Sunnyvale Finally Has a Dedicated Northeast Indian Restaurant
Chef Nandana Hazarika left a tech career to open KHAAR on Murphy Avenue, putting Assamese khaar, fermented bamboo, and Naga smoked chile on a Bay Area dinner menu.
- opening
- northeast indian
- assamese
- sunnyvale
KHAAR soft-opened August 5 at 193 South Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale, calling itself the Bay Area’s first restaurant dedicated to Northeast Indian cooking. Chef-owner Nandana Hazarika grew up in Assam, spent roughly seventeen years in engineering and tech, then left that track for a kitchen of her own. Sunnyvale already has plenty of Indian rooms. What it has not had is a sit-down built around Assamese, Naga, Khasi, and other kitchens from India’s Seven Sisters states in the Northeast, the kind of place where fermented bamboo and khaar show up on the printed menu instead of as a festival special.
Start with the name. Khaar is a signature Assamese preparation that uses an alkaline extract, often from banana-plant ash, in dals and vegetable dishes that taste earthy and clean rather than cream-heavy. Assamese speakers sometimes call themselves khaar khua Axomiya, people who eat khaar. Hazarika has said she wants that home feeling in public: family recipes, mustard oil, smoked chile, fermented bamboo, and Brahmaputra Valley tea culture, plated for diners who may never have ordered from Nagaland or Meghalaya before.
From tech career to Murphy Avenue
Her path is part of the story. After data and analytics work at firms including Accenture and later Palo Alto Networks, she trained as a cook and started making Assamese food for diaspora gatherings. That included Magh Bihu pitha, the rice cakes of Assam’s midwinter harvest festival, shipped to Assamese families across the United States. KHAAR is the permanent version of that impulse: a storefront after years of pop-ups and holiday trays.
The Bay Area already eats well across Punjabi, Gujarati, South Indian, and Indo-Chinese kitchens. A dedicated Northeast Indian room with bamboo pork, black sesame curry, and Assamese sour fish on the card is rarer. Treat the “first” claim as the house’s own framing until someone does a fuller regional census. The gap she is aiming at is real either way.
What to order while the menu is still soft
Through early September, the soft-opening card runs dinner Tuesday through Sunday from 4 to 9:30 p.m., Monday closed. On the mains side, look for branzino tenga, an Assamese-style sour fish broth with citrus, mustard, and poppyseed; claypot goat chops; black sesame chicken or pork; heritage pork with fermented bamboo shoot; and a Naga smoked-chile cauliflower steak over millet khichdi. Small plates push the same map: Khaar Smoke with mustard oil, Naga Fire lobster or shrimp in smoked chile butter, bamboo-shoot wings, and a croquette built on Assamese alkali rice with fish and fermented mustard.
A few dishes lean California, from orchard burrata to duck and squash-blossom specials. The house also talks up lighter seasoning and clearer ingredients than buffet-thick gravy. Read that as a way to welcome first-timers, not as a claim that Northeast cooking is mild. Naga smoked chile and fermented bamboo still bring heat and funk when the kitchen wants them to.
Why the opening matters past Sunnyvale
Diaspora “Indian” menus often leave the Northeast off the map. Earlier this month, Assamese Olympic medalist Lovlina Borgohain called out a Glasgow curry house for a truncated India outline that erased her region. KHAAR does the reverse: Assam and the Seven Sisters on a Bay Area storefront, with the assumption that diners can learn the words. Hyderabad’s Aakhol made a similar case for Assamese cooking in another city. Sunnyvale now has a West Coast version of that bet.
One Murphy Avenue room will not rewrite how California orders Indian food overnight. Soft openings change, and first menus move. Watch something simpler. If bamboo shoot, tenga, and khaar become ordinary dinner words in Silicon Valley, Hazarika’s pivot will have done more than open a restaurant. It will have widened the map.