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Couple makes city sweeter
The dream went
well. After 22 years at a local manufacturer of telephone components, he was
materials manager. He had a wife and two children. But in
November 2002, the shakeout in the telecommunications industry shook him out
on to the street without a job, the same fate his wife, Suchitra, had
experienced earlier in the year. Dutta, 56, reverted to an old family tradition: Bengali sweets.
Today Dutta,
his wife and a Salvadoran employee make cheese-based Bengali sweets daily at
Mithai House of Indian Desserts, a 1,000-square-foot shop in a strip mall off
N.C. 55 just south of the intersection with N.C. 54. Indian
customers say the sweets are just like what they get at home. They pass the
news on by word of mouth. From his contacts in the Indian community, Ducha
vouches for "authentic" quality of his sweets and notes the he
comes from a family whose brand of Bengali sweets, Para Bhandar, are well
known in Bangladesh. "I was
always thinking I'll put in this kind of shop," Dutta said one afternoon
after a bi-weekly run to five grocery stores in suburban Washington to
deliver his sweets to five Indian grocery stores had landed him back home at
4 a.m. "The quality of Indian desserts is so poor here." Dutta said the
sweets in local Indian restaurants are not up to the level of his homemade
stuff because of the time needed to make the cheese from fresh milk and then
boil it in sugared water. He should
know. Sixty-five
years ago, Dutta's father, a banker, invested in a Bengali sweets operation
in Bangladesh that eventually distributed its products to Japan and Hong
Kong. Dutta's lawyer brother now runs the business in Bangladesh, which Dutta
managed from 1971-78 before he left for the United States to join a brother
and to try his luck here. Despite having
a glowing reputation for the homemade Bengali sweets he took to gatherings in
the Triangle's tight-knit Indian community, Dutta still sought the seal of
approval. He got it in July 2002 when he made Bengali sweets for the wedding
of a friend's son attended by 500 guests. "That was
a sign that the quality was good enough, if I ever wanted to open up a
shop," recalled Dutta, who was still employed at the time. Dutta opened
his shop at 4823 Meadow Drive in November 2003 a year after losing his job.
Dutta wholesales the sweets to about a dozen Indian groceries from
Washington, D.C., to Charlotte to North Charleston, S.C., and welcomes retail
walk-in customers who can choose from 26 selections in the cooler. Supriya
Patnaik, 44, discovered Mithai several months ago through mutual friends.
"I just love the sweets," the software engineer at GlaxoSmithKline
said. "He makes it just the way we have it back home." "It's
rare to get those kinds of sweets from stores," said Patnaik, who has
been in North Carolina for 17 years and visits Mithai every other week.
"The worst part is I work close to the shop," she said, worried
about her waistline. Over the July
4th holiday, she, her husband and their 4-year-old daughter visited relatives
in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. and distributed 10 pounds of
Mithai sweets along the way. By her own
admission, Shobha Srinivasan is "not a dessert person." She learned
about Mithai in November and finds the offerings to her taste because they
are "not overly sweet." A program manager
at the National Institutes of Health, Srinivasan packed 24 pounds of Mithai
sweets in her luggage in February when she flew to Boston to celebrate an
uncle's 80th birthday. About 70 people from as far away as California tasted
the sweets. "It was a big hit," she said. Suchitra
Dutta, 50, sees little irony in moving half way around the world to end up in
the same type of business her husband left more than a quarter a century ago.
Both she and her husband's families left Bangladesh for Calcutta in Bengal
due to the political tensions between Hindus and Muslims. As
"displaced people," she said they "seem to be more flexible.
We go on to new places and pastures." When she and her husband lost
their jobs in the same year, returning to India was not an option. "It was
very hard," she said. "But the children are here and they were at
that stage when they were pursuing their education." Their son is a
rising senior at N.C. State University. Their daughter enters the 10th grade
in the fall. Dutta has been
making deliveries to the Washington, D.C., area for about three months. With
each trip, he takes a sampler of his wares to new grocery stores in hopes of
drumming up business. Indian
visitors to the Triangle drop by Mithai for sweets and tell Dutta to contact
the Indian grocery in their neighborhood so they can have a steady supply of
the sweets. Transportation costs frequently make shipping the sweets
prohibitive. Despite the
good reviews, 20 months into their entrepreneurial adventure the Duttas know
their growth depends on energy and acumen. Moving to Chatham Square in Cary,
which has been dubbed "Little India" due to the number of Indian
shops there, would give them more exposure. But there have been no spaces
available that have kitchens. "Definitely
our sales have gone up," said Suchrita Dutta. "People have come to
appreciate our sweets." |
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