I’ve been cooking Indian food in its different avatars since 2007,” says Srijith Gopinathan, the award-winning chef-owner of the San Francisco restaurant Copra, “and I don’t think I’ve seen a better-balanced time for Indian cuisine in the last 20 years.”
Previously relegated to late-night takeout, the subcontinent’s food is becoming a more regular part of the American diet, and a steadily growing number of upscale Indian establishments are popping up across the country. Gopinathan is one of a small crop of chefs leading the charge. There are currently just four Michelin starred Indian restaurants in the United States—from New York to Houston—and it’s practically impossible to get a table at some of them. Sujan Sarkar, the chef and proprietor at Chicago’s Indienne, calls his tasting-menu spot the most expensive Indian restaurant in America and says all 90 seats are booked every night.
Chefs and restaurateurs offer plenty of reasons for the shift: Increased media coverage and access to information (particularly on platforms like Instagram and TikTok) have introduced diners to nuances in the cuisine that had previously been watered down.
“Before it was very hard to educate. Information wasn’t as readily available, wasn’t as easily accessible,” says Mo Alkassar, the restaurateur behind Miami’s Ghee Indian Kitchen. “If you had a certain stigma in your head, it took a lot longer to change that.” Thanks to social media, he adds, “People are more adventurous and also get over certain stigmas—that oftentimes are not true—much more rapidly.”
The resulting ethos is, “Don’t give me a diluted version; give me the real stuff,” explains Roni Mazumdar, founder of Unapologetic Foods. The New York–based group behind Dhamaka and Semma has arguably done more than any other restaurant operator to elevate regional Indian cuisine. (Once, Mazumdar even saw people fistfighting while trying to get into the original location of Adda, another one of his concepts, which recently moved into spiffier digs in the East Village.)
Then there’s the importance of power—spending and otherwise— and who has it. Members of the Indian diaspora have considerable disposable income at their fingertips, Gopinathan explains, and they want to use at least some of it at restaurants whose food tastes like what they remember from back home, or what their grandparents make in their own kitchens. Increasing diversity among those in influential positions also means different conversations about what kind of food is worth spending money on.
But diners of all backgrounds are so hungry for upscale Indian food that restaurants from other countries are setting up shop stateside. London’s Michelin two-star Gymkhana opened its first U.S. outpost in Las Vegas in December, and the luxe Ambassadors Clubhouse brought its Punjabi cuisine to New York City this February. America’s current verve for Indian cuisine “reminds me a bit of London maybe 10 years ago, where it’s simmering and it’s ready to explode,” says Karam Sethi, the food and creative director at JKS Restaurants, which oversees both concepts and dozens more. At the original London locations of these two establishments, 30 per cent of the clientele is American, he adds. Now those diners can enjoy Gymkhana’s tandoori masala lamb chops and Ambassadors’ Ranjit Shahi Lobster Curry on their home turf.
What excites these chefs and restaurateurs is that there’s still room to grow. Gopinathan estimates that not even 20 per cent of regional Indian cuisine has made it stateside yet. And while it may take time to find and train the chefs who understand the nuances of these foods and who can execute at the highest levels, the inflection point is here, and Indian cuisine is only on an upward trajectory.
“I had never thought I will live to see that moment,” Mazumdar admits. “I thought whatever work we do will probably happen after my lifetime. And I had this faint, deep-seated hope that—my god, one day, what if it is kind of OK and normal, where somebody can say, ‘I’m gonna get a biryani,’ or ‘I’m gonna get a bowl of pasta,’ or ‘I’ll go get some sushi,’ and none of it sounds foreign. Nobody in that conversation feels like one has to be ethnic, [while] the other has to be mainstream.”