The dual departures of a chef and drugmaker Pfizer gave Sapan Goel the impetus he needed to remake the kitchen in his Ann Arbor store.

Goel brought in a new cook and renamed his tiny restaurant at the back of Foods of India, the bodega he's owned for the last 13 years at Broadway and Plymouth roads.

Foods of India employee Vinod Goel rings up a customer at the store on Thursday evening.

Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com

Kamal Rajbut, who joined the India Café, former Kitchen of India, on March 1, turns out northern Indian cuisine in a space he shares with an assistant at the back of a store that features everything from incense to Indian movies to dried sugar cane juice to frozen samosas.

A few tables accommodate diners who want to eat in, but the humble café is set up for carryout. That means everything is served on paper and eaten with plastic. A pair of giant blackboards above the order window list menu items, which range in price from $1.99 to $14.95.

Goel, 39, of Ann Arbor, is leasing the kitchen to Rajbut, who last worked at Mahek on Washington Street. 

Together, they added a dozen new vegetarian and meat dishes to the menu. Rajbut makes his own bread that he also sells and cooks with halal meat that he buys at Eastern Market. Halal meat conforms with Islamic standards of slaughter.

They also extended the hours of operation, opening earlier in the day, every day.

“The quality of the food is different - I would say it’s better. The service is quicker, and the hours are more flexible. We’re getting more traffic,” he says. “We’re just trying to build it up. Once we start getting more customers, we might go forward and get a bigger place in Ann Arbor somewhere.”

Revenues have taken a significant hit, dropping 20 percent in each of the last two years. When Pfizer pulled up stakes in Ann Arbor two years ago, Goel’s sales fell. He is also coping with inflation in India, which has driven up the prices of staples like flour, rice and lentils that cram the shelves at Foods of India.

It hasn’t been easy.

“I can’t mark up too much because we know the customer is taking a hit, too,” Goel says. 

But on a recent weeknight, a line of mostly college students snaked to the middle of the 1,900-square-foot grocer for Rajbut’s food. Graduate student Ashintosh Nayar, 26, shopped for a few basics and then ordered dinner at India Café. Like Goel and Rajbut, he is from New Delhi.

“I’m a regular,” he says.

Julie Edgar is a freelance writer for AnnArbor.com