WEST LEBANON — In a country where corporations are the biggest fish in the proverbial pond of industry, it’s far more common to see a chain store take the place of a family business than the other way around.
But such is not the case in West Lebanon’s Glen Road Plaza, where business owners Kulwinder Kaur and Manjit Singh are preparing to open Taste of Punjab, a brick-and-mortar version of their food trailer, in a storefront formerly occupied by Subway.
Over the last few summers, the couple has built a steady following selling northern Indian cuisine out of their cobalt blue trailer on Colburn Park, and the business often draws lines of customers at the Lebanon Farmers Market, Manjit Singh said in a recent interview.
Now the couple is ready to set up more permanent digs.
“We’ve been trying to open it because you can only make a certain amount of food in a trailer,” Raj Singh, the couple’s 22-year-old son, said in an interview at the restaurant.
The family, who lives together in West Lebanon, plans to open the restaurant in January, Raj Singh said.
In 2010, the family, which also includes Raj Singh’s sister, Inderpreet Kaur, first moved to the U.S. from the Punjab region of India, while Manjit Singh was working as a taxi driver in New Delhi. They were assisted by Kulwinder Kaur’s sister, whose husband Balbir Singh owns Jewel of India in Hanover.
After arriving in the Upper Valley, Manjit Singh worked at Jewel of India for about a decade, followed by a stint at Lou’s Restaurant and Bakery, while Kulwinder Kaur worked at the Hanover Inn.
Now, to help his parents navigate a language barrier as they work to open Taste of Punjab, Raj Singh has been liaising with plumbers and electricians and handling the business side of the business, often making phone calls during his lunch break at Nucar Ford of Lebanon where he works as a mechanic.
“They can do all the cooking but sometimes it’s hard for them to communicate,” Raj Singh said. His parents’ first language is Punjabi.
For the past few weeks, the family has been working on installing a 1,000-gallon in-ground grease trap, propane lines for the stoves and a hood system in the kitchen.
They also plan to add a clay oven so that they can make more tandoori dishes in addition to their current menu of curries, vegetable pakoras, samosas, mango lassis and other dishes.
Raj Singh’s bachelor’s degree in business management from New England Institute of Technology in Rhode Island has proved useful while getting the restaurant ready for opening day, but he’s also had to troubleshoot as he goes.
“The thing about opening a business is you learn as you do,” he said.
He often works at the food trailer with his parents in the summer, and he plans to help out at the restaurant when it opens.
Working as a family is “fun a lot of the time,” he said. Things can turn hectic when it’s busy, “but at the end of the day we’re all laughing.”
In the early days, the three of them will likely be the only staff, though they might hire one or two more people as the restaurant picks up traffic, Raj Singh said.
The roughly 1,000-square-foot restaurant currently seats about 15 people inside, but the family is hoping to set up outdoor seating in the warmer months.
It costs $3,000 a month to rent the space, which the family leases from Connecticut River Capital, a property management company with an office in Hanover that manages Glen Road Plaza.
There are still a few vacant spaces in the plaza, including the storefront formerly occupied by Blue Mountain Guitar, which shuttered earlier this year.
In August, Lebanon couple Catherine and Marvin Avelino opened Palengke, a Filipino grocery store, a few doors down from Men at Wok, adding to the plaza’s international offerings.
Jenny Zhu, co-owner of Men at Wok, another family-run business in the plaza, said she isn’t worried about another restaurant moving in because a “Chinese restaurant is totally different” from an Indian one.
For the past couple months, Manjit Singh and Kulwinder Kaur have parked the trailer outside of the Glen Road Plaza location.
“I f—ing love that place,” Dallen Johnson, a manager at Monadnock Vapor, said on Sunday evening in an interview at the vape shop, which is next to Taste of Punjab’s future brick and mortar.
Johnson, 25, had tried the chicken curry earlier that day, and he sang the praises of its “aromatic” and “floral” flavors.
On Sunday evening, DoorDash delivery driver Joe Buck stopped by the food trailer to pick up an order for a customer.
Taste of Punjab is a popular choice for DoorDash users, Buck said, and these days he typically makes 10 to 15 runs to the trailer a week, and more when Dartmouth College is in session.
That evening, a customer had ordered paneer paratha, a wholewheat flatbread filled with crumbled soft cheese, and samosa chaat, two samosas topped with stewed chickpeas, green chutney, yogurt, tomatoes and onions, a popular dish among DoorDash users, Buck said.
When Taste of Punjab was set up at Colburn Park over the summer, Buck often struggled to find parking in Lebanon when he had to pick up an order.
He expects the permanent location, which has about 10 nearby parking spots, will make it easier to pick up orders.
Kulwinder Kaur and Manjit Singh plan to continue using the trailer for catering events, and the Lebanon Farmers Market, but otherwise, they intend to turn their focus toward the restaurant.
Taste of Punjab is among a handful of Indian restaurants in the Upper Valley, including Jewel of India, Taj-E-India in White River Junction and Shere Punjab, a catering company and seasonal food stand in Woodstock and Hartland, all of which are run by Kaur’s relatives.
There’s also Turmeric Kitchen, which opened last year on Miracle Mile in Lebanon and which Manjit Singh briefly helped run.
Jewel of India’s owner and Kaur’s brother-in-law, Balbir Singh, has mixed feelings about Taste of Punjab’s expansion.
“I feel like it’s in competition with me,” he said, noting that Jewel of India is already experiencing the sting of tariffs, which has caused a 50% cost increase for ingredients such as rice.
At the same time, he’s reluctant to speak ill of family, and either way, “I cannot stop them because it’s out of my hands,” Balbir Singh said.
The way Raj Singh sees it, each restaurant has something different to offer.
At Taste of Punjab, that looks like a menu of stuffed flatbreads, samosa chaat dishes in which samosas are covered with toppings such as ground chicken, yoghurt and chutney, and fragrant masala fries, among other dishes.
“We all try to do our own thing,” Raj Singh said.