Personalities

Anjan Mitra

Anjan's Links:

Dosa

Ever since he left Bombay (now Mumbai) at age eighteen to study in the U.S., Anjan has always sought to recreate the wonderfully aromatic and complex flavors of his mother's cooking. As any good Indian son, he spent approximately nineteen years in a high-tech career after which he pursued a new entrepreneurial path as a restaurateur with a cuisine that he believed was under- or mis-represented in the U.S.

Inspired to create and present South Indian cuisine in a new way in San Francisco, he and his wife Emily created a very successful restaurant, DOSA, which rapidly become one of the top restaurants in the Bay Area as soon as it opened in December 2005. Within a span of three years they created a second location with an equal amount of success in the Fillmore neighborhood.

DOSA was never created around a "celebrity chef" but was envisioned by Anjan and Emily to pay homage to the rich diversity of Southern India, which they believed was not getting the respect it deserved. Having lived in this City for 22 years they also wanted to make it relevant to the San Francisco culinary scene with the use of mostly local, organic, natural, seasonal & sustainable ingredients.

Almost every single item on the DOSA menu was conceived and explicitly put on by Anjan and Emily, along with a talented crew of South Indian chefs. The dishes respect the traditional styles of Southern Indian cooking and are created with recipes from Anjan's family, as well as, the families of DOSA's very talented chefs! Anjan defines the overall menu, generates most of the dish ideas, maintains quality control, fine-tunes recipes and helps finalize plating. In essence, while he is not on the line prepping or plating during service, he does drives the culinary direction at DOSA which only works because of the dedicated integrity and hard work of the talented chefs in the kitchen.