Vijay Sadhu has been one of the most interesting chefs in Dallas for a long time. He opened Samar with Stephan Pyles and watched it become a James Beard semifinalist. He ran the kitchen at the W Hotel’s Cook Hall. He beat Bobby Flay on national television. He’s cooked for 50 people under a storm at a working farm in Van Alstyne while the lights flickered and the hail came down, and he didn’t miss a beat.
Dallas diners with long memories know him from his Indian restaurants specifically. Bukhara Grille in Richardson was an early stop. Then Clay Pit in Addison. He opened Northwest Frontier Cuisine, which became one of the city’s most respected Indian restaurants at the time — the first Indian-owned restaurant in Dallas to earn that kind of recognition. Sutra followed, a modern Indian concept at The Shops at Legacy in Plano that drew a loyal crowd and showed what happened when Sadhu got to cook the food he actually wanted to cook. Pepper Smash came after that in the same space. Each one a little more his own.
What he’s doing now is smaller than any of that, and better.
Sadhu has been hosting a private tasting dinner out of his Plano home — 16 seats, a single long communal table, strangers sitting down together every few weeks to eat something that doesn’t fit into any one category. He calls it cooking without barriers, which sounds like something a chef says in a press release but in his case happens to be literally true. The man grew up in Hyderabad, spent years in New York, Sydney, and Bangkok, fell in love with Southern food after a road trip through Georgia and South Carolina, and then kept going. There’s no cuisine that owns him.
The May 16th dinner is called Prana. In Sanskrit, prana means life force — the breath behind everything living. For a chef who has spoken openly about slowing down, cooking with intention, and finding something more honest in the kitchen after years of high-volume restaurant life, the name is not accidental.
The menu is ten courses at $150 a person, and it reads like the inside of a mind that has eaten everywhere and forgotten nothing.
It opens with scallops finished in nimbu kosho butter — a Japanese yuzu citrus pepper paste swapped for the Indian nimbu, which is a smaller, more tart lime — over toasted buckwheat, nori, and a caloupule panko, with a nimbu achar on the side for brightness. Right away you know what kind of dinner this is going to be.
The shiitake mushroom and brown butter chawamushi that follows is topped with confit garlic and smoked ghee. Chawamushi is a Japanese savory egg custard, steamed until it barely holds itself together. Sadhu takes that and runs a thread of South Indian fat through it — ghee, smoky and warm — and the result is something that should be confused but isn’t.
Then gnocchi with paneer, masala macha, and tulsi. Soft potato dumplings pulling Indian fresh cheese into an Italian frame, with the basil of the subcontinent instead of the Mediterranean. The grilled mustard shrimp course puts Sadhu back in the American South — shrimp and grits, which he first fell in love with on that road trip through Georgia — but the mustard here is Indian, the butter is smoked paprika, and the okra and red pepper sauce remind you this is not your grandmother’s lowcountry plate. It’s better.
A clean intermezzo arrives midway: fresh lime, pickled cucumber, mint, black salt. Four ingredients doing the work of twenty. You come back to the table ready.
The lamb chop lands with pear and fenugreek chutney, foxtail millets, raita, and pomegranate. Foxtail millet is an ancient grain from the Indian subcontinent, nutty and slightly chewy, and it holds up under the lamb in a way that rice never could. The short rib that follows goes somewhere else entirely — plantain, chilhuacle negro, and pepper jack, which is a Mexican black dried chile sauce on a classically brined Texas cut, with a little funk from the cheese. It works because Sadhu is not interested in fusion for its own sake. He’s interested in flavor, and these flavors belong together even if they’ve never been introduced.
Dessert is a jaggaery crepe — jaggery being the unrefined cane sugar of India, deep and molasses-adjacent — with saffron ice cream, hot ghee, coconut flakes, and candied pistachios. It tastes like the end of a meal in the best possible way, like something warm and deliberate and specifically designed to stay with you. Signature spice cookies and masala rose chai or coffee close it out.
Sixteen people get to eat this in May 16th. If you want to be one of them, reach out to Sadhu directly at chefvijaysadhu@gmail.com or visit vijaysadhu.com. The dinner is $150 per person. It will be worth every dollar.
