Tapovana Lunch Box Offers Cuisine for Higher Consciousness (and Purpose) in Bridgehampton

There’s a little kitchen tucked away on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton utilizing ancient Vedic principles to help feed the local hungry, all while detoxifying bodies and connecting minds to higher planes.

Tapovana – which translates literally as the clearings in the forest where Vedic seers practiced their deep meditation – has kept a pretty low profile inside the Bridgehampton Community House, notwithstanding the signage put up recently promoting its inspired South Indian offerings.

Long-time Sag Harbor resident Corey DeRosa, the yogi and culinary brain behind the Tapovana Healing Center and its quietly thriving cafe, Lunch Box, became a full-time chef and food purveyor right around the time COVID was wreaking havoc, when small businesses were scrambling to stay relevant and afloat.

Now, DeRosa says he’s gotten to the point where Tapovana has outgrown its space inside the Bridgehampton Community House, and is currently in negotiations to find Tapovana a new space, where it can house its Vedic temple and spiritual center, as well as his expanding cafe.

What all began with plaudits for the South Indian-inspired meals he made for his yoga students eventually turned into a full-time operation by the time COVID lockdown struck. DeRosa was making his signature South Indian vegetarian meals out of his Sag Harbor home and delivering them across the Hamptons to first responders and hospital workers, while also serving a growing number of regulars.

It was then that he also began donating warm, nutritious, home-cooked meals — the same ones he sells out of the Lunch Box — to local food pantries in Bridgehampton, which, DeRosa says, feed about 600-700 area residents per week.

The donated meals, he says, are miles from the dry or processed fare usually found in abundance at food pantries. “No complaints,” he says about the reception to his super-fresh and mindfully created dishes. “Only requests for more, so we keep making them.”

At that point he knew he was onto something: His food was reaching more people than he could with just yoga alone.

The shift from yogic practitioner to chef and cafe-owner was a relatively seamless one for DeRosa, whose prior hospitality experience was in service (he was many years ago a waiter at popular eateries 75 Main and Sen).

He uses the Vedic practice of Ayurveda — which means to focus on balancing the body through food — to inform his method. DeRosa said his easily-digestible meals are scientifically-backed to provide the best nutrients while purging toxins, making room in your personal brain-space for a better life experience.

“I call what I do, food for higher consciousness,” DeRosa says. “These are significantly designed recipes, very consciously done.”

Many of his recipes — like today’s special: a homestyle dosa with a zesty, tangy vegetable sambar, local green pepper, cashew and potato masala, and coconut chutney — are sourced from his annual trips to South India, where he says he fell in love with the customary vegetarian flavors while learning from his teacher, an instructor of Vedic philosophy.

The more his food gained notoriety in the Hamptons, the more people starting to realize just how inspired his South Indian offerings really were.

Soon, he took an offer to use the Bridgehampton Community House as headquarters for both Tapovana and the Lunch Box, where he continues to offer meals to the public while giving away hundreds per month to local Bridgehampton food pantries, including the one downstairs from his kitchen.

“It was a fantastic time because no one had really experienced food like that before, you’re talking about ethnic flavors, which people are so hungry for in the Hamptons, but so subtle and well-balanced with an obvious intention behind the food and the process that went into the food,” De Rosa says. “I was treating food the way same way I would treat a yoga class … I want you to come in stronger and more clear and receptive than you were before the class started, so you have a better experience with the rest of your day.”

DeRosa is confident about the positive effects Tapovana’s meals can have on a mind and body, since the Ayurvedic lifestyle is one he’s practiced for years, and the effects on him personally, he said, have been profound.

“It’s a natural lifestyle for me, it has to be,” said De Rosa. “The reason I’m able to share this is because I was living this way first, and then just like with yoga, the reason I started teaching was because the effects it had on me and my life were too good to not share.”

DeRosa founded his first yoga studio in 2006 in Sag Harbor. His methods are based on the teachings of the ancient Indian epic called the Ramayan, where holy men gleaned information from both their surroundings and the universe itself.

For thousands of years, people have believed in the power of these practices to reconnect man with nature through deep meditation.

You can experience these practices for yourself, too. Tapovana is holding an authentic Vedic meditative ceremony on Thursday, October 12 as a temple fundraiser and celebration in support of its non-profit operations and charitable mission.

DeRosa’s personal journey into yoga started with the devastation of 9/11 and personal dysfunction; for the last several decades, he’s been committed to a lifestyle based on ideas from the Vedas, one of the oldest literary texts known to man.

“Yoga is still something a little bit niche, and people really have to want have a change in their life to commit to it,” said DeRosa. “But everyone eats. The food is reaching a lot more people, and getting almost the same benefit.”

Tapovana is located at 2357 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton, within the Bridgehampton Community House, for more info, visit tapovana.com