Boston, MA | Indian & Bangladeshi Restaurant | Chef's Supper Subscription

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Key Results

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• A monthly five-course tasting menu that tours a new region of the Indian subcontinent every month, entirely off the regular menu
• Grew out of a self-run pandemic project (Diwali and Valentine's boxes) into a fully managed subscription
• Retained a loyal following even after the pandemic-era demand for boxed meals cooled off elsewhere
• A genuine creative outlet for a kitchen team otherwise tied to a fixed, 25-year-old menu

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Peace, since 1999

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Solmon Chowdhury opened Shanti in Dorchester in 1999 because his neighborhood deserved real Indian food, close to home. The name means “peace” in Sanskrit, and a quarter century later, that's still the feeling Shanti is built around. Rokeya Chowdhury, who married into the business and has run it alongside Solmon for the past fifteen years, puts it simply: the restaurant has become a neighborhood institution, and its mission has stayed consistent the whole way through.

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"Our mission really is sharing love and knowledge of our food and culture," Rokeya says. "That's what we've been doing for the past 25-plus years."

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That mission shows up in the details Shanti still handles in-house, from roasting its own spices daily to mentoring the kitchen team that carries the restaurant's Northern Indian and Bangladeshi cooking forward.

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A pandemic project with too many moving parts

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That instinct toward comfort and connection is what pushed Shanti to build something beyond the dining room in the first place. During Covid, the team started putting together Diwali boxes, curated feasts built around the festival of lights, and later experimented with a Valentine's Day box that let couples finish cooking their favorite dishes together at home.

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The idea worked, but the execution was another story. Running boxed meals meant Rokeya's team was handling curation and cooking, plus all the logistics that come with a subscription-style offering: payments, communication, fulfillment, and everything in between, on top of the two restaurant locations already running daily.

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Finding the piece that was missing

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"Once I found Table22, I was like, oh, this is the solution to all the logistics issues we've had," Rokeya says. She reached out to Table22 directly because the fit was obvious to her from the start.

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Table22 took the logistics almost entirely off her plate. Her team no longer has to think about the back end of running a subscription, which freed Rokeya up to keep evolving the concept itself, from one-off holiday boxes into the ongoing regional format the club runs today.

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Just as important to Rokeya was how Table22's team communicates with Shanti's members. "The Table22 team is so great on communication, communication between us and the customers," she says. For a restaurant where club members are often the same people walking through the door in Dorchester or Roslindale, that consistency matters. The tone members hear from Table22 has to match the hospitality they'd get in person, and Rokeya trusts that it does.

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A new region every month

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Today, Shanti's Table22 offering is the Culinary Tour of India, a monthly five-course Chef's Supper that moves through a different state or region of the subcontinent each month. It's available in omnivore and vegan formats for two or four people, with pickup or delivery, and it lives entirely outside the regular menu.

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"Our theme is going around the entire subcontinent, exploring the different regions," Rokeya explains. "That's something we couldn't do in the restaurant, because the region is so vast, the cuisines are so different, and the ingredients you find in the different places are so different." The subscription gives her kitchen a creative outlet to explore all of it, one region at a time, without reworking the restaurant menu to do it.

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The team has also used the format to test new ideas before they're menu-ready. Recent samosa experiments have included an apple pie dessert variation, which earned a rare joint endorsement from Rokeya's nine- and three-year-old at home, along with a request for a dedicated kids menu.

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Serving second-generation regulars

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Rokeya expected pandemic-era interest in boxed meals to taper off once people went back to eating out. Instead, the club held onto a loyal following. Members buy boxes as gifts, and couples order them for double dates at home. And for a restaurant built on relationships that span decades, that loyalty tracks with what Rokeya already sees in the dining room: kids who used to eat at Shanti with their families are now grown up and bringing their own partners in.

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"It's really humbling to see that we've been part of their lives," Rokeya says, "and how they experience Shanti at home as well."

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What she'd tell the next operator

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Rokeya's advice for other restaurants considering a club is straightforward: the workload is smaller than it looks from the outside. "Your team just needs to do the creative piece, and all the other pieces Table22 is going to take care of," she says. 

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Her team looks forward to the monthly club too, in part because it means getting to cook and taste food that never makes it onto Shanti's regular menu. They get to learn new things, and to experience some of the same joy and surprise they’re now bringing to their members at home, month after month. 

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Our platform, your creativity. Welcome to the Club.

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