Boston Comfort Kitchen Restaurant serves a menu of international comfort food with lively and nourishing flavors. His Managing Partner, Biplaw Rai, is on a mission to uplift the people around him – clients and colleagues.
On a recent visit, shrimp sizzle in a pan for a dish with mango chow and sherry peppers. Rai travels between his clients and staff to make sure everyone feels at home. “I create spaces,” he says. “I bring people together, especially through food.
Restaurants have played a big role in Rai’s life. “I am a Nepalese immigrant,” he shares. “I came here when I was 18 for college. And the restaurant industry has been like a safe space for me because it was the first industry that really opened the doors for me to find a job.
“I create spaces. I bring people together, especially through food.”
Biplaw Rai
His first jobs were at places like Taco Bell, KFC, and during the summers he worked in Ocean City, Maryland with other Nepalese students. He saw how much the restaurant industry depends on immigrants and how often employers abandon them.
“For a long time, when we worked in the restaurant industry, our voices or our stories were never heard,” says Rai. “Or if it’s been heard, that’s never been the focus of it. And I’ve always said the restaurant industry is like the belly of the United States.
Rai tries to do better for his team. Before each shift, he and the staff share a meal together. “We want to be a space, a catalyst, a place where we uplift our friends, family, community members on the vision they have,” he says. “And we want to start with our team first and then move on to the outside.”
Rai and his two partners – Nyacko Pearl Perry and Kwasi Kwaa – have been running Comfort Kitchen and operating it as a pop-up in Greater Boston since 2020. Currently, they offer dinner several nights a week at Little Dipper at Jamaica Plain, while their permanent residence in Dorchester is being renovated. Rai says the goal is “to give Boston something that’s very different from what you’re getting now in terms of food, in terms of service.” Let’s tell our stories. Let no one tell our story through their lens.
Rai grew up in Kathmandu. He sports a bold mustache that, when not covered by a mask, curves at the corners of his mouth. His warm laughter punctuates his sentences as he speaks to people around him. One of Rai’s partners, Kwaa, is from Ghana and the restaurant offers dishes from the African diaspora.
“We bring a very global perspective to our dishes,” says Rai. “There’s a lot of back and forth about how it should be presented, what should be there, what ingredients are there. And what we are finding is that there are more similarities than differences in food.
The dishes they serve are often linked to personal memories.
“Right now we’re making potato cakes on the menu. And it’s one of those things that I grew up eating, ”he says. “It’s like mashed potatoes with panko, then they fry it.” We ate it at noon when we had our swimming lessons. As a child, when you grow up, you just wait for this … it’s the best thing ever.
Comfort Kitchen operates with three guiding principles: collaboration, intercultural understanding and community.
“We want to be a space, a catalyst, a place where we uplift our friends, family, community members whatever their vision.”
Biplaw Rai
“We want to be a destination point where people actually travel across the neighborhood boundaries,” says Rai. “And also, in doing so, we want to draw attention to the segregation of the city.”
And that’s another reason why Rai wants to take good care of his staff. If they feel taken care of, they will take good care of customers.
“There are places where people don’t feel comfortable walking,” he says. “It’s mostly because of the class and the money. We want to be the complete opposite of that. We want people from all walks of life to come in. “
More than a restaurant, Rai creates a common multicultural space that allows people to learn from each other with comfort food at the center.