Indian at its Best

A group of restaurants is cooking up a storm in NYC by catering to the Indian palate

- Sonal Shah

IF a visitor from the US came to India looking for kudal varuval (spiced goat intestines), one might point them to a locally famous pitstop, possibly beside a tyre repair shop along the highway. Or, perhaps, to the home of a friend, where the labour-intensive dish is a house specialty. Or one could tell them to head to New York, where a heap of soft and spicy kudal varuval features prominently on the menu at Semma, currently the only Indian restaurant in the city with a Michelin star, which it won this October.

“I don’t think what’s happening can be planned,” says Roni Mazumdar, the restaurateur behind Semma and Unapologetic Foods, a mini-empire of Indian restaurants in the city. Outside, a line of people waiting for the doors to open begins to form. “As a matter of fact,” Mazumdar says, “I’m not even sure we fit into the category of Michelin.”

Mazumdar isn’t being humble—that’s not his style—nor is he off the mark. “If we’d set out to get a Michelin star, we could have done a tasting menu with [Semma’s chefpartner] Vijay Kumar and it would have had every molecular gastronomy and modernisation you could think of.” Instead, Mazumdar is acutely self-aware of being part of a transformation in the way the world understands Indian food and, by extension, the heterogeneity of the Indian diaspora.