I’d seen images of baby Krishna atop a banyan leaf in pop devotional art posters all over India. Yet it was only on a dusty lane in Jaipur’s Old City that I witnessed the leaf of the banyan tree deliver something divine in person. “That’s outstanding,” said Chintan Pandya as he tasted a piece of kesar pista makhan—a seemingly simple bar of saffron-tinted butter topped with bits of crushed pistachio—picked off the dried leaf. “No…mind-blowing.” Licking his fingers, America’s most acclaimed Indian chef passed the bar to me. “Here, use your hands.”
Everything from Gulab Chand Dairy, from lassis to rabri and shrikhand, had been excellent. This makhan, however, was sublime: at once inexplicably light and visceral, textures and flavors bursting as it melted on the palate. Pandya’s cofounder in the Unapologetic Foods restaurant group, Roni Mazumdar, plucked makhan off another leaf. “Unreal,” he said, his eyes half-closed. “I remember having a bite like this as a kid.”
Perhaps inevitably, Pandya’s rendition of this makhan would become a staple of the menu at Dhamaka, one of New York’s buzziest restaurants. Its deceptive simplicity spoke to the chef, who in recent years has been on a mission to cook only dishes he feels connected to. The nostalgia it evoked appealed to Mazumdar, a restaurateur who trained as an actor at Lee Strasberg Studio, for whom eating is an emotional journey, a story to be told.
The pair, who have launched seven restaurants since they first met in 2017, have been praised for opening New Yorkers’ eyes to the possibilities of Indian cuisine. After transporting so many diners, Pandya and Mazumdar visited the country in person this past February and March. The two-week trip was the first in years for both Pandya, a Mumbai native who moved to New York in 2016, and Mazumdar, who emigrated from Kolkata at age 12—and their first to the country together. I’ve visited a half dozen times to see my late father’s Bengali family; my last trip was to immerse his ashes in the Ganges. As Mazumdar and Pandya’s plans for a food exploration came into focus, they asked me to join. They’d been invited to cook at a series of exclusive dinners at JW Marriotts in New Delhi and Mumbai, but the trip would also provide a chance to gorge on flavors familiar and not, in the hopes of discovering dishes to reproduce artfully in New York.
The duo’s success has come from aggressively scrubbing away pretension and cooking the food they loved—and missed—first at Adda in Long Island City, Queens, then with Dhamaka, their restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which is devoted to the lesser-known flavors of the Indian Subcontinent. They refused to modify the spicing or ingredi-ents (the title of The New Yorker‘s review: “Learning to Love Goat Kidneys and Testicles at Dhamaka”) to make dishes more accessible or otherwise “apologize” for the food eaten by the world’s most populous nation, which is why they named their restaurant group Unapologetic Foods. They extended this approach with Semma in the West Village, chef Vijay Kumar’s ode to his native Southern Indian cuisine, and Masalawala & Sons in Park Slope, Brooklyn, based on the Bengali family recipes of Mazumdar’s father, which mirrored my own. They also introduced New York to Indian fried chicken at the street-food-inspired Rowdy Rooster in the East Village. Along the way, Pandya, Mazumdar, and Unapologetic Foods have amassed acclaim, including a Michelin star for Semma and a James Beard Award for best chef in New York for Pandya. Although some members of the Desi community, as we South Asians call ourselves, were dubious that Unapologetic Foods’ humble dishes were worthy of a proper restaurant—no less one where it’s impossible to get reservations—Pandya’s exquisitely rendered homestyle cooking proved to be the cause of and cure for homesickness. Diners emerge from their meals at Adda and Dhamaka visibly moved; Pandya and Mazumdar tell me they’ve been thanked by guests in tears. When eating Pandya’s renditions of bhetki paturi and khichuri at Masalawala & Sons, dishes I’d only eaten with my late father’s family in Kolkata, my eyes began to water, and not just because of the potent green chiles.
Pandya had accepted invitations to dine with several of New Delhi’s finest chefs, beginning with the tasting menu at Indian Accent, arguably India’s most celebrated restaurant and the country’s only inclusion on the World’s 100 Best list since 2015. Inside a glass-walled dining room, chef Manish Mehrotra has made an art of modern Indian fare with international inflections such as blue cheese, hoisin duck, and cannoli. We immersed ourselves in India’s regal past at Dum Pukht, whose classical Mughlai cuisine—long Indian food’s sole entry on the global stage—focused on the courtly fare of Awadhi Nawabs and painstaking preparation.
Pandya and Mazumdar were most in their element, however, on our daily food crawls, which began in Old Delhi. After polishing off one meal, they rushed through traffic toward a sign touting fried chicken for 100 rupees. “See?! Indian fried chicken is a real thing!” Mazumdar shouted, as if answering a question the duo have received often since opening Rowdy Rooster. Haji Mohd Hussain had a streetside kitchen consisting of a vat of boiling oil and a menu of just two items: chicken fry (whole or various pieces) and fish fry, each tossed in a masala coating and served with chutney, red onion, and rumali roti. Standing, we picked several plates clean.
