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Aficionados of Himalayan cuisine can eat their hearts out tonight (Tuesday), knowing that they’re doing good by eating well. 

The occasion? A benefit at Taste of the Himalayas, the 1700 Shattuck Ave. restaurant owned by Rajen Thapa, a Nepali native who i s raising funds for the school he started in Itahari, a city between Kathmandu and Dharan in the mountain kingdom. 

“I started the Modern Preparatory Secondary Boarding School in a house in 1993,” he explains, with initial funding he had raised in Germany. He began with 125 students from kindergarten through fifth grade. 

Today, the school provides a comprehensive education—in English—for 800 students through the college preparatory level. Of the total, 125 are on full scholarships, many of them untouchab les who would otherwise be unable to obtain an education. 

“We have to raise the money,” Thapa said. “Otherwise the school will be closed down.” 

As it is, Thapa said he sends about $2,000 a month he makes through the popular restaurant back to Nepal to h elp fund the school, which a nephew is now running in his absence. 

Born in India, Thapa’s Nepalese grandparents left their homeland along with many of their compatriots who emigrated to work on the tea plantations of West Bengal. 

“I got a scholarship from the Tea Board,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to school. School exposed me to the wider world, and it was there I decided to become a teacher.” 

Thapa decided to go to his ancestral homeland, settling in Itahari in 1983 at the age of 20 as a teacher of English and history. Within months he had been named first vice-principal and then principal of the school. He started his own school a decade later, and in the years since, more than 300 students have graduated. 

“I want my students to become first-class citizens of the world, outgoing, eloquent and confident. Many of them arrive after not thinking they’d ever be able to go to school,” Thapa said. 

Many Nepalese parents resist the notion of sending their children to school, believing their children should work, Thapa said. “‘Many of them say, ‘It’s always been this way: Why should it be any different.’ Others say they don’t want their children to learn to read and write because they don’t want them writing love letters.” 

Once accepted by the school, all students are provided with clothes, meals, texts and all school supplies, and they have a chance to work with computers. 

Another high-tech touch is provided by the parabolic solar collectors created by students and faculty from Emden University in Germany. The devices are used to provide the heat for cooking student meals, replacing the highly polluting wood stoves previously used. 

Those who attend tonight’s festivities will get to meet some of the graduates of Thapa’s school, including some who will demonstrate traditional dances. 

It was his success that sent Thapa to the Bay Area. In a country riven by political dissent, with traditionalists opposed by Maoist revolutionaries, Thapa’s high profile as a modernist was a ttracting unwanted attention and he was granted political asylum by the United States. 

In Berkeley, where several former students attend the university, he began as an employee of the restaurant, and a year ago he was able to buy it—the occasion of tonight’s celebration. 

Festivities will be held from 5 to 10 p.m., and all are welcome, he said. Customers who arrive at the restaurant tonight won’t be charged for their meals. But voluntary contributions they give will all go toward the school, he said. 

Photo by Richard Brenneman 

Berkeley residents who dine at Rajen Thapa’s Taste of the Himalayas may not realiize that some of their tab is helping to educate children at a Nepalese school founded by the restaurant’s owner. A benefit tonight (Tuesday) is open to all starting at 5 p.m.