Craving some curry? SLO County family business delivers bowls to your front door

Grady and Brittney Pope love curry — but their first love is family. So the joy of sharing a comforting old family curry recipe with new members of the Pope family? Nothing compares.

The only problem is that their oldest son Cayden can’t eat curry. Not the original family recipe with dairy and gluten, at least.

“I decided I wanted to take my mom’s recipe and make it for Cayden,” Grady Pope told The Tribune during a recent interview. “Then we come to find out that the original recipe was very, I would say, German, Texas-based. It was full of flour and whole milk, which our son was allergic to at the time.”

After a trial-and-error period spanning two years, the Popes finally were able to perfect a gluten- and dairy-free recipe that they would then give out to first responders in 2019, before transitioning to making deliveries in Cambria near the end of 2020.

The curry delivery service became Cayden’s Curry Co., which today delivers the tasty treats across the North Coast and into San Luis Obispo.

Named after the Popes’ “miracle baby,” the business has prioritized family even as they welcomed a second son, Ashton, to the fold. Don’t worry, the family is also in the process of naming one of its signature curries after Ashton to make sure he feels included in the family business, they said.

Throughout it all, creating their curry bowls has been a “labor of love,” Grady said.

What’s on the menu at Cayden’s Curry Co.?

The Popes shop for all the curries over the weekend, and build the bowls on Monday in The Kitchen Terminal, a commercial rental kitchen designed to help small food entrepreneurs.

Although Grady has experience working in kitchens as managing partner at Madeline’s Restaurant and Wine Shop, and Brittney owns Collective Beauty hair salon, the giant commercial kitchens that The Kitchen Terminal offers have been a saving grace.

“We’re the nucleus to this and we’ll see where it goes from there,” Brittney said. “But yeah, The Kitchen Terminal has been great. We love cooking in that facility.”

The curry menu contains the fan-favorite lemon chicken curry, the Trinidad chicken curry, coconut basil chicken curry, ratatouille veggie curry, Thai red pepper chicken curry and la piña de cerdo curry with pineapple and pork, according to Cayden’s Curry Co.’s website.

“It does bring back memories of my childhood, you know, and growing up because it’s curry, such a specific, you know, aroma and smell, it kind of takes me back to my childhood and a lot of cool memories,” Grady said.

The feedback and support the Popes have gotten from customers is that their curry brings families together.

“We’ve had a lot of comments lately about, you know, the phrase Taco Tuesday, that it’s become Curry Tuesday,” Grady said. “We keep hearing that one from people that it’s there. They look forward to their Curry Tuesday dinners together.”

Brittney said the Curry Tuesdays will switch to Curry Thursdays later in May, where customers order on Wednesday and get their curry on Thursday, for their own schedules.

“Our life is a moving puzzle, we get very organized with our schedule,” Brittney said.

Grady added, “The days are busy, but it’s all doable.”

Cayden’s Curry Co. currently delivers to five cities on Tuesday: SLO, Morro Bay, Los Osos, Cayucos and Cambria, but may expand to Pismo Beach or Paso Robles later if customer need calls for it.

To order one of the six curries cooked in the kitchen, customers sign up to be added to a text chain, where a weekly text is sent Monday morning, reading “it’s curry time” with a link to reserve curry bowls, Brittney said.

“If we start to see enough of a demand, I think we would slowly, one by one, start to add in those different areas,” Grady said. “That’s one of the beautiful things about our county, you’ve got all these little communities that are relatively close together. So we could, at some point, literally deliver to the whole county, if we had a couple of extra drivers and enough of a demand to do that.”

He added: “That would be a lot of fun in a year or two.”

For more information

For more information about Cayden’s Curry Co., visit its website at caydenscurryco.com.

You can also contact the Popes directly at 805-904-9428 and 805-904-9213.