Ooh Lala Indian Kitchen has recently been added to Kern’s Food Hall’s roster of international cuisines.
Ooh Lala was founded by manager Raj Patel and his brother, who also owns Hemingway Cuban Kitchen, after realizing that while the chef’s Cuban food is authentic, there was a lack of authentic cuisine from his home country in Knoxville.
While Indian cuisine naturally has plenty of vegetarian options, Patel, who is vegetarian, was looking for options that would suit him, which led him to open Oo La La next door to Hemingway.
“If you want to go somewhere and eat, you don’t have a lot of options,” Patel said. “There aren’t a lot of options, and other than that, there are a few Indian restaurants in and around Knoxville, but they’re not authentic Indian. The food is inedible. They taste good, but it’s not the authentic flavor of the food. So it’s a little bit lacking.”
Oo Lala serves a variety of traditional dishes, including masalas, biryani and tandoori-cooked dishes, but also allows diners to customize their bowls to make their own dishes. While not rejecting the flavors of other Indian cuisines in the area, the Patels wanted Oo Lala to have a depth of flavor that was closer to the food they’d eaten most of their lives.
“Instead of making it in bulk and making a week’s worth of sauces and everything else in one day, it’s separated by the food production process. (That) compromises the flavor and it compromises the quality of the food, because if you make it in bulk, it doesn’t taste as good as if it was prepared the traditional way.”
“We just want to provide delicious traditional Indian food to the American public. We don’t want it to just be frozen food that’s quickly fried. So our mission is to provide the real, authentic taste of India.”
Although it wasn’t a finished product when they signed the lease, the Patels had a vision for what the food hall would be, and the nature of a food hall would allow them to focus solely on food.
“I prefer food halls because the management takes care of the rest. We only have to manage the kitchen and the food,” Patel says.
“With a food hall, you don’t have to attract customers; the foot traffic comes automatically. If you get a standalone building and start a new restaurant, it takes months of advertising. People find out there’s a place here, but with a food hall, you also get free marketing.”
