First Look: Soundra Roastery & Chai

“Chai is like a love language for the whole of India. It’s like an emotion for all the Indians and it passed through the world,” explains Ramya Patel. Her food truck, Soundra Roastery & Chai, is an ode to her family, her homeland, and her culture.

Patel hails from Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. She initially came to America to pursue a career in information technology before deciding to go into the hospitality business. 

“I realized it’s not my cup of tea,” she says of IT. “This is my cup of tea. My hands are good at making this cup of tea, not coding.” 

When she told her dad about Soundra, which she named after her grandmother, “he started crying.”

“I was like, ‘Why are you crying? You don’t like the decision?’” Patel recalls. “He said that my grandma used to have [her own chai] business for 18 years, which I never knew. I didn’t know she had this business before. She never told us her hustle story, like what she was going through in her prime. 

“I think she’s my guardian angel for sure. I can bet you that.”

Patel credits jaggery, made from sugarcane juice, as a key ingredient in the taste of her tea, which comes in three variations: masala chai, a popular Indian drink that has become one of the subcontinent’s most popular exports; banarasi chai, a regional tea infused with floral herbs and spices; and Patel’s “old school chai,” which is purely made with jaggery and then some house ingredients. She smokes it with powder sourced from her uncle in Assam. 

“He’s my direct vendor,” she says. “This is like you’re getting [it] from the farmer to the cup.” 

Soundra also offers coffee, made from beans from Chikmagalur in South India. Patel highlights her Cadbury Cream Cheese Mocha (which combines housemade cream cheese with the popular British chocolate) and her Madras Mascarpone (which she describes as tiramisu-esque) as two of her standout drinks. 

Vignesh Vasan, a local software engineer and entrepreneur originally from the Houston area, met Patel at a Soundra pop-up and instantly became her business partner, helping with marketing. He raves about her as the three of us meet over chai and bun maska, a soft, sweet bun popular in Mumbai’s Iranian cafes. 

Chai, biscuits, and bun maska Credit: Haris Qureshi

“Ramya’s an excellent chef. She knows the flavors. She understands the profiles,” Vasan says. He pauses to chuckle as she taps away on her phone in a chai-fueled furor mid-conversation. “She’s always – even now she’s still working.”

Other street food, like chaat, a popular family of savory fried snacks, accompanies Patel’s chai. 

“Chaat has an elegance,” she says. “It can be made in bars, kiosks, or street tables and also from a seven-star restaurant. It’s how you do it, how you curate it, and ours is all from scratch.” The truck owner spotlights her samosa chaat, “the favorite thing for all Americans and Indians,” and her sauces, including green chutney, tamarind chutney, and beetroot raita.

Since opening up her trailer at 12400 Amherst (near Parmer and MoPac), Patel has added more iconic Indian street foods to her menu in order to “define all the good things about India.”

“It’s not just one community or one culture,” she says. “My Panipuri is in a Delhi style, so I named it Delhi Six. Our top seller is the Mumbai Veg Frankie, which is a veg wrap that is Mumbai-style with all Mumbai’s sauces in it.” Her favorite menu item is the Aloo Tikki Burger, which she credits to her memories of growing up in India and eating the vegetarian potato burgers at the fast food restaurants there. 

“Whenever people come from India to the United States and they go to McDonald’s, they ask, ‘Can I get a tikki burger?’ she explains. “Of course they will not find it. So this is what I want to serve here. We made our style of tikki burger with our truffle chili cheese on it.”

Although they were sold out of the Panipuri when I went, I had some of India’s most iconic street foods with Soundra’s Mumbai Veg Frankie, samosa chaat, and the Aloo Tikki Burger. The hype is real. The flavors and blends bust the myth that vegetarian food is bland or boring; there’s a reason that the Hindu people have been mostly vegetarian for millennia. With bombastic seasoning and quality ingredients like this, who really needs to munch on flesh for fun?

Patel’s passion burns brightly when she talks about her business and her journey as a culinary artisan. “I quit a $200K job and I choose to sit in this truck from 8am to 10pm. You should be rich in working hard and I’m very rich in it,” she says. 

“No one can buy me out,” Patel continues. “My hard work is my investment and my power engine behind me. I know I’m still selling very cheap street food, but it’s not cheap. I wouldn’t compromise my cup of chai in just some plastic or regular cup. Every cup of mine has our name stamped, [just] like every cup has a story in it. It has our heart in it. So that’s why even if it is a cheap thing, we don’t do it cheap. I did everything with my own two hands.” 

With a story and attention to the craft like hers, it will come as no surprise when Soundra stops being a local secret.

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