This South Jersey Indian restaurant serves food unlike any other in America. Here's why

The feeling began at the base of my scalp.

As I bit into the spice-nettled and thick-gravied Saoji chicken at South Jersey’s tiny Nagpuri Saoji restaurant, each pore on my head opened and each hair raised, one by one.

My neck felt flushed, and then the tops of my arms — a prickling and complicated warmth of clove-and-cinnamon spice and numbing chili heat that played out across the palate and then the skin, until eventually it settled into wherever you want to locate the human soul.

Oh, god, yes: This was real.

And it was also new.

Tucked into a beige-bricked mini-mall in Voorhees at 1227 Berlin-Haddonfield Road — across from an adult training center, a closed ping-pong hall and not much else — Nagpuri Saoji is an Indian restaurant unlike any other in America, home to a cuisine that would be difficult to find in most parts of India, let alone on this continent.

Saoji is a little like the Sichuan of India: notoriously spicy, viscerally meaty and wildly complex. It is the cuisine of Halba Koshti weavers in the Central Indian city of Nagpur, a home food rarely found in any restaurant until a couple generations ago. But when the cotton industry collapsed, handloom weavers discovered they could instead sell their food.

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The rest of India has newly awakened to Saoji flavors, with article after article professing to reveal Saoji “secrets.” But Nagpuri Saoji may be the first restaurant in America devoted to it. Most Indian restaurants in the United States serve food instead from the north or the south of the country.

Spicy, meaty Saoji Indian dishes likely unique in America

In Voorhees, chef-owners Neeraj and Swapna Sagdeo offer a fiery and many-textured tarri poha street food made with curried black chickpeas and beaten rice, and multiple varieties of crispy, chickpea-flour sev; aromatic chickpea-flour jhunka, like an alternate-universe panzanella; and sweetly cardamom-dazzled flatbread desserts.

The restaurant’s butter chicken eschews much of the tomato and cream of Northern Indian renditions, honed to the intensity of thick, spiced butter that clings to tender meat and gives it unexpected amplitude: This butter chicken, as they say, goes to 11.

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But especially, there are myriad takes on goat and chicken drenched in Saoji masala gravies made from 27 secret spices ground and blended freshly each week, simmered for hours into achingly tender meat that cooks slowly under the lid.

The heat is not the stinging green-chili fire of much Indian cuisine. It is the earthy and full-flavored spice of Vidarbha and Kashmiri red chilies that have been dried in the sun, and of black peppercorns, made festive with clove and cardamom and cinnamon and yet more flavors the Sagdeos won’t reveal.

Order a dish medium, and your body feels alive. Order it hot (tej) — or lord forbid, Nagpuri-tej — and your life is perhaps no longer your own.

Though the restaurant has been open to walk-in customers for less than a year, Indian-American customers now drive hours to eat there, from the tight Indian enclaves of Edison and Jersey City and New York. Others, whether in Texas or Seattle, order dishes shipped through the mail.

Maharashtrian celebrities, including pop singer Swapnil Bandodkar and renowned chef Vishnu Manohar, also have paid respects. So has a hometown newspaper in Nagpur.

An unlikely path to opening Nagpuri Saoji in South Jersey

And yet, the Sagdeos had never intended to open a restaurant.

They’d moved to South Jersey a decade ago as IT professionals, jobs they still hold for half the week.

But they’d grown up in Nagpur, and found themselves hungering for the flavors of food from Maharashtra, India’s wealthiest state, whose emigrants are more likely to study medicine or engineering than start a restaurant, Neeraj said.

And so there were few places he and his wife could find the flavors of home.

They started “poking around,” teaching themselves to recreate the foods they missed. They invited friends to taste their Maharashtrian flavors, and in 2016 began a Facebook page devoted to cooking Saoji cuisine. Eventually, they put up an online event, inviting friends to a backyard feast.

“We were just expecting 20 friends to show up, dining and having a good time,” Swapna said.

Instead dozens arrived, driving from as far away as North Jersey. Some were total strangers. They, too, had missed the spice and savor of Saoji cuisine — and wanted more.

The Sagdeos began a small food business on the side, cooking in a shared commissary kitchen and delivering Saoji curries and other dishes to Edison and North Jersey each weekend, or shipping to other parts of the country.

Finally, in late 2021, they moved into their current space, a white-walled dining room dominated on one side by a jovial “biodiversity” map of their home city of Nagpur. But still they weren’t often open to walk-in customers. Instead, groups of diners could schedule a visit and state their preferences — and the Sagdeos would make a custom meal from scratch.

“We didn’t want to have a flood of customers, and then compromise on taste or quality,” Neeraj said. They took months perfecting a small menu, including shrimp and paneer and vegetarian items, and took trips home to Nagpur to refresh their taste buds.

Now, four days a week from Thursday to Sunday, anyone who likes can wander into the little Voorhees storefront and partake in what still feels like a home-cooked meal: the spice a little fresher than usual, the meat cooked slower.

Customers who want something a little more adventurous — a plate of curried trotters, perhaps — still can call ahead and ask, and the Sagdeos might stop by the butcher.

And soon, they have a yet more ambitious plan. This March, they signed a lease on a 80-seat restaurant in Central Jersey’s Edison-Iselin area, home to perhaps the densest Indian community in the country.

They’re interviewing chefs and staff, and have obtained a liquor license to serve Indian-inflected cocktails. They hope to open their new palace of Saoji cuisine this year, in the former Yellow Chilli space at 1477 Oak Tree Road.

But in Voorhees, they say, they will remain the chefs: Four days a week. Ten or so tables. Spice turned to 11.

Nagpuri Saoji is located at 1227 Haddonfield-Berlin Road, Voorhees, New Jersey, 856-626-1562, nagpurisaojiusa.com. Open Thursday to Sunday, 11 am. to 3 p.m. and 6 to 10 p.m.

Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based writer for USA Today Network. Email him at mkorfhage@gannett.com, or follow him on Twitter at @matthewkorfhage.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Nagpuri Saoji in NJ might be only Indian restaurant of its kind in US