It’s easy to order on a whim with a QR code-carved menu that sends your order directly to the kitchen. There are print menus and servers if you prefer that too.

“With the QR code, I would say 95% of our customers are completely happy with it,” Kalathil said. He and the servers also go around and talk to every table. “We do have limited staff with our model. That’s one of the things that we had to compromise on. Otherwise, our prices will be way too high.”

The service experience was impressive and gracious.

They made another decision without compromise: There’s no tipping or service charge.

“Even before we opened the restaurant, this is something that we really wanted,” Kalathil said. They’ve been working with High Road Kitchens, an organization trying to bring fair wages and treatment to all employees in the restaurant world. “I’m also an accountant, so I did a lot of calculations to figure out how we can make this happen. The way we do it, we price everything in.”

Employees get a percentage of the restaurant’s income based on their weekly hours, Kalathil added.

“As we hire new folks, we do have a range of hourly rates,” Pak said. “But instead of tip share, we call it a revenue share.”

“It’s almost like a co-op for our employees,” Kalathil said.

But that doesn’t mean diners still don’t want to tip, as with one couple recently.

“At the beginning of their meal they’re like, ‘What? We can’t tip? We want to tip,’” Kalathil said. “They were like, ‘It’s up to the patron to decide whether or not to tip.’ And my answer when he said that was, ‘Well, we want our employees to get a fair wage, regardless of if patrons decide to tip or not, which is the reason why we are not letting you tip and we pay our employees.’

“I think they were a little taken aback when I said that, but by the end of the meal, they were absolutely loving everything,” he continued. “Basically, we don’t want our employees to be at the mercy of the customers, whether they tip well or not.”

And diners still do leave a lot of cash tips.

“We talk to our employees and ask what they want to do with it,” Kalathil said. “And their answer was caffeine, maybe a little bit of beer, and they also funded our three-month celebration.”

“It was literally made possible from all of our guests that don’t listen to us,” Pak said, laughing.

It seems so simple at Thattu, yet remains so complicated and fraught with emotion and politics elsewhere.

Perhaps it’s because the whole endeavor is a culmination of choices through lived experience.

Pak worked in finance, then the pharmaceutical industry, and finally a marketing analytics firm, her last office job.

So how does a Korean American woman who started off in the corporate world become the chef of a very personal regional Indian restaurant representing her husband’s culture?

“I grew up loving Korean food,” Pak said. “My mom was an excellent Korean home cook.”

She’s always been an expert eater, she added, but didn’t really start cooking until later in life. Not until she worked in food sales and met so many amazing chefs, including Won Kim at Kimski.

Kim, also Korean American and an artist, painted the graffiti-style murals in Thattu’s loft-like space.

She worked as his prep cook and made a lot of the banchan, the Korean sides she grew up eating.

“But then it was really wild,” Pak said, her voice breaking. She lost her father, and then her mother unexpectedly. Song Won Pak died in March 2017, and Mary Ahn Pak died in May 2018.

At that moment their daughter was cooking Korean food more than she ever had, but it became too hard to continue.

“Thank God I loved Vinod’s cooking so much too,” said the chef. “That’s when I poured everything into it. It was a way to process my grief.”

Through her process, Thattu has become a place of comfort and convictions — not just for Pak and Kalathil, not just for the workers, but for anyone who finds their new home.

Thattu

2601 W. Fletcher St.

773-754-0199

thattu.com

Open: Thursday to Sunday, lunch 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., dinner 5-9 p.m.

Eat. Watch. Do.

Weekly

---

What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now.

By submitting your email to receive this newsletter, you agree to our Subscriber Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

>

Prices: lunch, $11-$18; dinner $16-$32

Noise: Conversation-friendly

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible by entrance in alley, restrooms on single level

Tribune rating: Excellent, 3 stars

Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.

lchu@chicagotribune.com

Big screen or home stream, takeout or dine-in, Tribune writers are here to steer you toward your next great experience. Sign up for your free weekly Eat. Watch. Do. newsletter here.