Pop Stuff: Hot Stuff

It was a happy coincidence that in the height of a New York midsummer last year, July 4th to be precise – that most explosive of American holidays celebrated with fireworks that give Diwali a run for its money – I found myself having a meal at the newly opened Dhamaka in the city’s Lower East Side; the Hindi ‘dhamaka’ loosely translating in English as ‘blast’, in the best sense. The dish that was setting off my own gustatory fireworks was the goat neck dum biryani which had arrived at our table in its cooking pot, sealed under a dome of crisp dough. Our waiter cracked open the golden-brown exterior, letting an aromatic cloud waft into the hot summer air, before giving the layers of meat, rice, fried onions and spices inside a mix; a final melding of flavors that had already been slow-cooked to perfection. The goat was so tender it fell off the bone and melted like butter in my mouth and the rice – slender grains of basmati, wore the masala like a glove. The duo behind Dhamaka, of Mumbai-born executive chef Chintan Pandya and Kolkata-born, Bronx-raised restaurateur and founder of Unapologetic Foods Roni Mazumdar, had an unapologetic hit on their hands. Before the New Year rang in Dhamaka had landed on the most hallowed best restaurant lists in the country including that most vaunted spot – number one on New York Times critic Pete Wells’ list of top ten New York City restaurants.

For what it’s worth, I’m with Mr. Wells. Sampling Dhamaka’s goat neck dum biryani was the first time in my over two decades living in and eating out in New York that an Indian dish rivaled, and in this case exceeded, the food I savor back home in India. Dhamaka’s biryani outdid the dish that remains a special occasion marker at my childhood best friend’s home in Mumbai – every birthday brought in with a mutton (albeit not goat neck) biryani. And it wasn’t the only dish to do so. For appetizers, we tried the ragda pattice (potato patty with peas and green chilli), bharela marcha (peppers stuffed with peanut and coriander) and papdi chaat (spiced crisps drizzled with tamarind and yogurt) all of which were staples at my Gujarati grandmother’s table and flooded me with sense memories of childhood. Other dishes on Dhamaka’s menu are similarly bona fide and aggressively regional: take the doh khleh – a pork head salad that is a specialty of the north eastern state of Meghalaya, the coveted Rajasthani khargosh – a whole rabbit for sharing which requires a two-day marinade and six hours cooking time (only one is prepared per day so book ahead or cry), or the macher johl – a quintessentially Bengali fish curry. The reach across the Indian sub-continent of twenty-eight states has not bemoaned a lack of attention to detail. Even the paneer, boasting papery crisp skin over a pillowy interior, is freshly made in house.

Mazumdar and Pandya appear to be succeeding in pointing the experiences and lessons of their years in the industry, which include Mazumdar’s debuting former lower east side spot Masalawala (soon to be re-imagined in Park Slope) and Pandya’s training with the Oberoi Group in India and time under the tutelage of chef Vikas Khanna at Indian fine-dining stalwart Junoon in New York, towards the goal of bringing authentic Indian cuisine to the elevated mainstream in America. Mazumdar encapsulates this as being ‘unapologetically Indian’, a mantra that resists the veering away from the Indian palate that has defined the story of Indian food abroad, while Pandya has called it more pointedly, in a delightful New York Times profile of the pair, the ‘un-bastardizing’ of Indian food. The goal of having chefs and foodies look at Indian food with the reverence given to Italian cooking, or to that apex which is French cuisine, has been a long and winding road that has proved elusive to most. Today, Dhamaka’s Filipino chef de cuisine, Eric Valdez, digs deep into India’s provincial cooking traditions. But historically chefs have eschewed this rigour in Indian cuisine abroad, opting instead to meld Indian flavours into ubiquitous ‘curries’ such as the chicken tikka masala or to exalt Indian food to fine dining experiences through fusion elements that elevate western ingredients.

