The building that houses LV Kitchen in Livermore is nondescript. Green awnings cover the entrance with a small sign for Dino’s Pizza Kitchen in the front window. You have to go in the front door and down a hallway to find the full commercial kitchen tucked into the back of the building, a space used by a variety of East Bay businesses that are looking for a cheaper way to get started than paying for a full kitchen of their own.
This is where Jourdán de Sanctis, the owner and baker for East Bay Artisan, met Narendra Lakshminarasimha, the owner and chef behind Surya Darshini Dosa Cafe in Milpitas and where the idea for their joint venture creating khara buns was born.
A khara bun is a savory, brioche-type bun that is a widely available snack in Bangalore where Lakshminarasimha grew up. Both Lakshminarasimha and de Sanctis described the bun as having a similar flavor profile to an everything or onion bagel—but with an added kick of spice.
“When you bite into it, it’s a burst of all kinds of flavor with the tinge of spice, the heat of the spiciness hits you,” Lakshminarasimha described.
Unlike a bagel, all of the finely chopped vegetables and spices are mixed into the dough.
LV kitchen was the venue needed to bring the two of them together.
“He’s passionate about food, so we connected on that level,” de Sanctis said. “Two different people from two different cultures from two different backgrounds.”
Together, they combined their different backgrounds and skills to realize their vision for a khara bun. But first, there was a lot of experimentation and taste testing.
A culinary connection
De Sanctis is an Italian baker, making all sorts of bread, pasta, sauces, sandwiches, and so much more for the five farmers markets (Danville, Pleasanton, Martinez, Vallejo, and Brentwood) where you can currently find East Bay Artisan. He started his business during the pandemic, first making focaccias, fresh pasta, and charcuterie boxes in his home and selling through Instagram. In January 2021, he was asked to open a storefront in a new market in Martinez. During this time, de Sanctis was still working his full-time job for US Foods and was still reluctant to give up that stability. This was also around the time de Sanctis started baking in LV Kitchen. Eventually, de Sanctis decided to leave the market and switch entirely over to farmers markets.
“People come and they tell me about their life and I tell them about mine,” de Sanctis said, noting his visits to the market are his favorite part of the business. “And we share stories and they’ll wait in line while we talk a little bit and then the next person comes up and it’s their time. It’s just this really cool, really different feeling. I’ll never stop the farmers market thing.”
Lakshminarasimha is a self-proclaimed “techy guy,” he had no prior food or restaurant experience when he decided to quit his job as a senior architect at Danaher Corporation in 2019 and “become a dosa guy.” He designed and built his food truck only to start on the unfortunate date of March 14, 2020.
Due to the pandemic, the food truck eventually launched on June 6, 2020 at the San Ramon farmers market. The truck started generating three-hour lines, leading Lakshminarasimha to do pre-ordering instead. This would sell out in a minute or two.
That version of the dosa business came to an end in January 2023 when Lakshminarasimha had a heart attack. After the heart attack, he stopped his food truck and instead focused on opening up a restaurant. So in August 2023, he opened Surya Darshini Dosa Cafe in Milpitas. For a while, it was only open on weekends, but as of mid-February the cafe expanded to five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, 9:30 am to 2 pm.
De Sanctis was already working in LV Kitchen when Lakshminarasimha joined to start making his dosas. After working near each other for a while, they introduced themselves, each explaining what they were making and their business.
“Being there [at LV Kitchen], I get to see this gentleman come in who’s doing this specialty food truck that sells out every week by pre-order only at a farmers market who’s making these things called dosas, which I’ve heard of, but I never saw like the way he’s making it,” de Sanctis said of his first time meeting Lakshminarasimha. “I see him putting his passion and his work into it and so I’m excited.”
Finding the right recipe
As they got to know each other, they recognized they had similar approaches and philosophies. This motivated Lakshminarasimha to ask de Sanctis if he could try to create a khara bun. Lakshminarasimha had tried himself, but he’s not a baker and was never able to get close to the real thing.
So, de Sanctis attempted to create the bun based on Lakshminarasimha’s descriptions. After a lot of trial and error, they got close, but it wasn’t quite right.
Then Lakshminarasimha went back to India to visit his family in summer 2022, and he picked up some khara buns to bring back to de Sanctis.
“I gave it to him and I told him, just close your eyes and take a bite out of it,” Lakshminarasimha said. “Just see how it feels, the texture. He took one bite and said, ‘Narendra, I know exactly what I need to make.’ It was just like that Eureka moment.”
Soon after that, de Sanctis brought Lakshminarasimha a new version.
“He gave it to me to taste it right out of the oven. I literally fell down just eating it.” Lakshminarasimha said. “I brought those buns back home and my son, my wife, my daughter, they all tasted it and said, ‘got it. This is it, this is the bun.’”
They landed on their recipe around September 2022 and they then came up with a joint business venture with de Sanctis handling the creation of the buns, and Lakshminarasimha handling the sales and marketing side. By December 2022, they were introducing the product to their customers. They had to briefly stop due to Lakshminarasimha’s heart attack, but by April 2023 they were back.
Lakshminarasimha said it was important to him that the buns be vegetarian, including not containing eggs, because many of his main customers are vegetarian. He and de Sanctis also shared a conviction that the bun should be made without additives or preservatives.
“I think the key for me to be able to work with Jourdán is that he is also very focused on the artisanal aspects of breadmaking and I am very, very particular about natural ingredients: no additives, no fillers, no chemicals in my business also,” Lakshminarasimha said. “So it was a very good match in terms of our philosophies of how we operate.”
Originally, they tried to make the buns vegan, but they soon realized butter was needed to reach the desired consistency.
Lakshminarasimha did not want to go further into the buns’ recipe, preferring to maintain some secrecy around how they have replicated this Bangalore snack.
A Bay Area hit
It started small as a pre-order option along with Lakshminarasimha’s dosas. Since then, it has only continued to grow—from a few hundred buns per week to roughly 1,000.
Now, they are making plans for an exponential increase in production after making a deal to sell the buns in a local chain, India Cash & Carry, with locations in Pleasanton, Sunnyvale, Fremont, and San Jose. These stores tentatively plan to start carrying the buns at the end of March.
This growth will require some changes in production. Currently, each bun is made by hand. All of the vegetables and spices are finely chopped, the ingredients are weighed and put into a giant mixer. Then the dough sits overnight in the refrigerator so it can cool down. The next day it is hand-portioned and then hand-rolled into balls before it is proofed and baked. Both de Sanctis and Lakshminarasimha spoke of how they will need to start finding ways to automate parts of this process so they can scale up production.
Lakshminarasimha said that the bun can be paired with so many things. Normally, it’s eaten as a snack with tea or coffee, but he’s seen people pairing it with cream cheese and using it as a dip with soups. He hopes these uses can expand even more.
“I also want to see this as a kind of a bun that is used to make sandwiches,” Lakshminarasimha said. “So whether it is a Chick-fil-A Spicy Deluxe sandwich or an avocado toast or you name it, because of the unique combination of the spices, they go very well with all these kinds of things.”
Lakshminarasimha and de Sanctis keep coming back to their customers, who are so excited to have this bun available in the Bay. Vidya Lakshminarasimha, Narendra’s wife, handles all of the marketing and social media.
De Sanctis shared one of the texts that was sent to Lakshminarasimha as a response to a customer getting the buns.
“It’s very nostalgic for us,” the text said. The sender reminisced on their 25 years growing up in Bangalore and attached photos of their children enjoying the khara buns of the East Bay duo. The customer concluded, “This really brought us back to our childhood.”
