{"id":196168,"date":"2026-03-09T00:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T00:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/196168\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T00:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T00:20:08","slug":"soundra-roastery-chai-the-austin-chronicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/196168\/","title":{"rendered":"Soundra Roastery & Chai \u2022 The Austin Chronicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cChai is like a love language for the whole of India. It\u2019s like an emotion for all the Indians and it passed through the world,\u201d explains Ramya Patel. Her food truck, Soundra Roastery & Chai,<\/a> is an ode to her family, her homeland, and her culture.<\/p>\n

Patel hails from Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. She initially came to America to pursue a career in information technology before deciding to go into the hospitality business.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized it\u2019s not my cup of tea,\u201d she says of IT. \u201cThis is my cup of tea. My hands are good at making this cup of tea, not coding.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

When she told her dad about Soundra, which she named after her grandmother, \u201che started crying.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was like, \u2018Why are you crying? You don\u2019t like the decision?\u2019\u201d Patel recalls. \u201cHe said that my grandma used to have [her own chai] business for 18 years, which I never knew. I didn\u2019t know she had this business before. She never told us her hustle story, like what she was going through in her prime.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she\u2019s my guardian angel for sure. I can bet you that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patel credits jaggery, made from sugarcane juice, as a key ingredient in the taste of her tea, which comes in three variations: masala chai, a popular Indian drink that has become one of the subcontinent\u2019s most popular exports; banarasi chai, a regional tea infused with floral herbs and spices; and Patel\u2019s \u201cold school chai,\u201d which is purely made with jaggery and then some house ingredients. She smokes it with powder sourced from her uncle in Assam.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s my direct vendor,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is like you\u2019re getting [it] from the farmer to the cup.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Soundra also offers coffee, made from beans from Chikmagalur in South India. Patel highlights her Cadbury Cream Cheese Mocha (which combines housemade cream cheese with the popular British chocolate) and her Madras Mascarpone (which she describes as tiramisu-esque) as two of her standout drinks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vignesh Vasan, a local software engineer and entrepreneur originally from the Houston area, met Patel at a Soundra pop-up and instantly became her business partner, helping with marketing. He raves about her as the three of us meet over chai and bun maska, a soft, sweet bun popular in Mumbai\u2019s Iranian cafes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Chai, biscuits, and bun maska Credit: Haris Qureshi<\/p>\n

\u201cRamya\u2019s an excellent chef. She knows the flavors. She understands the profiles,\u201d Vasan says. He pauses to chuckle as she taps away on her phone in a chai-fueled furor mid-conversation. \u201cShe\u2019s always \u2013 even now she\u2019s still working.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other street food, like chaat, a popular family of savory fried snacks, accompanies Patel\u2019s chai.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cChaat has an elegance,\u201d she says. \u201cIt can be made in bars, kiosks, or street tables and also from a seven-star restaurant. It\u2019s how you do it, how you curate it, and ours is all from scratch.\u201d The truck owner spotlights her samosa chaat, \u201cthe favorite thing for all Americans and Indians,\u201d and her sauces, including green chutney, tamarind chutney, and beetroot raita.<\/p>\n

Since opening up her trailer at 12400 Amherst (near Parmer and MoPac), Patel has added more iconic Indian street foods to her menu in order to \u201cdefine all the good things about India.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just one community or one culture,\u201d she says. \u201cMy Panipuri is in a Delhi style, so I named it Delhi Six. Our top seller is the Mumbai Veg Frankie, which is a veg wrap that is Mumbai-style with all Mumbai\u2019s sauces in it.\u201d Her favorite menu item is the Aloo Tikki Burger, which she credits to her memories of growing up in India and eating the vegetarian potato burgers at the fast food restaurants there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhenever people come from India to the United States and they go to McDonald\u2019s, they ask, \u2018Can I get a tikki burger?\u2019 she explains. \u201cOf course they will not find it. So this is what I want to serve here. We made our style of tikki burger with our truffle chili cheese on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although they were sold out of the Panipuri when I went, I had some of India\u2019s most iconic street foods with Soundra\u2019s Mumbai Veg Frankie, samosa chaat, and the Aloo Tikki Burger. The hype is real. The flavors and blends bust the myth that vegetarian food is bland or boring; there\u2019s a reason that the Hindu people have been mostly vegetarian for millennia. With bombastic seasoning and quality ingredients like this, who really needs to munch on flesh for fun?<\/p>\n

Patel\u2019s passion burns brightly when she talks about her business and her journey as a culinary artisan. \u201cI quit a $200K job and I choose to sit in this truck from 8am to 10pm. You should be rich in working hard and I\u2019m very rich in it,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one can buy me out,\u201d Patel continues. \u201cMy hard work is my investment and my power engine behind me. I know I\u2019m still selling very cheap street food, but it\u2019s not cheap. I wouldn\u2019t compromise my cup of chai in just some plastic or regular cup. Every cup of mine has our name stamped, [just] like every cup has a story in it. It has our heart in it. So that\u2019s why even if it is a cheap thing, we don\u2019t do it cheap. I did everything with my own two hands.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

With a story and attention to the craft like hers, it will come as no surprise when Soundra stops being a local secret.<\/p>\n

A note to readers:\u00a0Bold and uncensored,\u00a0The Austin Chronicle\u00a0has been Austin\u2019s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community\u2019s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cChai is like a love language for the whole of India. It\u2019s like an emotion for all the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196169,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,69304,1551,5440],"class_list":["post-196168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-chai","tag-feature","tag-first-look"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}