At Helly Raichura’s Carlton North Indian fine diner Enter Via Laundry, you won’t find typical butter chicken and dal makhani on the menu. Instead, guests experience a degustation of lesser-known regional dishes from across the country – if they’re lucky enough to land one of its 20 frequently booked-out seats, that is.

“I don’t want to cook stereotypical dishes because I think they’re done quite well by a lot of different restaurants anyway,” Raichura tells Broadsheet. “For me, it’s more of an educational meal where I take [guests] through a journey of a particular region, why it’s cooked the way it’s cooked, and what point in history it changed or became so popular.”

Taking cues from the homestyle cooking she grew up eating back home in Gujarat, India, Raichura’s food philosophy revolves around made-from-scratch dishes that focus on traditional technique and seasonal produce, sans excessive restaurant-style butter, oil, cream and acids.

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It makes sense considering the celebrated chef began cooking from her home kitchen, hosting 12-person dinners at her Box Hill digs where guests would literally enter via her laundry door and dine with strangers at a communal table. The concept came about in an impulsive way, Raichura says, after baking cake orders for friends on maternity leave, training for two months at Thailand’s two-Michelin-starred Indian fine diner Gaggan, and itching to do more.

“I really didn’t want to wait to go through traditional channels for cooking where I found a job in a restaurant or looked for an investor or went on reality television. I wanted to just start cooking and experimenting.

“And I didn’t pay much attention to how to manage or scale it. I just kept cooking what I wanted to cook and there were people always there wanting to eat.”

People there were – thousands of them on a waitlist which exploded after Raichura’s guest judge appearance on Masterchef in 2020. Soon after, at the age of 33, she found herself quitting her HR job, deftly switching to full-time chef and opening Enter Via Laundry’s permanent home in Carlton North in 2022.

Each year, Raichura focuses on two different regions of India at the restaurant and curates her menus off the back of meticulously planned research trips. “Before I go, I always [study] the region in depth and pin down exactly what I want to cook … Then I find local restaurants and chefs over there,” she explains. But it’s not just about the food – learning the language and the context of centuries-old recipes is equally important.

Previous menus have spotlighted Keralan, Goan, Kashmiri and Mughlai fare served on hand-painted crockery and clayware sourced across India. In keeping with her style of cooking dishes not often seen, Raichura uses hard-to-find Indian spices like a dark, hyper-regional jaggery she found in Goa and a stash of mawal powder she got her hands on for the Kashmiri menu. The chef also pairs them with Australian natives like lemon gum and warrigal greens. “It’s a bit of a selfish process, to be very honest. I just travel around, eat, shop and bring things back.”

When talking about the current menu, which focuses on Parsi cuisine (a small Zoroastrian community in the state of Gujarat), Raichura geeks out over the history and nuances of traditional dishes which “are almost lost even back in India”.

“I’m making a dish called bharuchi machi [whiting] which is a tougher version of patra ni machi, in which you still marinate your fish and wrap it in banana leaf, but then you go a step further and wrap that in a clay and bake it.”

Somewhere between admin in the morning, kids’ school pick-ups and drop-offs and wrapping up service at night, Raichura finds time to work on a debut cookbook titled Bhartiya Bhojan (simply meaning “Indian food” in Hindi), set to be published early next year.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if I keep doing this or something completely different. I was an HR advisor, then a chef – you never know, I may become a potter!”

Luckily for us, Raichura has two more years’ worth of regions mapped out before she decides what’s next.