About Tai's Kitchen
About Sangeeta Korde (Tai)
Sangeeta Korde didn't have an ideal career in mind while she was growing up, but the one thing she did know was that she really loved to cook, eat and serve fantastic food to her family and friends. She traveled throughout India during her childhood and was especially interested in learning from and absorbing the unique culinary cultures from each of India's regions.
In her family, Sangeeta’s maternal grandmother was known for her culinary skills. She passed these skills down to her mother, who in turn taught Sangeeta family recipes that span generations.
Ammai, Sangeeta’s paternal grandmother, was also an excellent cook. While growing up, she would sit by Ammai and her Mom in the kitchen while they spent laborious hours hand-picking through huge colanders of vegetables that needed peeling and chopping, or deboning fish, deveining shrimp, or preparing meat. Sangeeta loved to see her Ammai and her Mom magically transform all of these ingredients into elaborate feasts. It was an unwritten rule that Ammai would provide these amazing dishes for impromptu guests who would often arrive for dinner.
This tradition became ingrained within Sangeeta and inspired her love of making food for others.
Sangeeta moved to San Francisco in 1992 after marriage, where she learned many authentic and new fusion dishes from her mother-in-law, who was also an excellent cook. She and her family moved from San Francisco to Charlotte, NC in 2001, a time when there were very few Indian restaurants in the city. Since then, she always dreamt of having authentic Indian fast and traditional food available in the city.
For a while, Sangeeta worked in the corporate world as a financial analyst but her passion was to cook. To follow her dream and begin her journey in the food business, she opened the first Maharashtrian Food Truck in the US, “Marathi Tadka”, with her friends Poonam Kulkarni & Aparna Padhye and served as the truck's Head Chef. However, she ended her partnership with Marathi Tadka due to a desire to bring her cooking to a larger audience. A few months later, "Tai's Kitchen", a service seeking to cater authentic dishes with vibrant flavors to the greater Charlotte area, was born.