Kindness Is Greater Than Fear

After Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, the team at Chai Pani Asheville cooked and distributed over 30,000 meals — many airlifted to folks completely cut off from civilization. Chef-owner Meherwan Irani led that team as they all turned into first responders, servants, therapists, and advocates — tethering an entire community displaced. We believe Chef Meherwan is a hero, and we wanted to talk with him.

April 2, 2025

TBS: So happy to be chatting with you, Meherwan. You’re in Western North Carolina, in Asheville. We want to hear your Hurricane Helene story.  

MI: Friday morning (Sept. 27, 2024) we woke up to the aftermath of the hurricane, with no power, no internet, no cell phone service. Nobody had any idea what to do and how other people were. So, almost as if drawn by some magnetic force, a number of us just found ourselves wandering downtown to our Chai Pani restaurant. With no communication there was no other way except to meet up there. By mid-Friday afternoon, we started working on a plan, and by Saturday we had received communications from World Central Kitchen because we were on a list of who to call when disaster strikes. They said, “Hey, we can’t get there yet, but are you in a position to mobilize and start figuring out a cooking operation?” The downtown location was our only restaurant with power, so we created an old school human communication chain. Somebody drove to somebody’s house, and they drove to another house, and somebody was able to find internet somewhere. A small team, by Saturday afternoon, started cooking and packaging food. We were cooking without even a sense of where it was going. We just thought to ourselves, this is going to work itself out.

TBS: So much happening so fast.

MI: I look back now and just marvel at how quickly this community was able to come together … restaurateurs, chefs, hoteliers … mostly folks in the service industry. We’re built for this. As Molly, my wife, likes to say, we experience disasters every day in the kitchen and at work and in our lives. So this was a disaster at scale, and I can’t imagine a better-suited group of individuals to get together to manage it than folks in the hospitality business. Our mindset is like, Yeah, we got this, we got this, we got this.

TBS: Thank you for all you’ve done to put WNC on the road to recovery. 

MI: We’ve got another month to go before our tourism season kicks off and folks start coming back to town. Our job collectively now is to let the rest of the world know we are open for business. That we’re not traumatized. Not damaged. We’re not a lesser version of who we used to be because of this disaster. Right now, the business owners, especially in the hospitality business, have this sense of optimism and hope, which is really needed right now because it’s been really hard to be hopeful coming out of what we did with the hurricane. So regardless of the political climate, regardless of what’s happening at a national level, at least in our little town, I’d say there’s a sense of hope.

TBS: Hope, optimism, you’re better!

MI: We are better. Coming to Asheville now, you will see more of what this town and community is about than you ever have before. You’ll get to see the actual heart and soul and community of the city. Every business you walk into will greet you like a hero because that’s who you are to us. The whole town has rallied around the message. The state has rallied around the message. Our new governor, Josh Stein, made a number of visits, and it’s been really heartwarming to see that he sees the town for what it is. I sort of feel like we got covered by this gloss of commercialization over the last 10 years. Now the Asheville that I moved to 15 years ago is back. 

TBS: That’s so good to hear. Again, thank you. It brings me to our next question. Do Western North Carolina’s experience with the storms and LA’s experience with the fires impact people’s attitudes toward climate change or, as so many are calling it now, climate collapse? Do you believe these horrors change us at all?

MI: Part of America’s strength and what makes America this unique country is  individualism. But it’s also part of our downfall, our weakness. It really takes a lot for America to put aside individualism and come together as a communal country. We’re just too big, too varied, a country built of immigrants, a country built of different approaches to what matters. I’d love to be an optimist and say this is going to make a difference in the way we look at climate. I’m also a realist. I just don’t think it will. I do think this is a wake-up call for where you build, how you build your home. How do you rebuild your business? What kind of insurance policies you take out. Absolutely. I mean, we ourselves are thinking of that deeply. How do we survive the next climate issue that comes to town? But it’s at an individual level. Maybe there’ll be some community level [action] around it, maybe. But institutions fail us over and over again, whether it’s at state level or the federal government level. The media and press can be that institution that continues to have that conversation. Just because I don’t feel optimistic about it doesn’t mean that I’m not looking to you to continue to beat that drum.

TBS: You can count on that.

TBS: Another topic: Immigration and what’s currently happening with this administration. How is it impacting your kitchens, your teams, you?