During my early childhood in the 1980s in London, having an Indian meal (outside of those at home) was synonymous with an inexpensive take-away consisting of watered-down versions of north Indian dishes. The now hotly debated origin story of the aforementioned chicken tikka masala is that it was invented in 1970s London by a Bangladeshi migrant chef or possibly in Glasgow by an Indian chef who improvised with a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and some spices. What we do know is that it did not originate in the kitchens of India. It was only when my family returned to India for a period in the early 90s that I discovered the depth and breadth of Indian cuisine; from our dinner table in Mumbai (Gujarati on my father’s side and Punjabi/Himachali on my mother’s) to those of friends of diverse backgrounds and foodways, from Sindhi to Maharashtrian to Parsi, in the melting pot city. On travels to other states I tasted regional specialties; coconut-infused Kerala ishtews and Tamil Chettinad karis. When I moved to New York in the late 90s, the Indian culinary scene was limited, as the U.K. had been. Indian food was largely relegated to small pockets of Queens or the cheap and cheerful (and occasionally drab), dosa or kebab houses of Curry Hill. With few exceptions, notably Dawat, the 1986 collaboration between food maven Madhur Jaffrey and restaurateur Avtar Walia (who would go on to open Tamarind in New York in 1999 on the heels of Tamarind in London in 1995), New York boasted little in the way of Indian dining that could be classified as a transporting experience in the true sense.

The reasons for this humbling of Indian food in the West are numerous and controversial and range all the way from racist portrayals of Indians and their food in popular culture – no thanks Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for serving Harrison Ford live snakes in India – to the suggestion that Indian immigrants who initially set the stage were less focused on presentation and quality than their European counterparts, that they somehow failed in being the standard-bearers. For me the answer stems from one all-encompassing place – it is the same reason that we don’t expect to pay much for ramen or tacos and assume that a Chinese meal isn’t worthy of a special evening. Food, like almost everything else, spins on the axis of Eurocentric ideals that have valued and vaunted classical music over jazz, Aryan features over those of other racial groups, Tennyson over Tagore. If colonization made the Western world a guiding north star, it follows that the European palate would take precedence and that chefs focused on other cuisines would get short shrift in everything involved in the launch of a restaurant: from investors, to real estate, to accessibility of ingredients, to salaries, to media coverage.

The narrative first began to shift in New York with the 1998 opening of Tabla – a partnership between another Mumbai-born chef, the late Floyd Cardoz (his death in April 2020 was one of the great early losses of the pandemic) – and restaurateur Danny Meyer. Tabla captured the attention of the food scene, not least the critics, because of the glorious way in which it combined crab cakes with papadums and presented halibut in a watermelon curry. The marriage with western ingredients that I was only just rebuking might well have been Indian cuisine’s necessary entrée (pun intended) onto the mainstage. With Meyer’s heft behind it and by leaning into fusion elements, Cardoz and Tabla made enough people curious about Indian food that, regardless of whether the food was too Indian for some and not Indian enough for others, it sparked a conversation that kept a space seating close to three-hundred packed to the gills in the early years. It could be said that the initial success of Tabla’s elegant dining room foretold the success of the modernist Indian fine dining establishments that followed including Devi (now closed) which, under chefs Hemant Mathur and Suvir Saran, became America’s first Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in 2007 and Junoon and Indian Accent which followed suit with the accolade under chefs Vikas Khanna and Manish Mehrotra respectively.

Tabla’s more casual downstairs Bread Bar presaged Cardoz’s entry into an Indian restaurant that was heavier on the ‘fun’ and lighter on the ‘fine’ side of dining with Paowalla, which he opened in Soho in early 2016 to then become The Bombay Bread Bar (since closed) and restaurants Bombay Canteen and O Pedro, in a return to his roots in Mumbai. Alongside Paowalla came other fun-casual restaurants that concentrated, perhaps excessively so, on the idea that Indian eateries could bring a modish feel – in keeping with the spirit of a trendsetting city, that was neither white tablecloth nor Curry Hill casual. Indian spots like Babu-ji, Badshah and Old Monk became a vibe. Variations on the kitschy image of an Indian sage, with a handlebar mustache, turban and sunglasses or robes, graced the walls while Yo Yo Honey Singh pumped forth so loudly, conversation was secondary. While immensely popular, this hipster-guru phase, as I like to refer to it, on the path of the Indian dining experience was more of a mood and less of a meal than I was yearning for. Later entrants Gupshup and Baar Baar upped the ante but felt much the same. I wanted a place for bang-up ‘home food’ on a night out with friends. I didn’t need to feel cool while I ate it and I didn’t relish a menu that classified naan as bread.

