Inside Patel Brothers, the Most Beloved Indian Grocery Store in America

Patel Brothers has every Indian ingredient, snack, and condiment you could ever want.
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Photo by Dan Goldberg

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It’s Sunday afternoon, and an entire Indian community, it seems, has packed into a single store. Dozens of jars of colorful spices and powders line the front of the shop. A complicated-looking steel machine busily cranks out perfectly round chapattis, which make a pleasant pfft sound as they neatly pile on top of each other. A woman in a burnt-orange sari sneaks a piece of mathri, a buttery fenugreek crisp, out of a container as she considers a bottomless bin of lentils. Welcome to Patel Brothers, the most popular Indian grocery store in America.

Photo by Dan Goldberg

I hesitate to think about life before Patel Brothers. Most of the Indian grocery stores my family used to frequent were located in rundown shopping centers. The produce always looked like it had been out for a day too long. There were jars of achaar collecting dust in the aisles. “Things were thrown on the floor or expired, and the employees talked to you like they were doing you a favor by allowing you to come,” recounts Barkha Cardoz, co-owner of Paowalla in New York. My first visit to Patel Brothers changed everything.

Photo by Dan Goldberg

I was visiting my parents in Dallas a few years back, and my dad asked if I wanted to come help him pick out the first mangoes of the season at the newly opened store nearby. I was shocked to see the bags of rice and flour neatly organized on shelves; the jalebi (like an Indian funnel cake) tasted as delectably syrupy as it did at the shops in India; one of the managers actually offered to walk our big boxes of mangoes to the car. That day, I became part of the enormous legion of loyalists who swear by Patel Brothers for Indian groceries.

Patel Bros (as it is affectionately called by fans) now counts 50 stores across the U.S — it’s by far the largest Indian grocer in the country. The business started as a storefront in Chicago, opened by two brothers, Mafat and Tulsi Patel, in 1974. At the time, the Patels were recent immigrants from India, and had trouble finding the ingredients they craved from back home. They purchased a dilapidated shop on Devon Avenue and sold the kinds of items you couldn’t get at your average grocery store, like fresh spices, mangoes, lentils, and chickpea flour — all imported from India.

Photo by Dan Goldberg

The small store turned into a multi-million-dollar brand that now also includes a separate food label, SWAD. That’s the brand name you see on the wide array of snacks that Patel Bros offers, including cult favorites like frozen samosas that somehow taste freshly fried, deeply flavorful chana masala you can make in a microwave, and murukku, a spicy, crunchy spiral-shaped cracker.

“It feels like I am back in a grocery store in India,” says Cardoz, who does a vast majority of the buying for both Paowalla and her home at Patel Brothers. “As the years have gone by, our suitcases from our India trips have gotten comparative lighter.”

Photo by Dan Goldberg

Raghavan Iyer, a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, remembers his first trip to the original Patel Brothers in Chicago, after having lived in India for 21 years: “It felt like a slice of my upbringing,” he says. “When I saw certain snacks that I grew up with, like murukku and the peanuts smothered with black salt and cayenne, I actually felt a lump in my throat.”

For Indian chefs, the ability to buy high-quality ingredients that come directly from the source is a game-changer. PriaVanda Chouhan, chef/owner of DesiGalli in New York, relies on the fresh spices from Patel Brothers to make her food taste the way she remembers growing up. With cumin, for example, “The one I need for my garam masala is really different from the generic cumin that people buy at Whole Foods,” she says. “The Indian cumin at Patel Brothers gives me that deeper flavor. It’s more aromatic. Whatever I feel like I’m missing from India, I find it there.”

Photo by Dan Goldberg

In addition to the variety, there are other innovations that Patel Brothers has made over the years to accommodate the particular needs of the Indian consumer — like the aforementioned chapatti machine, which, for families like mine who might go through 6-10 a day, has eliminated the frustrating search for bulk, freshly made breads. “There are certain things Indians like to be homemade, like chapattis,” explains Swetal Patel, the company’s Vice President, who runs the stores’ day-to-day operations. “Everybody loves fresh chapattis, but our customers are not housewives or house husbands who have time to sit at home and make them. We think about these kinds of conveniences.”

Wherever they land, the stores also become community centers for the Indian population. When the first location opened up on Devon Avenue, other Indian business started to pop up on the same street, giving way to an entire stretch that became known as Chicago’s Little India. Store openings have now gotten so crowded, Patel says, that he and his cousins (who help him run the business) will fly to new locations last-minute to help out — like this past October’s opening in Frisco, TX. “The Indian community just goes ballistic when we open,” he says. “We’ve gotten lucky that people welcome us with such open arms. It feels like we’re doing something right.”

Photo by Dan Goldberg

The most novel aspect of Patel Brothers, though, is how accessible it has made Indian ingredients for non-Indian customers. On top of the stores being laid out similarly to an American grocer, each item is clearly labeled and described in both English and an Indian language (usually Hindi), and there are employees on-hand who are literally trained to take your shopping list and pull everything you might need. “Patel Brothers walks that fine line between addressing the needs of the Indian and Pakistani community and also being there for a newbie who is still trying to figure out what all the ingredients are,” Iyer says. “No store has ever done that before.”

Photo by Dan Goldberg

For people like me who fall somewhere in the middle — Indian but shaky on the food vocabulary — the accessibility factor is key when it comes to shopping for my mom (she writes her lists out in Hindi to keep me on my toes). In most cases, though, my dad will happily volunteer to come along. A self-identifying Patel Bros fan boy, he tells me that his favorite part of visiting the store is the “bulk bins. They’re filled with these fried Indian snacks, like all different kinds of bhujia [tiny, fried crisps]. There’s a sign that clearly says, ‘No Sampling,’ but I sample them anyway. Everyone does.”

Photo by Dan Goldberg

As Indian cuisine continues to grow more popular, Floyd Cardoz, chef/co-owner of Paowalla, sees Patel Brothers as an important tool for offering customers a more nuanced understanding of the culture, beyond just curry and tikka masala. “The products will be identified by region, and when there are holidays, like Diwali or Holi, you’ll see the decorations come out,” he says. “It gives people who are not Indian an idea of what’s actually going on.”

Barkha Cardoz visits the store at least once every two weeks, and will regularly stop to help out a confused-looking shopper, and offer up one of her recipes. “It’s like I’m educating people about something that’s my home, my culture, my comfort level, and it feels amazing,” she says. “Why bother going back to India?”

Photographs at Patel Brothers' Shaumburg, Illinois location: