Anita Jaisinghani

The Climb

Anita Jaisinghani began in Houston, Texas, as a pastry cook in the pastry division at Café Annie. That early post sharpened the discipline of the work and established a method built on precision without closing off room for invention. The next major chapter came as founder and owner at Indika in Houston, Texas (2001–2015), where she held a long-running platform for her ideas about Indian food. Over those years, the restaurant became a working site for shaping, refining, and presenting that point of view. Today, Anita is chef-owner of Pondicheri and chef-owner of Bake Lab + Shop, extending the same approach through two different kitchens. Across both, the constant is a practice that moves between tradition and interpretation, treating cooking as something active rather than fixed.

Today

Since 2011, Jaisinghani has been chef and owner of Pondicheri in Houston, United States. The work is tied to Indian cuisine and Indian street food, with the restaurant serving as a daily translation of those traditions in a Houston setting. That shift from one culinary context to another gives Pondicheri its range: specific in flavor, grounded in reference, and attentive to how familiar food can be made readable in a new place without losing its shape. Since 2014, she has also been chef and co-owner of Bake Lab + Shop in Houston, United States. The role carries her earlier pastry experience forward into a current project, keeping baking close to restaurant work rather than separating the two. The result is a practice with continuity in it, where sweet and savory methods inform each other and technique remains the base of the work. Her attachment to Houston is also a matter of weather and familiarity. In that line, place is not background; it is climate, memory, and recognition, part of the structure that holds the work together.

Signature

Anita's signature dishes include Indika, Pondicheri, pani poori, mango lassi, and Indian tomato salad. The list moves between restaurant names and dishes: the two projects that frame the career, the street-food snap of pani poori, the cooling note of mango lassi, and the plain-spoken clarity of Indian tomato salad.

In Their Words “There is no prescribed way to make anything in India and every dish has a different version in every family.”