This is the gaping hole that Pandya and Mazumdar filled with Adda in 2018, their second venture together after Rahi in the West Village. In 2019 the restaurant garnered a prestigious James Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant followed by another in 2020 for Pandya as Best Chef, a sign that the food world had begun to catch up to the down-home approach that the partners espoused. Adda, small and cozy as the name suggests (it means ‘hang out spot’), opened off a highway in Long Island City in a warmly lit room papered over with Indian broadsheets and little else. Neither the size, nor location as destination, nor the simple interior, cast a pall on the food which speaks loudly for itself. Adda’s menu consists of everyday Indian dishes – butter chicken, vada pao, chaat, biryani and a number of tandoor specialties – combined with other fare that would be ghar ka khana (home food) in many homes around India but are less well represented abroad, such as bheja fry (goat brains) or Malvani fish curry. The menu is small and reasonably priced and the food positively drips with spice and richness that effortlessly recalls the street corners of Mumbai or the dhabas of Delhi.

On one recent visit to Adda, I could just as well have been on Mumbai’s Mohammed Ali Road as I tucked into the hot, gingery masala of the bheja fry with a perfectly buttered piece of pao (a specialty baked roll that came to India via Portuguese settlers), toasted to just the right balance of crisp and fluffy. The aloo chana chaat (a snack of crisp fingerling potatoes, chickpeas and chutney) produced a similarly ideal marriage of flavour and texture in tang and crunch and the Junglee Maas (goat curry) and Dilliwali butter chicken that followed combined tender meat on the bone and off, in flavorful sauces that tasted like they had been passed on from someone’s nani (grandma). As any old-fashioned cook will tell you, nailing time-worn recipes is an art and maintaining their freshness is a science; Adda manages to do both. The menu is rounded off with a number of nostalgia laden bells and whistles; Thums Up, Limca, piping masala chai, cool, thick mango lassi and a kheer (rice pudding) for desert that is a bowlful of comfort. These little niceties are a godsend in New York when ‘home’ is thousands of miles away. Indeed, as Indian cities become increasingly globalized, in thrall to foreign ingredients and overrun with malls and Mcdonald’s, these items are also worthy emblems of our DNA.  

This is not to say that there is no longer a place for the many incarnations of Indian cuisine. Indeed, Tabla’s spirit of fusion lives on in places like Sona, another successful pandemic opening in March of last year. Sona is Maneesh Goyal’s debut restaurant in the Flatiron district with chef Hari Nayak and a boost from partner Priyanka Chopra. Goyal has been careful to note that the food does not shy away from its heritage. I’ve had three excellent meals there which have featured the best appam in the city, a memorable rock shrimp koliwada and the Floyd’s Goan fish curry which is a sublime nod to the late chef. Sona is another column for another day, but suffice to say while the menu features many traditional Indian dishes, it delights in creative liberties such as a gruyère filled dosa and a Calcutta mutton cutlet accompanied by an onion jam. I have to admit I feel like I’m eating Indian food that has been softened and oftentimes exquisitely tempered for a non-Indian palate. Even though Sona is definitively not, as food critic Ruth Reichl wrote years ago of Tabla, ‘American food, viewed through a kaleidoscope of Indian spices’ it does cater, albeit wonderfully so, to a palate that it has deemed not quite ready for the heat.

It would be a stretch to say the duo behind Adda brought authentic, regional Indian cuisine to New York. Some of my most delicious, homesickness-curing meals have been at the Gujarati restaurant Vatan or even at post-midnight stops at the pick-up food counter inside the Punjabi Deli in the East Village; both are long time New York stalwarts. Besides, it seems unfair to decide what authenticity is in a culture that contains multitudes or to label innovation in food a shift away from identity. However, it is fair to say they have brought asalee desi khana into the New York limelight by leaning into it in every possible way and trotting it out with unabashed glee, charm, finesse and indeed exceptionalism. Mazumdar and Pandya’s menus are not so much catering to you as they are challenging you, propositioning you, inviting you in. Try me, they are saying, I’m the real deal. In retrospect, this representation of Indian food, its honest self as it were, might be the final destination on the journey of Indian food abroad, if certainly not its final iteration. They have conclusively and irrefutably given Indian cuisine permission to be itself in the same way European cuisines long have, enticing the American palate instead of bowing to it.

