Over the years William George has fed high-ranking politicians and celebrated screen actors, and he has the photographs on his wall to prove it: when VIPs from the south Indian state of Kerala come to visit, George’s Glenview-based Royal Malabar Catering is pretty much the only game in town. But George’s bread and butter is supplying the working Keralite expats of Chicagoland with the everyday foods of their homeland, which include a remarkable variety of meat, seafood, and vegetarian dishes flavored with a brilliant palette of spices—cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, chiles, garlic, ginger, coriander, and turmeric, often tempered by the liberal use of coconut.
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In addition to its vegetarian Hindu majority, Kerala is home to large Christian and Muslim minorities. Those groups account in part for the diversity of its food, shaped by its position at the epicenter of the spice trade, resulting in centuries of exchange with Phoenicians, Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Chinese, Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British.
George was born into a family of cooks who prepared these foods for gatherings in his hometown of Kottayam, inland from the Malabar coast, and he learned to cook as a boy—mostly from his mother and grandmother. He came to Chicago in 1990, toward the beginning of a wave of Keralite immigration sparked by opportunities in nursing and information technology, and worked for his uncle’s packaging and mailing business. Two years later, eager to be his own boss, he opened Banana Leaf, a small restaurant in an Albany Park strip mall.
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