Sunda Is Back – Kind Of

For over three years, two of Melbourne’s most exciting chefs, couple Saavni Krishnan and Sriram Aditya, have been running Saadi, an Indian pop-up that has taken over the kitchens of some of city’s coolest venues including Arnold’s, Hope St Radio, Sleepy’s and Hot-Listed Public Wine Shop. All while working full-time jobs.

Now, Krishnan, currently sous-chef at Hot-Listed Manze, and Aditya, head chef at Gemini, have left and are in the middle of a residency at Sunda, the Halim Group’s Punch Lane restaurant that closed in January. (The group plans to reveal more permanent plans for the space later this year).

“The goal for this year is to try and see if the Saadi pop-up model can be translated into a proper restaurant model,” Aditya tells Broadsheet. “We’re going all-in to try and see if it actually makes [sense].”

For the residency, which runs from Thursday May 1 to Saturday July 26, the couple has developed an entirely new menu of “fun Indian” dishes, as Krishnan puts it. A four-course set dinner menu is $80 per person. The opening menu included grilled river trout with spiced claypot rice as well as whole-wheat bread rolls – “a dinner rolls sort of situation, but quite crusty,” says Aditya – that will make use of Sunda’s charcoal grill. Plus, a vegan take on shahi tukda, a bread pudding that Aditya describes as a “very, very simple local dessert from the streets of India”. A small snack menu will also be available for walk-ins, and a $40 lunch menu will offer a shortened version of the dinner menu.

“We are quite confident you won’t find food like ours in Melbourne,” says Krishnan of the dishes, which are inspired by the couple’s diverse Indian backgrounds: Krishnan grew up in Mumbai with a Punjabi mother and a Tamil father, while Aditya has South Indian heritage.

The recipes come from their parents (they send their parents copies of all the Saadi menus while they’re developing them), but Krishnan and Aditya work together collaboratively to tweak them, drawing on their collective restaurant experience. “There’s no individual ownership for any dish. It’s all a Saadi project,” says Aditya. “At the end of the day, when the food actually hits the plate, it is two of us on a plate in different forms and fashions.”

Saadi will be in residency at Sunda until Saturday July 26.

This article was originally published on Tuesday April 1. It was updated on Friday June 13 to reflect new information.