After 24 years in Parkville, Pavan Foods serves its final customers

Artwork by Janki Patel’s two kids, ages 4 and 7, decorated the paper covering a glass case inside Pavan Foods while she took orders from customers near the cash register and her mother-in-law rolled out dough in the kitchen.

For 24 years, the shop, which includes a grocery store and restaurant, has been an extension of the Patel family’s home, welcoming generations of customers for vegetarian dosas, samosas and other classic Indian dishes. But on Wednesday, the Patels closed the business for good.

Janki, with a bright smile, said she is exhausted from being a one-woman army raising a family while working at the store. Her mother-in-law, Pratibha Patel, is having health issues that make the 12- to 15-hour days even harder. She wants to spend more time with the grandkids, and not at the restaurant.

“After school, they have to come here because we’re here,” Janki said.

The closure is devastating for the restaurant’s longtime customers who relied on it for its tasty and affordable Indian fare. Many customers grew up with the restaurant, starting with simple dishes and graduating into the grown-up section.

Deep Shah has been coming to the restaurant since he was ordering cheese dosas off the kids menu. Now a student at Towson University, he orders the thali, a platter that includes multiple dishes. “It’s the gradual growth in human development,” he laughed.

He and his parents follow a vegetarian diet in keeping with their Hindu faith, and it’s hard for them trust food from a restaurant that also serves meat — that the food won’t be contaminated in some way. The closure of Pavan Foods, the only vegetarian Indian restaurant for many miles, “is very demoralizing,” he said, calling it a “major breakdown in the community.”

Janki’s husband, co-owner Bhumik Patel, was just a seventh grader when his dad saw the “for lease” sign on the building on the 8900 block of Harford Road. His father, Viral Patel, and Rajendra Patel, his uncle, opened the business as a grocery store specializing in Indian goods. Viral’s sisters, Sonal and Beenaben, worked there, too, and Bhumik, his sister and his cousins helped when they weren’t in school.

Over time, the family added a casual restaurant, selling the kind of unapologetically Indian vegetarian dishes they ate at home. For more than two decades, they never changed the large yellow “Pavan Foods” sign above the shop. “It doesn’t even say ‘restaurant’ up on the sign,” Bhumik said.

Viral died in 2015 and several members of the Patels’ extended family moved away over time. Then, two years ago, with business at the shop declining, Bhumik took a job in IT, working 9 to 5 and then nights and weekends at the restaurant. The burden on Janki and Pratibha became overwhelming. Though Bhumik had spent his childhood at the eatery, he and Janki envision a different future for their own kids.

The eatery offered many dishes that are ubiquitous in homes and restaurants in India but next to impossible to find in Maryland. Longtime customer Dharna Noor said that the first time she ate a dosa — a thin, savory crepe — outside of India, was likely at Pavan.

What set Pavan apart was its approachability. It wasn’t a special-occasion buffet with white tablecloths. On any evening, you’d see the owners’ children running around. And of course, there was the food, which Noor called “simple and extremely punchy and flavorful.” You could have served it at a fancy restaurant and charged six times the price, she said.

Noor admitted that as a child she didn’t appreciate Pavan, which served what she then thought of as the kind of “boring Indian food” she and her family ate at home. It wasn’t until she got older that the restaurant “went from being a place that I sort of dreaded going, because it reminded me too much of my heritage, to feeling like my second living room.”

A gut punch: the restaurant’s final day in business happened to be Noor’s birthday. “what did I do to deserve this,” she posted on X.