This Chef is Changing How New Yorkers Look at Indian Food

Long before he found a stage for his cooking, Chef Vijay Kumar was a village boy in Tamil Nadu, worried his food might never be enough. “I belonged to a farmer’s family and didn’t have the luxury of eating expensive food,” he recalls. “I always felt judged for it. As a child, you can only hope things will change.” Little did the boy who once walked barefoot to school know he would grow up to be that change.

Today, Chef Vijay Kumar’s food and culture take centre stage. His Manhattan restaurant, Semma, a celebration of village style Tamilian flavours, has been crowned number one on The New York Times’ 100 Best Restaurants list and has earned a Michelin star. The 44-year-old chef also won the prestigious James Beard Award for Best Chef in New York State. “If you asked eight-year-old me, he’d never imagine he’d be sitting here talking to you,” Kumar says over a Zoom call just weeks after the win.

Unapologetically Indian

Kumar’s accolades are more than a personal triumph—they mark a milestone for Tamilian cuisine and a bigger win for Indian food at large. In the Western world, where Indian cuisine is too often reduced to curry, chicken tikka masala and ‘naan bread,’ the chef made a deliberate choice to stand apart.

When he launched Semma in 2021—backed by Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya, the team behind New York’s favourites Dhamaka and Adda—he refused to dilute his flavours for Western palates. His food stayed bold and true to its roots, just like his grandmother’s and mother’s cooking. The menu featured the food he grew up with—“food made with care, with fire, with soul,” as shared in his James Beard speech. He even put nathai pirattal (snails laced with tamarind and ginger), a dish he foraged for in his childhood when rice was scarce, on the menu. “I was scared to death. I thought I was putting my career at risk. But if everyone stays scared, who’s going to take our cuisine forward? The wings have been folded for a long time. It’s time to fly wide.”

While doubt crept in often, Kumar persevered despite diners’ expectations of a more familiar version of Indian food. “But soon, the positive reviews started pouring in. Within months, Semma had received stellar write-ups from nearly every major publication in New York,” he says.

When I visited Semma last summer, the mid-afternoon dining room was filled with more international diners than Indians, feasting on meen pollichathu and paniyaram. “Semma had captured diners’ emotions. People craving authentic home food would hold my hand and thank me for bringing this to New York. That’s the impact food has. It should not be divided into poor or rich. There’s no separation when it comes to food,” he says.

“Don’t fit into somebody else’s mould”

“When I started cooking, I never thought a dark-skinned boy from Tamil Nadu could make it to a room like this,” Kumar said in his acceptance speech, dressed in a veshti. Hailing from Natham, a small village in Tamil Nadu, cooking was never seen as a viable profession for him 30 years ago. “Where I came from, you either became a doctor or an engineer,” he says. He couldn’t afford engineering school, so he pivoted to culinary school in Chennai instead. He went on to work in several kitchens across India and abroad, steadily rising through the ranks before eventually making it to the US.

His hard-won journey has brought pride to his village thousands of miles away, where a flex board now congratulates the chef and his parents. “When I told my mother about the New York Times article, she didn’t understand what I was trying to explain. She’s a typical mother. She just wants to know when I’m coming home,” says Kumar with a laugh, who hasn’t visited India in many years. “When the neighbours greeted her with sweets and she read the articles in the local language, she realised it was a big deal.”

Semma draws long queues of diners, but a sense of humility grounds Chef Kumar. His mantra in life reflects his parents’ simplicity: “Do everything with heart. Don’t worry about others or the outcome. I didn’t chase or dream. I just did my duties.”

When asked what advice he would give his seven-year-old self, he says, “Culinary schools may convince you that cooking other cuisines is more fashionable. The French never shied away from serving escargots, did they? Have dignity and pride in your own food. Cook the dishes you grew up eating and represent your cuisine. Don’t try to fit into somebody else’s mould.”