I was born and raised in Karachi, spent part of my childhood in London, and eventually landed in Atlanta, Georgia, which, if you're keeping score, means I've now lived on three different continents' worth of "where's the good desi food around here?" Atlanta, for what it's worth, actually had an answer. There was a whole world of it, and my family was right there in the middle of it.
Then, 16 years ago, I moved to New York City. Alone. No family, no friends, just me and a very confident assumption that a city this big, this diverse, this everything, would obviously have my back.
It did not.
The city with a Chinatown, a Koreatown, and… nothing
Here's the thing about New York that took me embarrassingly long to actually notice: it has neighborhoods that wear their identity proudly. You can walk into Chinatown, or Koreatown, or Little Italy, and within one block you know exactly where you are and what you should be eating. There's a whole civic vocabulary for it.
South Asia (a region of nearly two billion people, five countries, more languages than I can list, and some of the best food on the planet) doesn't get that same treatment. Not because the community isn't here. It very much is. It's just... scattered. Undocumented. Word-of-mouth only, and only if you already know the right mouths to ask.
And I asked a lot of mouths. Every job I worked, I'd eventually corner some coworker and go, "hey, you're from around here, where do you get good Pakistani food?" I got shrugs. I got "isn't that basically Indian food?" (a sentence that will end a friendship in some households). I got pointed toward the same one buffet, every single time, regardless of what borough I was actually asking about.
What I was actually looking for
I wasn't just looking for a good meal. I was looking for something that tasted like home: the specific, particular home I grew up in, not a generic stand-in for "South Asian food" as one flattened category. A biryani that tasted like the one at a family wedding. A place where the guy behind the counter didn't need me to explain what nihari was.
I never found a site, an app, or a list that actually organized any of this for me. Not restaurants. Not the concerts, the film screenings, the dance performances, the community festivals that were absolutely happening somewhere in this city every single week, if only I'd known where to look.
So I built it myself
By day, I'm a Director of Product, which mostly means I spend my life thinking about how to organize information so people can actually find what they need. Turns out that's a pretty useful skill set for a problem I'd personally been annoyed by for over a decade.
Mela started as a genuinely stubborn side project: I wanted a single place that could tell me, and anyone else looking, what's actually happening across NYC and NJ's South Asian community, and where to actually eat, without having to corner a stranger at a company happy hour to get a real answer.
It's still growing. New restaurants, new events, new neighborhoods get added constantly (some days literally while I'm asleep, more on that another time). But the goal hasn't changed since day one: build the thing I always wished existed. A place that feels like coming home, even if, especially if, you're 800 miles from the version of home you grew up in.
If that's you too: welcome. Let's find your Karachi, your Dhaka, your Colombo, your Kathmandu, right here in New York.