MI: My obligation to our company and our team is essentially to let them know that no matter what happens, we are going to be there for them. It’s hard to talk specifics because, again, it’s not one-solution-fits-all in our industry. But time and time again, and we’ve done this very successfully, even during the pandemic, we let everybody that works for us, that is worried about their status, worried about their family, worried about their parents or their kids or their neighbors, know that one thing you can count on: we will always be there for you.

Immigration is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere. You can’t bury your head in the sand and pretend that there’s a way to prevent that from happening. You can’t roll this back any different than you can roll back marriage equality or gay rights or women’s rights. Mass immigration is going to happen. Climate change is going to basically make it impossible not to accept that folks will immigrate. So burying your head in the sand and pretending that this is a problem with the border. It’s not. It’s a problem with the laws and the rules and the regulations of this country which are not realistic. And the second hypocrisy that I see is that every employer in this country knows that we need an immigrant workforce.

TBS: There’s so much fear.

MI: Fear on both sides. It hits close to home. The fear that has been created by this administration has struck my daughter. She and her boyfriend are both American citizens of Indian origin. Recently, they came home. And the first night, my daughter said, “I need to talk to you about something important.” She said, “I want you to promise me that you won’t leave home without your passport.” And I’m like, Honey, whoa, whoa. Where’s this coming from? And I could see she was really scared. She said, “Dad, I’m reading everything. I’m scared. I’m scared that someone like you with your profile … I just don’t want to see anything happen to you. Too many people are depending on you.” I’m like, Hey, this is crazy. I mean, I’m not worried about this. But she was worried about it. And that’s what this administration has done. They’ve created an environment of fear that I think is far more devastating than the policy itself. I’m so enraged that somehow my daughter has been made to feel this fear, and the current people in power have created this fear in my family. I can only imagine how widespread that fear is.

In fact, America has been fed a diet of fear for so long that major decisions are now made because of fear. And fear overwhelms critical reasoning. It overwhelms. It makes you act against your best interest. And that’s what, unfortunately, this particular brand of conservatism has done well, is to make people scared enough to want to do things against their own best interests. And that’s why I see my role — in my little world, as someone that’s been given the privilege of being a leader — is to work against fear. Fear is the most damaging of human emotions, more than anger, more than anything else. It is fear that stops people from being kind to each other.

TBS: We notice, through all of it, you are almost always smiling. Your kindness and optimism shines through, Meherwan.

MI: Honestly, it’s because I love the restaurant business — it’s where the people are. Society at large comes into your space and you’ve got staff and you’ve got folks, and that opportunity to care for each other. Our industry is built around taking care, and I love that. We’re serving and feeding people, and there’s a sense of taking care of people in that. Not just in words, not just on Instagram, not just on the internet, but actually physically, person to person demonstrating care, whether it’s during normal service or whether it’s in the middle of a disaster like Hurricane Helene. We pay it forward. I see people walk out and I imagine that, with the experience they just had, they’re going to take it home with them. The next stop that they’re making, they’re going to be just a little bit nicer. And as somebody once said, you want world peace? Just be nice to each other.

TBS : Kindness is contagious. 

MI: We’re in the kindness business. We express it by serving food and beverage, but the business we’re in is just being kind to other folks. The idea of preparing a meal for somebody else, regardless of the economic motivation or the professional motivation, at the end of the day, it’s an act of kindness. I experience it when I go out to eat. And I mean even the kindness of forgiving people of their foibles. Customers are rude, customers are unreasonable, staff is rude, staff is unreasonable. But because we’re in the hospitality business, the way you deal with it, the way you answer it is kindness. During Helene, we got to see the other side of it … where the community was now reciprocating the kindness back to our industry. That’s good stuff.

TBS: Meherwan, how can we help you?

MI: What a great question. How can you help? That caught me off guard. (In our Zoom camera, Meherwan is visibly touched.) Let’s see. I mean, the most powerful medium of communication that the world has ever known is storytelling. Emotional, powerful storytelling. And I think what you’re doing with this conversation we’re having is helpful. You tell our stories to people that would not normally stop to listen. They would not normally give us the time. There’s a lot of people out there that if they just heard the story, you could change the way they think about a lot of these issues. And, often, I can’t be at the same table with those people. I can’t be in the same room with those people. And the media I think has an obligation in my mind to not just tell the stories, but find ways to get outside the echo chamber where the message needs to be heard. The more you’re not preaching to the choir, but actually expanding the reach of your storytelling, the more it helps the folks out there that are the actors in the story.  ◊

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