Amidst clanking pots, echoing laughter and piping hot food circling the restaurant, Himal Chuli owner Bishnu Pradhan — known more fondly as ‘mother’ or ‘grandmother’ — can be seen adding ‘a little of this and a little of that’ to each dish she cooks.
Bishnu and her husband Krishna Pradham opened Himal Chuli, the first Nepali restaurant in the U.S., in March 1986. For 40 years, customers and friends were synonymous as the cultural carveout occupied an important presence in downtown Madison, bringing a taste of the Himalayas to the Midwest. But this past December, the restaurant closed its doors for good, three years after Bishnu’s passing.
Bishnu’s cooking was widely loved by the Madison community. From her husband’s colleagues to hungry college students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, there wasn’t a demographic that didn’t cherish her Nepali cuisine.
Rajan Pradhan, restaurant owner and son of Bishnu and Krishna, told The Daily Cardinal simply, “she had the touch.”
Himal Chuli started as a small food cart on Library Mall in the early ‘80s with a limited menu before moving into their State Street location, where they remained for the duration of the restaurant’s existence.
The local community quickly embraced the restaurant.
“It was a very comfortable, tight space. The laughter carried. It was always full of joy and happiness, because mother’s cooking in there, so it can’t go wrong,” Rajan said.
When Bishnu was teaching Rajan to cook in the kitchen, he said it was often very difficult keeping up with his mother’s tempo and habit of measuring with her heart.
“Oh it was tough, but that’s mother and son,” Rajan said. “We loved each other very much and she molded me into who I am now.”
Rajan, the oldest of his brother and two sisters, spent the first 10 years of his life in Nepal before immigrating to the United States. He grew up on a plateau in the clouds where trekkers and climbers from all over the world passed through on their way to scale mountains. But Rajan was more interested in scaling fish.
“Hiking up to my village is good enough for me,” he said. He’d rather be in the kitchen watching his grandmother or aunt cook.
In the U.S., Rajan attended middle and high school — stopping by Himal Chuli during his lunch breaks — and studied Fine Arts before leaving school to help his mother more at the restaurant. But Rajan’s artistic inclinations are alive in his new restaurant, Ama.
Across from the stairs in Ama hangs the first art piece ever hung in Himal Chuli, a depiction of porters in the Himalayan Mountains. Rajan has also decorated his restaurant with a variety of Buddhist paintings, sculptures and Hindu artwork, hoping to eventually put up a collage featuring his mother.
In short time, it was Rajan’s sons — in place of Rajan — that were stopping by the restaurant during their school lunch breaks.
Akash Pradhan, Rajan’s second son, told the Cardinal that as children, he and his brothers would cause chaos for the kitchen and wait staff in the little restaurant.
“But [they weren’t] gonna say anything to the owners’ grandkids,” he laughed.
And so, he and his brother were allowed to run cheerfully amok about the tables.
Akash recalled gaining the confidence on a particularly slow day to walk up to tables as if he was their server. “Yeah, I can take your order,” he told them, still visibly a child.
Akash said that when you walked into Himal Chuli, there was a table right before you entered the kitchen, “and that was grandma’s table.”
“That’s where my memory is surrounded — at that one little table where grandma could see outside,” Akash said.
From that table, Bishnu would watch customers walk in, sit and chat with her family and reprimand her grandsons, Akash said.
Himal Chuli is set to reopen in the same place under a slightly different name, Himali Chulo, and new owner, Ashim Malla. Still, the original restaurant will remain a fond recollection to many and be remembered by family as a place brimming with motherly love.
“It's always sunny in my memory,” Akash said. “And my grandmother is always there.”
