New York’s ‘Indian’ Food Is More Creative Than Ever

The tasting menu at Passerine includes this “melon” dish with prosciutto.
Photo: Todd Coleman

The seven-course tasting menu at Passerine in the Flatiron District begins with a two-bite tuna-tartare tartlet dotted with avocado purée around a lump of caviar. What at first looks like an amuse from a vintage French cookbook is hiding confettilike cubes of raw red onion and lime gel that, along with the caviar, helps tame any burn from the onion. From there, the meal progresses to dabs of saffron yogurt with endive, prosciutto, and melon, over which is poured raw, tannic green juice. A peppery foam adds dimension to warm, shredded crab, while short rib is surrounded by corn foam and flowers.

The meal walks a line between French classicism and Indian tradition, which is the point, according to chef Chetan Shetty: “I’m not trying to be a pompous guy, but if I want caviar or foie gras, there’s no Indian place that does it or would want to do it; you always end up in a French restaurant. But I have so many things that go well with it.” After cooking school, Shetty started working at Indian Accent in New Delhi, where he learned to use “not very Indian” ingredients such as blue cheese, asparagus, and, yes, foie gras. “We just nurtured this habit of going a bit more beyond,” he says.

Shetty moved to New York to work at the Indian Accent on 57th Street, where he began incorporating local, seasonal ingredients, like fiddlehead ferns and ramps, into his cooking, an approach he developed further while at Rania in Washington, D.C., where he was the executive chef for a couple of years before returning to New York with Passerine. He says that by the time he came back to this city, something had changed: “You throw a stone anywhere in New York at this point and there’s an Indian restaurant.”

The city has been bullish on high-end Indian for a while from chefs who are established enough to take creative risks and can charge accordingly. And just as the rising profile of Thai restaurants allowed chefs to break free of the handful of dishes American palates might “expect,” the Indian cooking in New York right now is a hotbed of creative expression.

“When you grow up eating the quality of Indian food back home, they turn a kebab into the best thing you’ll ever eat,” says the restaurateur Salil Mehta. For a long time, Mehta doubted that he could open an Indian restaurant to suit his Delhi-born standards. “Kebab aur Sharab on the Upper West Side, that’s the story of my childhood. When Chef came into the picture, I asked him, ‘What’s your true dream project?’ And he always said that it was a coastal-seafood-Indian concept.” That became Kanyakumari, where the multiregional menu is based on the chef’s travels along the Indian coastline by motorcycle.

Celebrity chefs have also arrived. At Bungalow in the East Village, the presence of Vikas Khanna within its art-lined walls has made it one of the city’s most consistently difficult reservations since its 2024 opening. This year, Regi Mathew, who runs the acclaimed Kappa Chakka Kandhari in Chennai and Bangalore, opened Chatti by Regi Mathew a couple of blocks from Penn Station. It’s based on an extensive menu of Kerala toddy-shop-inspired bites like battered curry-leaf mushrooms and “beef dry fry.”

What makes these restaurants so striking is how different they are from one another with menus based on decades of globe-spanning experience with fine dining and Indian food. It’s how you end up with the chicken-tikka pizza at the Onion Tree, which is based on a Neapolitan dough that bakes into a charred and puffy fortress for dark meat in a glossy, spicy brown sauce. The pie is finished with a tadka of curry leaves, mustard seeds, and red and green chiles. The East Village restaurant is an offshoot of the original in Nassau County, yet it was only in the past ten years that Jay Jadeja even started cooking Indian food professionally. He attended culinary school in India before traveling the world for seasonal work like churning out lobsters on cruise ships and making fondue for hotel guests in Switzerland. When he came to New York in 2001, he stayed at a Days Inn and soon started managing restaurants, which is how he met his Bayside-born wife, Raquel Wolf-Jadeja, with whom he has been running restaurants for 20 years. They’re used to people assuming that bread baked with saag paneer or seekh-kebab calzones must necessarily be “naan pizza,” but the pair staunchly defends their high-hydration dough as the most significant part. Jadeja is particularly proud of their crisp-bottomed, sturdier Roman style, prepared as a classic margherita with Italian tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, and bright-green olive oil.

Jadeja is eyeing locations for a possible Indian fried-chicken restaurant, just as chef Chintan Pandya is doing with his Rowdy Rooster. In many ways, Pandya’s company, Unapologetic Foods, has served as a breakthrough and model for Indian cooking in New York. He opened Adda in Long Island City less than a decade ago (and recently moved it to Manhattan) and, in doing so, alongside business partner Roni Mazumdar and many chefs, laid the groundwork for Dhamaka, Masalawala & Sons, and Semma, where chef Vijay Kumar has attained his own celebrity (plus a number of awards). “The Indian camaraderie of chefs is growing right now,” says Pandya, who doesn’t view any of the newer restaurants as competition. Instead, he’s thinking about promoting the talent at his projects and expanding for the first time outside New York. “If we open up one more Adda, and we’re planning to,” Pandya continues, “we might do it in Philadelphia.”