Rizvi, who also owns GupShup, another Indian restaurant in Union Square, says that Bungalow gets over 400 emails a day asking for reservations, from guests based as far as Los Angeles, who are prepared to travel to New York once they’ve secured a reservation. “When you’ve waited months to get a table, I want to give you the best,” says Khanna. (If you’re luckier still, you’ll leave dinner—as my mother did—with a pot of Khanna’s sun-dried lime pickle.)
Also among this swell of new restaurants is Kanyakumari, named for India’s southernmost town, where chef Dipesh Shinde digs deep—and unselfconsciously—into South India coastal fare, with punchy spice blends like the East Indian bottle masala (tossed through mussels) and Guntur chili with which he coats idlis. At Jazba, another newcomer in the East Village, and younger sibling to Junoon, the interiors are colorful and kitschy and the menu is inspired by street hawkers. Here, the Aminabad galouti kebab transports you to the byzantine gullies of Old Lucknow, and the fried chicken from Mangalore is wrapped in old newspaper, like so many roadside snacks in India. Owner Rajesh Bhardwaj says Jazba can do what Junoon couldn’t 15 years ago. “There was a concern amongst chefs that guests were not open to trying bolder flavors or regional specialties,” he says. “Our green chile chicken is both very spicy and kept on the bone; we would have steered away from this kind of dish even a few years ago.”
It isn’t just the food; many of these new spaces also challenge preconceptions around what Indian restaurants should look like. Passerine, which opened in time for Diwali last year, is a chic, low-lit space in Flatiron that’s dressed in leather and zebra and botanical prints. Here, chef Chetan Shetty relies on the flavors from his hometown of Pune to churn out dishes like a Konkani monkfish curry and a chai-rose ice cream. The restaurant recently launched a seven-course tasting menu, currently paired with heritage Lebanese wines. “Indian restaurants can be a sexy Friday night out too,” says Alvina Patel, who co-owns Passerine with restaurateur Maneesh Goyal.
To eat at any of these places is to realize that Indian restaurants no longer need to cater to a Western palate—or frameworks of reference. “We don’t have to pretend we’re anything that we are not,” says Vijay Kumar. At Semma, names of dishes, however unpronounceable to unfamiliar audiences, like uzhavar santhai poriyal (a beet-and-squash stir-fry) or muyal pirattal (rabbit leg), are left untouched. At Chatti, the small plates are colloquially called “touchings” because they’re meant to be eaten without cutlery.
“It’s much bigger than just the food; it’s about culture and community and identity,” says Khanna.
It was out of a need to create a sense of community that prompted Shwetha and Venkat Raju to set up Brooklyn Curry Project, a weekend dosa pop-up that started drawing lines at the Fort Greene Saturday farmers market, and now operates out of a commercial kitchen in Downtown Brooklyn. “We moved from Bangalore to New York for our jobs, but we missed our people,” says Shwetha. “This was our way of using our food to get to know people and have them get to know our culture.” Every Saturday morning, a steady stream of people files into the makeshift café, claiming a handful of tables and chairs and studying the handwritten menu. Most order dosas, but there are idlis and filter coffee, and depending on the weekend, specials like peppery mutton roast or pineapple kesari bath. The open kitchen is helmed by a cast of friends and family; the Rajus ping-pong between pouring dosas and chatting with customers.
