East India Company: A Family Kitchen Carried Across Canada

East India Company has always been a family affair. Kamal and Sudha Mehra arrived from India in 1962, and by 1967 they had opened their first restaurant in Winnipeg with Kamal’s mother. Their three sons now carry it forward across three restaurants, including the Somerset location in Ottawa we fell for.

Chef Nitin Mehra, the youngest, joined at 18, trained at Algonquin College and Le Cordon Bleu, and leads the kitchens, catering and a growing line of sauces, chutneys and frozen appetizers. “It’s a family business and I love being around my family,” he says. Anish oversees operations and, as a sommelier, shaped the wine program. Sachit has spent more than 30 years in the business and runs the Winnipeg restaurant alongside their mother. Their sister Divya is part of the story too.

A Taste of History

The grandmother’s yogurt culture, brought from India, is still used in every restaurant. The team makes its own paneer, and their mother still roasts and blends the garam masala for the curries. “A number of recipes that mom and dad put on that initial menu, initial buffet, they’re there. I am not going to touch them.”

The cooking leans Punjabi, with South Indian, West and North Indian dishes, vegetarian plates and seafood sharing the buffet. Weekends bring a dosa brunch and a naan pizza topped with Quebec cheese and Ontario produce. Prairie short ribs and PEI mussels meet the house chutneys, a way to showcase Canada “while staying very wholly committed to being an Indian restaurant,” the chef assures.

A Buffet Worth Putting Forward

South Asian cuisine was built for sharing. “You want someone beside you as you take your food,” he explains. For a first visit, his advice is direct: “You’re in my house. I spend 14 hours a day in those four walls. I want you to have the buffet.”

Although he wants everyone to have a taste of everything, if he had to recommend two specific dishes, they would be the coconut shrimp curry his father developed without ever tasting it, being deathly allergic to shellfish, and a cheese naan stuffed with cream cheese, inspired by a Mumbai street snack from his mother’s hometown.

Down to the Last Detail

In the East India Company dining room on Somerset, a 325-year-old Hindu wedding altar of teak still wears its original paint. His father, a designer, imported it with a 350-year-old wedding chariot, where the bride once sat at the centre and the elephant loops are still visible underneath. Some 135 guests fit inside, and 40 more on a patio where a motor rickshaw from Delhi now sits. His father was also particular about sevens and nines, so they hide throughout the space, and the family leaves guests to find them on their own.

A Drinks List Tuned to South Asian Flavours

The beverage program is curated around the food. The two sommelier brothers look for wines that are versatile and never overly forward, with “nothing too sweet, nothing too tannic, nothing too dry,” so a glass can follow a plate across the buffet. Canadian wines lead the list, chosen to pair with the chicken, lamb and beef curries, and a rice lager made with a local brewery was geared to the cuisine. “There’s so much complexity to any South Asian item,” the chef says, and the right wine alongside it is “so beautiful.”

Every full table still brings a flutter, the chef says, like a first date: “I hope this goes so well.” When it does, he gets to share his family’s cooking in what he calls “the best feeling in the world when there’s like a humming dining room and it’s just the noise of people having a glass of wine, eating your food and enjoying each other’s company.”

Written by Marie-Ève Godin
Photography by East India Company

Updated on October 06, 2026

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