This Bay Area temple is one of the oldest in the country — and the food is free
Sudha Surapaneni, head volunteer in the kitchens at the Shiva-Vishnu Temple in Livermore, outside the temple on Sunday, March 24, 2024. Chris Partin/Special to SFGATE
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It is Saturday morning at the famed Shiva-Vishnu Temple in Livermore. Thousands of devotees arriving in Teslas and Range Rovers throng the shrines dedicated to Shiva, Ganesh and other Hindu gods and goddesses. I, on the other hand, can only think about the free food.
The first time I came to this temple was in 1992, as a newlywed. My husband and I were living in New York City and visiting family in Fremont. Naturally, they wanted to take us to the famous temple, even back then considered grand and what Hindus would call auspicious — as in bringing good things for those who visit. For newlyweds, visiting Hindu temples with relatives is a rite of passage, and so we went along.
On this recent visit, I quickly finish my prayers and head out to the covered courtyard in the back, where two long tables are covered with freshly prepared, aromatic dishes. They are simple and delicious and follow recipes that have been passed down for generations. There is a savory rice dish flavored with tamarind; a lentil-based gravy called sambar; a spicy fried vada, shaped like a doughnut; and a cooling yogurt rice tempered with spices.
Most of America’s 1,000 or so Hindu temples offer similar sacred foods. Often, though, it is just one dish — a sweet halwa or milky kheer. At the Queens Hindu temple in New York, the canteen food is so good it made the New York Times’ recent list of the best 100 restaurants in the city — but you have to pay for it. The Pittsburgh temple, too, has a kitchen with food for sale. The Livermore temple — its official name is HCCC, or Hindu Community and Cultural Center — is unusual in that the food program is expansive, core to its identity and, most importantly, free.
Every weekend, a rotating cast of 60 volunteers, many of them high-paid professionals and entrepreneurs, including the “CEO of a $5 billion company,” according to temple President Sailaja Malireddy, volunteer in the spacious kitchens to prepare the food. Often, students come in groups, hungry for a taste of their homeland. Visiting elders, too, come here because they can eat it “without any restrictions,” says San Ramon-based software engineer Balu Krishnaraj, who has been volunteering in the kitchen for 17 years.
“I love to feed these elders,” he says. “When they visit from India for a month or so to stay with their children, they have to adjust to American kitchens and worry about spilling turmeric on the counters and such. Many are vegetarian and have diet restrictions — they don’t eat onions or garlic. At the temple, they can enjoy the food that they are used to, without having their kids tell them not to eat sweets or carbs or whatever.”
What makes these dishes special is not just their taste — delicious as they are. It is an idea, core to Hinduism, that feeding people is a form of charity. While most of the devotees here are not lacking in resources, “lots of folks who have been laid off come to the temple to eat and even though we don’t encourage it, they bring containers and take food home,” says Anand Gundu, who works for Oracle and has volunteered in the kitchen for 15 years.
On the Saturday morning that I visit, the spacious kitchen is humming at 10 a.m. A vat big enough to fit a human is filled with sambar, a yellow-orange gravy bubbling gently with aromas of curry leaves, fenugreek and tamarind. Another holds ghee, used to flavor the dishes. Women dressed in traditional saris stir pots, ladle fried vadas and stir-fry vegetables native to India, like winter melon. The other parts of the kitchen are open to a volunteer pool of about 60 who come on a rotational basis and take care of various aspects of food preparation.
“There is one couple who drive a hundred miles every weekend to keep track of the inventory,” says temple food chair Sudha Surapaneni, an IT program manager who owns three restaurants in the Bay Area. She describes other volunteers who come in to cook, cut, grate, grind and clean up the kitchen, often arriving at 10 a.m. and staying until as late as 8:30 p.m.
The recipes for these dishes are traditional and known to most Indians. In fact, on my visit, the pongal, vada, idli and other dishes tasted exactly like they should — no fusion, no fuss. Surapaneni says they source produce from local farms and milk and rice from Costco, and have suppliers for Indian dals. They get generous donations, too.
“Sometimes people donate their body weight in ingredients — for example, jaggery or lentils,” she says. “We use that.”
The Livermore temple program is mostly funded through ad hoc monetary donations. The temple’s website suggests donations amounting to $251, $501 and reaching up to $10,001. They are often given by families to celebrate a promotion, a birthday or in memory of a relative. In 2023, one family gave $50,000, according to Gundu, who was part of the temple committee last year. He says devotees generated $1.2 million for those donations in 2023. Most of the funds went right back into the program, but some trickled down to local food banks and other charities.
For Gundu, volunteering at the temple kitchen is a way of connecting with his community. “More than the religious aspect, I like the humanitarian aspect [of working in the kitchen],” he says. “Food is a gift from nature and it gives me immense joy to serve food to others — to the interfaith groups that visit the temple, to hungry students.”
With more than 136,000 Indians, nearby Santa Clara County has among the highest concentrations of Indian immigrants in America, according to the Migration Policy Institute. (Alameda County is close behind, with 97,700 Indian immigrants). It is this density of population that fostered the building of the Livermore temple in 1986, although the seeds were planted a decade earlier.
In the late 1970s, a group of homesick Hindus came together, longing for a place to connect. The Livermore temple was formally instituted as a nonprofit in 1977. Soon after, the group began looking for land to build a temple. They bought 4 acres near a lake in the Springtown neighborhood for $60,000, said Muthuraman Iyer, one of the temple’s co-founders, in a newsletter about the history of the temple. Money came pouring in — a weekend fundraiser held at Granada High School raised half a million dollars.
Today, the temple sits on more than 12 acres of land, purchased over time, and includes an auditorium, a large banqueting area where Hindu marriages are held and the kitchen that feeds some 6,000 visitors every weekend. On festival days, the number rises to 20,000 people. The younger generation is getting involved, too. Back in the kitchen, I spot Chakri Potharajula, a 15-year-old from San Ramon who has been visiting the temple since he was 5. Today is his first morning in the kitchen. He is put to work — chopping tomatoes, cubing winter melons and stirring spices into the dishes.
“It’s really cool,” he says. “I used to watch these large containers of food being brought out for us devotees but now I get to see how it is made.”
He’ll be back next weekend — and so will I.
Shoba Narayan is a James Beard Award-winning food writer and author of six books, including 2021’s “Food & Faith: A Pilgrim’s Journey Through India.” She splits her time between San Francisco and India.
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