About
Our Mission and Practice
We believe we grow our community by engaging intentionally in the farm to fork process and living our vision of creative resiliency.
We seek to bring our community together with love, warmth and hospitality over delicious, healthy food. We prioritize worker, environmental, and social justice; accessibility through affordability; and sustainability at every level. We pay a living wage.
Our producers are local, our investors local, and our long-term goals are about transforming the local economy. We strive to source our produce and meat from nearby family farms; organize our workplace around joy and liberation; honor the land and our relationship to it; be an incubator for artists; and practice interdependence with other organizations and small businesses who share our values.
Thank you for your support!
A brief History and Request
Vimala grew up in Bombay where she learned to cook from family, street vendors & friends. In 1994, a single mother of three, Vimala started cooking donation based community dinners in her Chapel Hill home. Eighteen years later in June 2010, thanks to the support of our beloved community, Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe was born! When you visit the restaurant please consider donating to our Food for All fund to help us continue the legacy of our community supported dinners. If you can afford to help us sustain our ‘everybody eats’ policy, please do give generously. If you are unable to afford our prices, let us know. We believe in making healthy, delicious food accessible to all people and we trust in our community’s commitment to food justice. When Vimala cooks, everybody eats!
Meet our Staff
Andrea Wood is a web, flyer, etc designer, and tech helper at Vimala’s. She worked for many years surrounded by many fascinating and some boring books in the libraries of the university and then for a period as a farmers’ market manager when joining Vimala at her community kitchen in 2009. Since 2006, she has been building sustainable do-it-ourselves community with the Carrboro Greenspace, including co-organizing the annual Urban Farm Tour and workshop series. In 2008, she joined the Crop Mob in their efforts to rebuild farming communities upon a foundation of mutual aid. She lives in Bolin Creek Cooperative and dabbles in gardening, cobbing, mushroom cultivating and yoga. Andrea is also a team member for a new endeavor: YardSprout.
Liane Salgado grew up in Chapel Hill, left to study ecology, local plants, medicinal plants, sustainable living and permaculture as a National Science Foundation scholar at the University of Michigan’s doctoral program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the 1970s and moved back to Chapel Hill in 1987.
A long time friend and supporter of Vimala’s, she is currently working at Vimala’s, collaborating on the local Transition Town effort and developing a community permaculture center as well as supporting local and urban agriculture and solid waste reduction efforts. In addition, she does GIS, energy modeling, and technical writing for conservation non-profits and local businesses.
Her home on Damascus Church Rd. is the site of our beautiful kitchen garden.
Manju Rajendran is a community organizer, artist, writer, cook and botany nerd. Since age 12, Manju has been doing social justice work, especially with young people, inspired by her mother’s and father’s legacies of civic engagement, food justice, education organizing and community-building.
She is a member of Southerners On New Ground, Left Turn, Ubuntu, Bread Uprising Bakery Cooperative, and Grupo Capoeira Brasil/ Terreiro de Arte e Cultura.
Manju and her small flock of plucky hens live under a pecan tree in Durham, NC.
Paul Martinez: Nothing new under the sun yet the Curryblossom blazes like one. Whether rich, poor or somewhere in between come for the food and stay for the scene as we build our skills so we can pay the bills… Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, I moved to the east coast in 2003 to try out something new. Ever since I can remember I have always loved food and kinda knew I would work with food for a living. I have worked in various restaurants in Chapel Hill/Carrboro but was truly blessed when I found Curryblossom. “Chef,” as I like to call her, is truly a gifted and wonderful person. She has more than a few soldiers ready to go to war for her though we are about love and togetherness. I look forward to what the future holds for us all both in our professional and personal lives. I also look forward to getting to know all of our guests, soon to be friends. See ya soon.
Peter Brayshaw is a musician, community activist, herbalist, cook and farmer. Since 2006, he has been an active collaborator with the Carrboro Greenspace Collective and helped found the Carrboro Community Garden Coalition in 2008. He has trained in wild edibles and herbalism with traditional midwives in Albuquerque, NM, at home in the Appalachian Mountains and locally with Will Andres. Peter cooked with Vimala for many years in her home-based community kitchen and now cooks in the restaurant. He is also farmer-in-charge of our beautiful kitchen garden and leads the bi-weekly Baby Sing Song with his partner Lydia and their little one, Eloy. When not busy with all of these undertakings, he loves to let loose with friends and play folk & experimental music.
Rob Jones is a radical educator and food activist working to make sustainable food accessible and affordable by empowering communities to grow food. In addition to coordinating the restaurants’ sustainability efforts, Rob is a fellow with Good Work; a social entrepreneurship and community development non-profit based in Durham, NC where he works to expand our understanding of entrepreneurship to include all of the ways we create livelihood for ourselves; from paid work to growing food in a home or community garden. He is also a co-organizer of Crop Mob, a group of young, landless, and/or wannabe farmers that works collectively and builds community within sustainable agriculture. Also, a mycologist, you can find him on Wednesdays at Carrboro Farmers’ Market and Saturdays at Chapel Hill Farmers’ Market selling mushrooms as part of Ecology: Woodfruit.
Vimala Rajendran, Executive Chef has been a longtime activist for progressive causes including grassroots media, international peace and stopping domestic violence. Through it all, she has fed the movement. Her food has shown up everywhere, from protests across the region to weddings and private parties to the Weaver Street Market lawn and Johnny’s in Carrboro.
At the restaurant, I enjoy recreating my family’s favorite recipes, as well as new ones that I once introduced to my mother who openly welcomed my cooking experiments. Many thanks to this community for rallying behind me to envision the possibility that my creative, wholesome food could be market worthy! I am immensely grateful to my parents, brother Wilson, and sisters, Wilma and Margaret, for your inspiration and the rich stories we created together. I am thankful for my children Manju, Anjali and Rajeev for being the driving force behind all the growing up that I have done in the last three decades, and more recently, the commitment that my children and husband have made to me. And now Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe is one of the greatest gifts ever!
