The city’s best samosas are inside a tiny pocket of Brookside

If I had a buck for every time somebody told me about a great new restaurant concept that was going to set Kansas City dining on its ear, I’d have more than enough dough to open my own restaurant. Not that I’d ever indulge in that kind of madness. Besides, these great new ideas hardly ever get off the ground, or they’re so poorly executed that they fail quickly — and expensively.

But rules have exceptions, and a good idea can become an unexpected and welcome reality. That’s the story of Chai Shai, the little tea-and-samosa shop on the edge of Brookside (in the Rockhill Ridge neighborhood). It’s one of the great restaurant-success stories of 2011. And what makes the tale so happy is that its genesis is so basic: two young entrepreneurs actually listening to their customers.

The original idea was pretty simple. Two Pakistan-born brothers, Abdul and Kashif Tufail, leased the corner storefront on East 59th Street in order to use the kitchen — the previous tenant had been a catering enterprise — for their thriving wholesale samosa business. They had reason to feel confident, having already started the operation as a sideline to earn extra money while attending the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

“We only wanted the space for the kitchen,” Kashif says. “We had planned to paint over the windows.” But curious neighbors stopped by to find out what the Tufail brothers were doing in the space, then encouraged them not only to make samosas but also to serve them. So they decided to use the existing dining room (several restaurants and one short-lived coffeehouse had operated there) as a tea shop that served Pakistani-style street snacks: samosas, pakoras, samosa chaat. It was uncomplicated and family-run.

Now 18 months after opening, the Tufails oversee 10 employees — their mother, Aasma, is the chef, and Abdul has returned to pharmacy school and works part time. They’ve been doing well enough that Kashif has hired former Roasterie manager Elise Kelly — a superb and knowledgeable server — as his assistant manager. Also onboard is a congenial bearded server, built like a lumberjack, who seems to call all of his male customers “Bud.” It’s the butch version, I guess, of the old hash-house salutation “hon.”

“The business grew much faster than we ever thought it would,” Kashif says. We started with a limited menu of appetizers and a few sandwiches, but our customers would come in and ask for dinners, so we started offering a few dishes on weekends. The demand was so great, we now serve dinner six nights a week.”

So there it is: a good idea realized with hard work and resulting in success. Of course, it helps to have a good location, and Chai Shai is a few blocks from the UMKC campus. It’s unusual to step into the dining room and not find several Indian, Afghan or Pakistani students sipping hot milky chai and sharing a plate of fried pakora fritters.

But on the chilly Tuesday night that I dined alone, the room was an interesting cross-section of the local population: older customers and young students, black and white patrons, one snooty woman who never stopped staring into her iPad, and a young couple gazing so deeply into each other’s eyes that they barely touched their food.

The delicious fragrance wafting out of Chai Shai that night was such an intoxicating perfume of cumin, ginger, cinnamon and cardamom that I could imagine it luring people from as far away as … at least 63rd Street and Troost.

I was lucky to snag one of the coveted tables in the dining room, which holds only a half-dozen of them in addition to the seats at the copper-topped bar and a few stools at the front window. And I warmed myself with a big china cup of hot black tea — a spicy brew concocted with star anise, cinnamon and cardamom pods.

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I had taken a novel to read, but who needs fiction when you can look at all the imported delicacies neatly arranged on the metal shelving adjacent to one row of tables. While I ate, I stared longingly at the glass jars of garlic paste, the bottles of spices, the bags of rice and yellow split peas, the British cookies and Marmite spread, even the cans of imported British Heinz “Beanz.” Kashif opened a can so I could taste them. They’re different, all right: much, much worse.

I dined frequently at Chai Shai when it first opened last year, but I could tolerate only so many meals on paper plates with plastic utensils, so I took a sabbatical. The plates are now heavy china, I’m happy to say, but the forks, knives and spoons are still plastic. I’ve given up worrying about it, though, because this place has the best samosa, bar none, in the metro, whatever you eat it with. It’s a gorgeously light and crispy golden triangle filled with seasoned chicken or beef — or the vegetarian version, the best choice, stuffed with potatoes, peas and cilantro and served with a tart green chutney made with fresh mint, cilantro and green chiles.

Kashif insists that the dinner menu changes frequently, so I’m glad I had the opportunity to sample a couple of the more popular choices — moist, delicately spiced achari chicken and the exceptionally tender, succulent cubes of lamb korma — before the Tufails rotate these entrées off the menu later this month. “When you have a restaurant this small,” Kashif says, “you have to give people a reason to keep coming back to try new things.”

The dinner entrées here are served with basmati rice and a gloriously fluffy piece of naan. That bread isn’t made in-house (there’s no tandoori oven in the kitchen) but by one of the more talented bakers in the city, Jamal Al-shmary, who operates a small bakery in Northeast. There’s also a small salad on the plate — with American-style poppy-seed dressing. Pakistani diners don’t eat traditional Western salad, but Americans like it, so the Tufails serve it. “Poppy plants grow all over Pakistan, so there is a connection,” Kashif says.

In India and Pakistan, the yogurt-based condiment raita is considered a salad and is frequently made with fresh cucumbers. I had never tasted a variety like the one served at Chai Shai. It’s a delicate, creamy and sweeter sauce (particularly good with the lamb dishes) that’s seasoned with cumin, coriander and red chiles. Another familiar condiment, tamarind sauce, looks like molasses syrup at most local Indian buffets (and often tastes like it, too — it’s frequently a canned product), but Chai Shai’s is the real thing. Aasma Tufail boils down the puckery-tart tamarind pods, adds sugar and water, and creates a mandarin-red dipping sauce that’s excellent with the blissfully light fried pakoras.

The Tufails stay away from frozen products, so the milky paneer cubes (it’s the Indian version of whole-milk farmer’s cheese), splashed with spicy, fiery-red masala sauce and tucked into a folded flaky piece of roti bread, melts like butter in your mouth. I almost didn’t order the masala paneer roll sandwich because I dread the rubbery consistency of the cheese in so many Indian restaurants. But Chai Shai uses a fresh product, made locally, and serves another winner.

Kashif sometimes can’t believe how popular his little tea shop has become in such a short time. “You know what success is to me?” he says. “It’s the homesick, lonely Indian and Pakistani students who come in here from UMKC and tell my mother that her cooking is just like the food that their mothers make at home. They make a connection here and feel welcome. That’s my success.”

When you eat at Chai Shai, it’s your success, too.