There is a jar of turmeric on Urmila's counter that has never been empty.
Not once, in fifteen years of Namaste Village kitchens across Norwich, Cambridge, London, Twickenham, and Oxford, has anyone needed to order it urgently because someone forgot. It is simply always there. Haldi. Turmeric. The golden root that colours a dal, grounds a curry, and has been used in Indian households as medicine, as ritual, as dye, and as blessing for longer than anyone has thought to write it down.
This May, in the week the world pauses to think about mental health, we want to share something that Urmila's kitchen has understood since long before wellness became a category: what you eat and how you feel are not separate conversations.
Ahimsa, the Buddha, and the question of what we eat
Wesak, the festival marking the birth and enlightenment of the Buddha, falls in May. It is one of the most widely observed Buddhist occasions in the world, and it arrives quietly in the same week many of us in England are thinking about mental and emotional wellbeing.
The Buddha taught ahimsa, which means non-violence, as a guiding principle for how we live and how we treat other living beings. His relationship with food was more layered than a simple label. Early Buddhist texts record that he accepted food as it was offered to monks, without always refusing meat. But the philosophy he put into the world, particularly through the Mahayana tradition that followed, pointed clearly toward compassion in eating. Ahimsa and vegetarianism became deeply linked in the Buddhist tradition, even if the path there was not a straight line.
This matters because the same principle runs through the Gujarati and Vaishnav heritage that shaped Urmila's cooking. Not the same tradition, but the same root conviction: that what we choose to eat carries a consequence beyond our own plate, and that choosing to cause less harm is worth something. Urmila's kitchen has cooked this way not because of a trend, but because this is how the tradition taught her to cook. The connection to the Buddha's philosophy is not a borrowed idea. It is a shared one.
What does Ayurveda say about food and mental health?
Ayurveda, the ancient Indian science of life, has understood for thousands of years what modern nutritional research is arriving at with some urgency: food affects your mental and emotional state, not just your physical health.
In Ayurvedic thinking, foods are grouped by their effect on the mind. Satvik foods, which are clean, light, and free of excessive stimulation, are connected to clarity and calm. Most of Urmila's menu sits in this category. Not by deliberate design in any modern sense, but because this is simply how Gujarati devotional cooking has always worked. The tradition arrived at these principles long before anyone put them in a wellness app.
The foods considered rajasic, meaning stimulating and heating, include the very things most restaurant cooking leans hardest on: heavy use of onion, garlic, and chilli. Urmila's kitchen avoids most of these, not to make a health claim, but because it is honouring a way of eating that has always understood the mind and the plate as connected.
The dal that carries the whole philosophy
If one dish holds the entire spirit of what we cook, it is Urmila's turmeric dal.
Lentils, slow-simmered until they dissolve into something silken and balanced, sitting between a soup and a stew in the way that Gujarati cooking often does. The haldi goes in early, as it always does here, not as a flavouring but as a foundation. It colours the dal a particular gold that means, in any household that grew up with this food, that something good is about to happen.
At the end comes the tadka: the moment whole cumin and mustard seeds hit hot ghee in a separate pan, and for about four seconds the kitchen fills with a fragrance that is the whole point of the exercise. The tadka is poured over the dal. The lid goes on. You wait. You serve.
It is not complicated. It has never needed to be.
Come in this May and bring the family
The May bank holidays were made for tables of people who are glad to be together and in no hurry at all. We have six kitchens ready across Norwich, Cambridge, London Islington, Twickenham, and Oxford, and the dal is always on.
During the school half-term, children under 9 eat free with every adult main meal. A starter, a drink, and a main from the kids' menu are all included. A dessert can be added for just one pound more. Because a child who eats well is a child who sleeps well, and a parent who sits down to a proper meal without doing the mental arithmetic deserves the same.
Book your May table at Namaste Village across Norwich, Cambridge, London, Twickenham, and Oxford. One child eats free per adult main meal, children under 9, dine-in only. Not valid with any other offer.
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