This is nowhere more evident than at Semma, the newest addition to the duo’s growing crop of restaurants – although word has it they have a lot more up their sleeves including fried chicken and biryani concept additions. Semma opened its doors this past October, on Greenwich Avenue in the heart of the West Village, in the location that was previously Rahi – Pandya and Mazumdar’s experiment with a more modernist menu before they decided to go back to the source. At Semma, Tamil for ‘fantastic’, chef Vijay Kumar (previously at Michelin-starred Rasa in California) showcases his South Indian roots with specialties from his home state of Tamil Nadu while also highlighting the rest of the region. South India, which includes the five states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, is only skimmed in the Indian food in America canon and is too often classified as a monolith and reduced to the common denominator of ‘idli-dosa’. While the dosa at Semma is a miniature masterpiece of crunch, spice and filling, during my meals there it became something of a sideshow to the nathai pirattal – tamarind and ginger-spiced snails coaxed out of shells and artfully boxed into a banana leaf, the attu kari sukka – peppery lamb in a dry masala and the valiya chemmeen moilee – lobster tail in a bright mustard coconut curry which I sopped up with the lighter kal dosa.

Warmth is king at Semma which might be why it is my favorite amongst the trifecta. The restaurant, the largest and in some ways most refined of the three, exudes heat: from Mazumdar’s welcome and personal but unobtrusive attention to the tables and the convivial energy of the staff, to the heat of the spices, to the colors and textures that make up the décor; part Kerala barge with plenty of rattan in the main room and part lush mangrove in the back. All three restaurants are what I would call spice forward but the range at Semma is symphonic. The unassuming mulaikattiya thaniyam (sprouted mung beans) pack a dynamite punch, the curry leaves shine in the kudal varuval – goat intestines the way Kumar’s mother would cook them and the natural sweetness of peanuts and sesame in the mirchi ka salan (stuffed long peppers) is balanced with pungent spice. No restaurant from this duo is complete without a stellar goat biryani and the Dindigul biryani at Semma is no exception. The small, starchy grains of the seeraga samba rice, a grain specific to Tamil Nadu, appear to absorb the masala more readily making the biryani especially fiery. When the heat proves too much, a range of cutely named cocktails (IYKYK), like the Thalaivaa – bourbon with jaggery and coconut ice or the Silk Smitha – cardamom infused tequila or indeed the well-appointed wine list, are on offer to quench the buds.

Authenticity in everything has become such a buzzword lately that some might argue that Pandya and Mazumdar’s eateries have fortuitously arrived at a time when people are paying attention. The food world faced an overdue reckoning in 2020 when Bon Appétit magazine came under fire for a culture of inequality that elevated white editors. At around the same time influential cookbook writer Alison Roman made headlines and faced backlash for insisting her viral ‘stew’ recipe – a chickpea concoction evoking South Indian or Caribbean roots in which turmeric and coconut milk played starring roles – was not a curry. All this came amidst the horrors the pandemic exposed, from food scarcity to unequal burdens placed on grocery store and restaurant workers. It may seem natural that restaurants like Adda, Dhamaka and Semma should come into focus when it feels increasingly voguish to be mindful of the politics of food, where it came from and how it was cooked. Their menus also highlight offal, the consumption of which has environmental benefits at a time when sustainability has never been more important. The bheja fry (goat brains) at Adda and kudal varuval (goat intestines) at Semma are supposedly trumped only by the gurda kapoora (goat kidney and testicles) at Dhamaka, which I have yet to try.

Crediting nose to tail eating or an awareness of the colonization of the spice trade in Pandya and Mazumdar’s success merely overemphasizes new ideas for old ones. The pair’s success is less a sign of the times, albeit times in which museums are considering handing back their loot and food is retracing its origins, than it is grounded in a reverence for the role of time itself. By bringing traditional methods of cooking forward, favoring the ingredients of their ancestors and using methods in which patience pays, they are highlighting dishes that have stood the test of time simply because they are that good. Add to this that in New York, as in all gastronomic capitals, restaurants that keep people coming back must have that particular hard-to-cipher element – the ability to get everyone talking which any great restaurateur will tell you, is the toughest recipe to crack. At Adda, Dhamaka or Semma, long after the food is in your belly, the experience will be on the tip of your tongue. This is hot stuff, in more ways than one.

Soleil Nathwani is a New York-based Culture Writer and Film Critic. A former Film Executive and Hedge Fund COO, Soleil hails from London and Mumbai. Twitter: @soleilnathwani