Kundan Baidwan
It’s not often that I feature someone for the first time who’s already been on the podcast … not once, but twice. Such is the case for my friend, artist/bartender/nonprofit arts organizer Kundan Baidwan.
Before we dig into this one, please go back and check out Kundan’s previous appearances on the show:
Those podcasts were about important things in Kundan’s life—the legendary SF bar where she’s bartended for more than a decade, and the Indian arts nonprofit she started with friends just within the last year or so. This episode is all about Kundan herself.
We begin Part 1 with Kundan’s birth (on Dolly Parton’s birthday) in January 1978. She was born in San Jose, but her family soon relocated up the East Bay to Fremont. Her dad had come to the U.S. for college. He went to school in Reno at UNR. When he and his first wife split up, he went back to Punjab, India, to find a new partner. One of his sisters introduced him to the young woman who would become Kundan’s mom.
Kundan’s dad had already graduated and moved to the Bay Area by the time he found his new wife. In fact, he had lived in The City—on Haight and in South of Market—in the late Sixties. He brought Kundan’s mom back to The Bay after they got married.
The young couple moved around San Jose a couple times, with her dad doing what he could to buy housing for himself and his family. This included their move to Fremont when Kundan was around 2.
All of Kundan’s early memories are set in the East Bay—Fremont specifically. They spent time there and at relatives’ places in San Jose. As a young kid, she enjoyed things like playing dress-up, singing songs in the mirror, hanging out with adults, and asking for recipes. She had visions of being a “culinary genius,” she says now.
Kundan has 26 first cousins, and she keeps up with every single one of them. She’s on the younger end of her generation in her family, but most of her cousins around her age don’t live nearby. In the Bay Area, Kundan was usually the youngest. Owing to this, she feels she benefited from constantly being exposed to culture through her older relatives.
Around middle school, Kundan says she became a “bad student.” What she means by that is school got harder and she didn’t feel up to the challenge. Other kids also began teasing and taunting her, which didn’t help.
When it comes to her own creativity, Kundan is quick to credit her mom, who, she says, was pretty much always drawing or illustrating. Her mom’s mom was a painter. Creativity ran through her and her siblings’ DNA—her brother and sister both wrote at various points in their lives.
She went to Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, where she found her people—the “weird kids,” meaning artists and musicians and theater people. High school wasn’t too cliquey, but as much as groups mixed, you knew who your people were. At this point, Kundan and I go on a sidebar about the movie Didi, Sean Wang’s 2024 film set in Kundan’s hometown of Fremont in the early 2000s.
Her parents were on board for Kundan’s to major in psychology in college. She’d taken art classes in high school, and found a strong art program at UC San Diego. But that’s not what she intended to study.
Kundan shares some of her early memories of visiting San Francisco from across The Bay. And we end Part 1 with her decision to leave the Bay Area and go to college in San Diego.
In Part 2, Kundan tell us about her decision to move to San Diego for college, where she would join her older sister, who’d been there for several years. But before that move south, she joined her sister and her sister’s friends on a backpacking adventure in Europe. After some time there, Kundan and her sister went to India to visit family there. Then she came back to go to school.
What began as the study of psychology gradually gave way for Kundan to take more and more art and film classes. Eventually, she re-declared as an art major. She graduated in five years, and among the friends she made in San Diego, one was set on living in New York and going to NYU. And then 9/11 happened, and everything changed.
She’d had dreams of moving to New York and becoming an artist, but those plans were put on hold. After a short stint in Paris, in early 2002, Kundan moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. We take a brief detour to talk about Kundan’s time in Paris, a city, she says, that will always be a part of her soul.
It was in New York that Kundan says she really came into her own. She’d graduated college and was diving into the abyss of early adulthood, finding jobs, paying rent, etc. She also learned how to have fun. This meant, through her work at a music venue, absorbing all the acts that came through. She made lots of friends, too, through serving and bartending at the venue. It was in this job that she became friends with the one and only B.B. King.
That was Kundan’s first bartending job, at the club. She also did some “cater waitering” with a catering company in New York. But we’ll get back to that.
After New York, she pondered a couple different places to start the next chapter of her life. Her sister had quit practicing law and was writing for television in LA, so that was a possibility. But Kundan chose to be closer to her childhood home. Her adult life in The Bay began at a friend’s house in Palo Alto while she “figured out how to get her way into San Francisco.” It was 2007, and she got a 9-to-5er as a receptionist at an engineering firm near the North Point Shopping Center. Then the bottom fell out of the economy and Kundan got laid off in 2008. We go on a bit of a sidebar about that shopping center (I worked nearby back then).
Kundan used time after her layoff to travel. One of the first places she went was Memphis and Graceland, where she took her mom. There was a family trip to Spain. Then she traveled all over India with a friend for what turned out to be three months. Kundan talks at some length about the ups and downs and rewards of traveling.
When she came back to The City, she needed to find a new place to live. A friend had told her about a bar in the Haight that might be a little intimidating, but Kundan didn’t mind that. That bar was Zam Zam. Right away, she loved the place and made friends, including one woman she felt she knew from somewhere. Eventually, they figured out that she was Kundan’s bartender back in New York. Small world, SF-style. That woman is responsible for Kundan’s job at Zam Zam.
What started out as her filling in has turned into 14 years or so behind the bar at one of my favorite San Francisco spots—Zam Zam. She found a place to live nearby and loved that she could walk to her new beloved bar, whether to work or connect with a friend or meet a stranger.
We fast-forward a few years to when my life intersected with Kundan’s. I was on a “Bourdain Crawl” with Bitch Talk Podcast shortly after the renowned chef and author passed away in 2018. When we got to Zam Zam that weekday in June, we lucked out that Kundan was behind the bar. Shortly into the recording of Kundan’s retelling of Zam Zam’s history, Erin of Bitch Talk turned to me and said, “This would be good for Storied.” And that’s how our first episode with Kundan came to be.
Based on that first meeting, Kundan talks about learning the history of the bar she works at. It happened thanks to many factors—her own love of history, the bar’s unique story, visitors’ consistent questions about the place, and the current owner’s knowledge of his business. She goes on to talk about working at the bar the day that Bourdain died. Like a lot of people, he had meant a lot to Kundan. She had even considered culinary school after getting laid off. She worried that the day would be difficult, but it turned out to be the exact opposite—folks were there to honor the man.
Then we back up a bit chronologically to talk about art coming back into Kundan’s life. She’d never really stopped, but it wasn’t front-and-center for her like it is today. A cousin (one of 26) commissioned her to make paintings for his new office. Soon after that, she got the job at Zam Zam, which allowed her the time and freedom to paint more, and so she did. A friend tapped her to be in a show, her first, in the Mission. And when Kundan and I recorded, the show that she curated (her first) was still up at Mini Bar. She shares a little more about how much Mini Bar means to Kundan.
Kundan talks in some depth about the subject of her second appearance on Storied—Rootstock Arts, the arts nonprofit she started with her childhood friend, Sameer Gupta. For her, all the hassle and trouble and stress of doing an art show is nothing compared to the rewards, which are many. I have to agree, 100 percent.
We end the episode with Kundan’s thoughts on this season’s theme (also the theme of next month’s art show in South of Market): Keep it local.
We recorded this episode at Mini Bar in April 2025.
