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A Chef Inspired by Nando’s and Her Nan
Photo: Natalie Black
Chef Kwame Onwuachi remembers tough conversations he had with investors while trying to open a restaurant in Washington, D.C. It would be located on a redeveloped wharf, and his board suggested a menu of meze platters and lightly cooked seafood. “I was like, ‘My name is Kwame Onwuachi, and I am not cooking Mediterranean cuisine,’” he says. “I am cooking African and Caribbean cuisine and highlighting that.” That restaurant’s success brought him in 2022 to Tatiana at Lincoln Center, which quickly gained a reputation as one of the most innovative restaurants in the city. “Being in these spaces doing this type of cuisine is going to let other people be able to do this,” Onwuachi says, “because they’ll be able to point to something and say, ‘This has worked in this space.’”
That’s just what happened. Caribbean techniques and recipes are at last being given the showcase treatment at fine-dining spots across town: Paul Carmichael goes through 100 pounds of shoulder meat per week for goat in creole sauce at Kabawa, and Gregory Gourdet tops fresh oysters with Haitian pikliz at Maison Passerelle. India Doris now joins that group with the 50-seat Chelsea restaurant Markette (which, until three days ago, was known as Haymarket), where her menu includes a gratin of braised oxtail under toasted polenta and peri peri chicken she modeled after Nando’s, the massive South African chain that was a cornerstone of her youth.
“I like things to be done a certain way,” Doris says, standing in Markette’s pristine kitchen. She’s shaking a steel Mauviel pan of sliced white onions that are becoming translucent in a few cubes of butter. Every time a sliver jumps overboard and starts to sizzle on the radiant flattop stove, Doris reaches for the long, pointed chef’s tweezers in her front-left jacket pocket, plucks the errant speck from whatever crevice it has landed in, and tosses it in the trash a few steps away. “The things that people don’t see, they lead into the dining room,” she says.
She next adds chopped red bell peppers, fennel seed, coriander, and garlic to her sautéed onions before blending them with smoked paprika, garlic oil, and house-fermented peri peri peppers to make the bright-orange sauce. She drizzles that along with homemade ranch — flecked with chopped leaves of tarragon and summer savory — over a honey-roasted half-chicken until its charred skin is barely visible. “I love fine dining, but I wanted to do something that feels more natural to me,” Doris says. “If someone was making me peri peri chicken, I’d want them to care about it.”
Doris’s fastidiousness may come from the eight years she spent working for the late chef Jamal James Kent at Crown Shy and his two-Michelin-star fine-dining spot, Saga. Or it may come from her grandma. Doris grew up in West London with an English Caribbean mother and a Scottish father. Sunday-roast dinners at home meant jerk chicken and Yorkshire pudding with cooking handled by Doris’s grandmother, who emigrated from Jamaica. “My gran, she’s very particular and she didn’t like people touching her stuff,” Doris says. After years of observing her, Doris was finally allowed to help make fried dumplings, rubbing butter into the flour by hand so the dough “stayed flaky and delicious and crunchy.”
Her first kitchen job came when she was 15. She started as a porter — “putting away ingredients, carrots and apples, for hours” — before taking other gigs across Europe and, eventually, New York. When she left Saga to open the restaurant now known as Markette, a few cooks followed to continue working with her, a development that makes perfect sense to her friend Danny Garcia, who first met Doris when they cooked under Kent at the NoMad. “She may come off quiet,” he says, “but the way she leads the kitchen, it’s not with force, it’s not with making people scared — she builds trust.”
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