Kashif Tufail is the owner of ChaiShai, a little Pakistani restaurant on the corner of 59th Street and Holmes in Brookside. Besides all the neighborhood regulars, it’s become a gathering spot for Pakistani students at UMKC.
And before they eat, Tufail says, they always ask him, “Are these samosas as good as my mom's?"
“And I say, 'Yeah, I believe so.'”
Once they eat them, and agree on how good they are, Tufail reveals, “You know whose samosas those are? Those are my mom’s.”
Tufail moved here from Lahore, Pakistan when he was three years old. Lahore is known for its street food. It was there that his mother Asama Tufail learned how to make samosas, a traditional pastry that’s lightly fried, flaky, and filled with beef, chicken, lamb, potatoes or other veggies.
When the family moved to the United States in 1978, Asama Tufail began making samosas to supplement the family’s income. After a little success, she wanted to scale up, so she and her son rented the corner storefront at 59th and Holmes.
“It was never designed to be a restaurant,” Kashif Tufail says, “It was going to be a production facility, just black out the windows, lock the door and just make samosas.
But the Brookside neighbors who walked by the Samosa “factory” kept urging the Tufails to open up a small place where they could have lunch. They reluctantly gave in. Slowly.
“We originally thought since we are making samosas in here already, we’ll put on a pot of chai, you know, and make some tea to go with it,” Kashif says. “If 5 people come in, that’s fine. We’ll serve them some chai tea and some samosas and still do our thing in the back, you know our wholesale production.”
More than five people came. So, Asama created a lunch menu. When that wasn’t enough, she created a dinner menu. Meanwhile, Kashif had been working as an engineer at Sprint, but he was bored with the work and was finally convinced to go all in on a restaurant - Chai Shai was born.
Despite the modern décor, Kashif says part of Chai Shai’s mission is to serve authentic cuisine without cutting any corners when it comes to spices or ingredients.
“We don’t do what I call Indian/Pakistani restaurant food, which is what you get a lot of here in the States, which is an Americanized version of our cuisine from back home and not very representative of where we come from,” Kashif says. “We do a very classic home-style cooked food here, and it is the same food that we eat back home.”
Asama says she learned to cook those home-cooked meals featured on Chai Shai’s menu--dishes like achari chicken, lamb koora and corn cob curry—from a master. Her mom.
Asama says cooking reminds her of her mother, and tells me that’s what drives her to work long hours in the kitchen of Chai Shai.
“It’s because I cook with love that is why it is so tasty,” Kashif says.
For Kashif, he says not only does he have the best chef ever, but who better to have as a business partner than you Mom?
“I know I have a business partner right that I can trust implicitly,” Kashif Tufail says. “It doesn’t matter if we never see eye to eye on anything; you know, at the end of the day, we are on the same team and that never changes.”