Punjabi Dhaba Offers a Taste of Home to Sikh Truck Drivers

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Punjabi Dhaba Offers a Taste of Home to Sikh Truck Drivers

The roadside diner in Kingston Springs is one of several dotting highways across the U.S.

• NICOLE HAMILTON
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  • NOV 4, 2021
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Karan Singh and  Kiranjit Kaur

Photo: Eric England

 

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It’s 9 a.m. on a Sunday, and Punjabi Dhaba in Kingston Springs has already been open for an hour. The restaurant is serving sleepy-eyed truck drivers who shuffle in from the truck stop across the street for breakfast parathas and a curry to go before another day on the road.

In India, roadside diners like these are known as dhabas, and while they’re dotted along the highway across the U.S., they’re especially common in the Punjab region of Northern India. In 2019, brothers Karan and James Singh opened Punjabi Dhaba about 20 miles west of downtown Nashville to serve the growing number of truck drivers in the U.S. from the Sikh community.

 

Punjabi Dhaba

132 Petro Road, Kingston Springs

 

Here in the U.S., dhabas are popping up on popular trucking routes, especially along I-40. There’s Taste of India, located in the back of a convenience store at an old gas station in San Jon, N.M., and Spicy Bite in Milan, N.M. The latter features a massive lunch buffet with plenty of five-star reviews on Yelp from hungry travelers (semi and SUV drivers alike).

Continue east on I-40 beyond Amarillo and you’ll eventually hit an area where there’s not much on the horizon. That is, aside from a billboard for Truck Stop 40 Punjabi Restaurant towering over a stark stretch of highway between Texas and Oklahoma, advertising fresh food in the Hindi language.

Punjabi Dhaba’s first location was just off I-40 in the 101 Travel Plaza in Cedar Grove, Tenn. Word tends to travel fast within the Sikh trucking community, and business at the restaurant grew quickly and stayed steady. But the COVID-19 pandemic hit the trucking industry hard, and the Singh brothers decided to close the restaurant — although James Singh knew the closing wouldn’t be permanent.

“The pandemic just gave us a chance to shift our focus,” James says, pointing out that most dhabas are located inside a gas station or truck stop. “We wanted our restaurant to serve truck drivers, but also be something that people locally would want to visit.”

In March of this year, the Singhs opened Punjabi Dhaba at its current location in Kingston Springs. Now located off I-40’s Exit 188 on Petro Road, the restaurant sits directly across the street from a mammoth Petro truck stop. And while the old location was as no-frills as you’d expect a truck stop diner to be, the new space greets road-weary truckers and Kingston Springs locals with chandeliers and colorful Christmas lights. The manufactured log cabin gives strong Tennessee country vibes, while the movies played on the television above the door are strictly Bollywood.

 

Punjabi Dhaba’s menu got an upgrade with the move as well. Now it’s more extensive, fulfilling James and Karan’s goal of catering to both truck drivers and locals — plus folks who make the drive from places like Bellevue for popular dishes like chicken tikka masala. Customers order at the register, and everything is made to order. Members of the Singh family, including Karan’s wife Kiranjit Kaur, work behind the register or in the large open kitchen while James and Karan make the rounds out front, talking to customers as they wait for their food.

Truck driver Jan Pal Singh visited Punjabi Dhaba on a recent Sunday morning to pick up potato- and onion-filled parathas and chai before heading to Florida. “I come here because everything is freshly made and healthy,” he says. “I don’t eat fast food.”

Abdi Ibrahim, a Texas-based driver, doesn’t eat fast food either. Instead, he stops at as many dhabas as he can along his east-to-west route, including Punjabi Dhaba. “Nothing here is processed,” says Ibrahim while awaiting his order before a drive to Virginia. “Most truck stops only have fast-food options, and that’s a problem because a lot of truck drivers have health issues like diabetes, obesity and high cholesterol.”

Ibrahim is one of a growing number of truck drivers from East Africa and says that another reason he stops at dhabas is for food that’s very close — and in some ways the same — to what he’d eat back home in Somalia. “It’s the same spices,” he says. “I can call [Punjabi Dhaba] up and they can make me anything. They know what I like.”

On most days — between the morning rush of feeding time-pressed truckers and before drivers stop in for dinner and settle in across the street for their required 10-hour rest (known as a “reset”) — Punjabi Dhaba is open for those who want to dine in for lunch or dinner.

That’s usually when the parking lot fills up with customers who roll in with something smaller than a semi. Inside, truck drivers and locals — and perhaps some road-trippers — wait for homemade Indian food.

“We have a lot of customers who stop here whenever they’re on the road,” says James. “Our regulars come from everywhere.”