The restaurant will bring taco bombs, burritos, and kati wraps to the Pearl District, fusing flavors from Indian and Mexican cuisines Hari Venka, a former engineer, has been a home cook since 2008, sharing his food with friends and developing recipes over that time. His hobby picked up in intensity during the pandemic lockdown — and although Chipotle and other fast casual restaurants were also in regular rotation for his family, Venka enjoyed throwing together ingredients to make similar dishes at home, like burritos and bowls. Soon, he and his wife Aarthi Ethiraj will enter the fast casual world themselves, incorporating a culinary tradition underrepresented in the national chain market. “There are a lot of Indian restaurants near where we live,” Venka says. “But there are one or two locations, and that’s it. We wanted to know why there are not many Indian [chain] restaurants, like Panda Express or Chipotle.” The idea of fusing Indian cuisine with burritos and other Mexican flavors was how the couple’s first restaurant, TikkaTacoRito, was born. However, Indian Mexican cuisine is not exactly a brand new concept: Punjabi Mexican cuisine has existed in some form in California for decades at places like Rasul’s El Ranchero. The concept of transposing Indian ingredients onto other dishes also has some footing in the greater Portland restaurant world: Indian pizza places such as Fusion Curry Pizza, Curry Pizza House, and others have popped up in Portland and Hillsboro in recent years. But when TikkaTacoRito opens on July 1, diners will be able to order customizable Indian Mexican dishes like paneer rice bowls and goat kati rolls in a fast-casual setting. TikkaTacoRito will make tortillas and roti in-house as the foundation for burritos and kati wraps. Venka explains that the process of making TTR’s tortillas and roti are quite similar. Both doughs need to rest and will then be pressed and cooked to order using a heated tortilla press — it takes approximately 20 seconds to go from dough ball to finished bread. “My son is now in second grade, and anything we make, we have to put it in something, roll it up, and then he’ll eat it,” Venka says. The restaurant’s team will fill bowls and salads with a choice of grains and proteins like chicken, goat, and paneer, which will be marinated overnight in yogurt and a blend of chili powder, fenugreek leaves, and cumin, rendering them tender. They will then be cooked in a cylindrical claypot oven to impart a smoky flavor. Traditionally, claypot cooking uses coals, but here, Venka will be cooking with gas and tossing in a few coals to achieve a similar taste. The restaurant’s oven reaches temperatures of 400 to 500 degrees and is able to accommodate 12 to 14 skewers which can each hold five or six chicken breasts. The restaurant’s taco bombs draw inspiration from panipuri, a bite-sized Indian dish that consists of a hollowed-out crunchy wheat shell stuffed with potato, chickpeas, and other vegetables. Here, Venka will deep fry the shells before filling them with taco ingredients and a sauce similar to chutney. “The idea is you get an explosion [of flavor],” Venka says. A dish Venka is calling boba caviar is similar to sabudana khichdi, a savory Indian pilaf made with tapioca pearls. With the recipes they’ve devised, Venka and Ethiraj see TikkaTacoRito’s Pearl District restaurant as an experiment for possible expansion. The menu was designed to be simple and “in a format that everyone understands” so it can be easily scaled up. “The thing for us is there should be no prior cooking experience required to make these things,” Venka says. TikkaTacoRito will open at 1426 NW Glisan Street.