Welcome to the world-cuisine revolution, Nashville style. At My Sauce Lab here in town, three self-described “saucey scientists” — Vasisht Ramasubramanian, Praveen Pedankar, and Arjun Meherish — hold these truths to be self-evident: that being inspired by, learning from, and ultimately adopting ingredients from other folks’ cultures is a good thing, particularly when the results are so invitingly flavorful and warmingly spicy. The three tastemakers leading the charge launched My Sauce Lab in October of 2021 after yearning for hot sauces with flavor profiles going above and beyond the traditional triumvirate of vinegar, red chilies, and salt. And doing so while keeping it all vegan, artificial preservative free, and Nashville made. “We wanted to do something different,” Arjun says. “We wanted to [present] our sauces in terms of heat level, but wanted a lot of flavor in them.”
To make that happen, Vasisht and Praveen, the team’s culinary minds, went to work, using their years of experience in chef-driven restaurants such as Chauhan Ale and Masala House in The Gulch to develop their sauces, eventually settling on six distinct styles to launch their venture. The results range from the relatively mild ‘Imlee,’ a tamarind-based sauce that includes notes of coriander, paprika and cinnamon along with the red chili, to the relatively spicy ‘Lucifer,’ a Caribbean-inspired sauce that’s all about that mango-habanero love affair, albeit a hot relationship with notes of turmeric, garlic, and mustard to ensure those mango-habanero fireworks stay complex, fresh, and interesting.
In the heat scale in between come flavors such as Green Goodness, a serrano pepper-based sauce, and El Fuego, a chipotle-forward sauce that bills itself as ‘the new Sriracha’ and comes with a recommendation on the label to “enjoy on Latin foods.” Bold words for three guys from India, but the Saucey Scientists stand behind them.