Nepalese restaurateur cooks from heart

At Shangri-La Café & Grill, you might find Meenakshi Sharma waiting tables. You also may catch a glimpse of her in the kitchen stirring a pot or behind the cash register, always with a big smile.

But she’s not a waitress or a cook. She and her older brother, Paramesh Adhikari, own the successful Rohnert Park restaurant that specializes in Himalayan cuisine.

How Sharma came to own it is an intriguing story.

She grew up in the isolated Nepalese village of Salakpur and remembers walking to grade school through the jungle. Twice she saw jaguars among the foliage, and she remembers promising herself that someday she would go to the Amazon to see what was in that jungle.

When she grew up, however, Sharma worked in a bank and on the side taught her language to Peace Corps volunteers.

“I couldn’t understand why people wanted to come to Nepal because it is such a poor country,” she said. “We have nothing, but the Peace Corps volunteers loved Nepal and made me proud of my country.”

Fifteen years ago, when she was 36, she made a Christmas trip to see her brother, who had moved to the U.S. in 1989 after earning degrees in etching, printing and art history. He worked as a commercial artist for a Petaluma printing company and lived in Rohnert Park.

What was supposed to be a short brother-sister visit dramatically changed Sharma’s life. A family friend in Berkeley who was teaching private students the Nepalese language decided to return to Nepal. She offered Sharma her classes.

“I saw that I could make a living teaching my language,” Sharma said.

For three years, she taught students in Berkeley while studying business administration at Lincoln University.

“I’d go to university in the morning. Then in the afternoon and evening, I taught groups of students,” she said. After teaching, she was hungry but didn’t like to eat alone.

“I’d say, ‘Can you stay and eat with me?’ And they’d say, ‘Free food. Sure!’ And they loved what I cooked. They said I should open a restaurant.”

Sharma began catering for events, and when Manoj Joshi tasted her cooking, he also encouraged her to open a restaurant.

“He told me, ‘You make simple things, but you cook from your heart,’ ” she said about the man who founded Wellness By All Means, a Fremonth holistic healthcare initiative. “He’s my biggest inspiration.”

At a Himalayan street fair, Sharma met UC Davis student Sujan Bhattarai, and in July 2002 they married. At the time, he was studying environmental science. Today, he works as a lab instructor in Sonoma State University’s Chemistry Department.

In 2003, her brother said he had found a place across the street from SSU that would make a good restaurant site. He told her, “You like to visit with people, you like to cook for people. That’s all you need to have a successful restaurant.”

He put up the money, and the two of them worked for months creating Shangri-La.

“We could not afford to hire professionals for everything, so we did a lot ourselves,” Sharma said.

They sheet-rocked the walls, laid the floors, built the kitchen, painted the walls, hung prayer flags and Nepalese tapestries, and opened for business May 19, 2004. Not long after that, Sharma became a U.S. citizen.

All of Shangri-La’s recipes - from chicken tikka masala to Biryani, Dahl and Naan - are hers.

“And I train the cooks so they cook like me,” she said. “In the beginning, I worked from 6 a.m. to midnight. Now I go in around 9:30 and leave about 10 at night. I do everything: cook, serve, clean tables, visit with the guests. I love it. I love to talk with the people. Either I’m at the restaurant or I’m out of the country.”

Sharma loves travel with Bhattari as much as she loves cooking, visiting Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Bali, among other places.

“Since I grew up in remote eastern Nepal in the village of Salakpur - no electricity, no roads, nothing - that kind of place fascinates me,” she said. “Going where there is no electricity takes me back to my childhood. And reminds me of who I am.”

In 2013, she and Bhattari visited the Amazon, traveling by plane, boat and, eventually, by foot.

“The jungle was so dense it was dark,” she said. “Rays of sun came through here and there, but it was raining and dark and dense.

“We saw trees full of tiny monkeys and all kinds of beautiful birds. The whole place sounds like a symphony. I was in heaven.

“We heard a jaguar, and I felt so at home I wept.”

Then she added, “Sleeping in a hammock in the jungle was the best thing.”

Shangri-La, 1706 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park, is open 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., 5-9 p.m., closed Sundays. 793-0300, shangrila-cafe.com.