It’s 2017. A Tribune food story is causing distress at Dhaba Canteen, a Sindhi mainstay on Chicago’s North Side. The family-owned restaurant was hoping the piece would be a celebratory profile of Neeraj, the restaurant’s long-time owner and maybe even an appreciation of Sindhi culture in America. But it turned out to be a piece about the decline of Devon Avenue.

Rita, his daughter, is furious. “The condescension,” she says, adding an expletive.

Devon Avenue, of course, is Chicago’s celebrated artery of Desi culture, familiar to all of us who love the food of South Asia and offering a long-established collection of restaurants, shops and grocery stores, including the original Patel Brothers, now the world’s largest chain serving the Indian diaspora. Since the mid-1960s, Devon Avenue, roughly between Ravenswood and California Avenues, hosted such historic Chicago eateries as Standard India, Annapurna, Viceroy of India and many more. Over the years, I’ve been to most all of them.

But, as Madhuri Shekar’s play “Dhaba on Devon Avenue” make clear, Devon Avenue has been changing; restaurants have been facing well-documented headwinds when it comes to food and labor costs and the formality of the restaurants in the 20th century has shifted to more casual profiles. And the initial dominance of a tight-knit group of Indian and Pakistani immigrants has shifted with the sands of time. Many of the children of the immigrants who moved to Chicago in the last decades of 20th century have seized opportunities far beyond the kitchens and dining rooms of Devon.

“Dhaba” is premiering at Writers Theatre in Glencoe under the experienced direction of Chay Yew (TimeLine Theatre, awaiting its new home, is a producing partner). The play was long in gestation and it certainly feels like a pre-pandemic exploration of its theme.

The core conflict is a classic, formulaic story of a fading old king, in this case Neeraj (Anish Jethmalani), clinging to the authenticity of his failing restaurant even as his daughter Rita (Tina Muñoz Pandya) wants to move with the times and experiment with fusion cuisine, all the more apt since the staffers of the restaurants no longer are all Sindi; the line cook, Luz (Isa Arciniegas) is Dominican. Rita’s sister, Sindhu (Arya Daire), has moved out of town, her world is finance and management, not cooking magaz kheema.

I’ve seen this plot many times. Even just a few minutes into the play, you intuit that Neeraj, who is in failing health, is not going to emerge triumphant here, as his daughters and even old pal Adil (Mueen Jahan) circle around his beloved restaurant and, symbolically, of broader aspects of their lives. Similarly, you suspect that Rita’s rebellion will have to be tempered with a better understand of family, tradition and heritage. So you are never surprised.

The playwright’s palpable point of view, of course, most closely matches that of Rita. Frankly, I crave a play penned from the elder generation’s perspective, but it’s their well-educated kids, of course, who ended up going to MFA programs at Yale or Julliard and they inevitably write from what they know and feel. Their parents probably are more than fine with that, of course, but the result tends to be plays that are a bit too neat and that don’t understand the pain of aging and the power of childhood memory in an immigrant’s life; something that children born in the United States rarely fully understand. I’m also not convinced every immigrant or first generation American ends up being more restrictive than their children wish, but you’d never know that from the nonprofit American theater. (This issue is one of the reasons why August Wilson, who so understood late middle age, is so missed.)

All that said, these themes would not be so common theatrically if they were not true. “Dhaba” has real richness in its details: I’m a sucker for local plays and this one comes with a palpable authenticity and some nicely toned performances (especially from the very live Muñoz Pandya and Jahan, who energizes the show every time he shows up). And, at times, Jethmalani is moving, too. If you are interested in Indian food, especially if that is your tradition, you’ll likely respect the truth in some of these scenes.

Yew’s direction really kicks in during one powerful scene around the stove although, in general, I wish the set had been reordered to foreground the cooking more; it’s such a powerful, sensual part of this writing and it deserves to be front and center. The piece was, I think, written before “The Bear” became a hit but that’s one of its lessons for dramas set in restaurant kitchens. That and a slate of characters who rarely are or do what you might think.

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Review: “Dhaba on Devon Avenue” (3 stars)

When: Through July 27

Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Tickets: $35-$95 at 847-242-6000 and writerstheatre.org

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