Not So Little India

Adda has moved to the East Village and become a bigger, better version of itself in the process.

- BY MATTHEW SCHNEIER

THE CHILE-PEPPER string lights of First Avenue, two stories' worth of them, have long been the beacon of the East Village's Indian-food corridor, the compact shorthand to generations of New Yorkers for the whole variegated subcontinental cuisine. (When a friend of mine first moved to town, he frequented a restaurant he only ever knew as “Chile Pepper.”) It's no huge slight to these restaurants to say that in the years since they first appeared, the Indian-food scene has expanded dramatically in variety and quality, and now we are enjoying a masala boom. Jazba, Kanyakumari, Passerine, and Chatti have all opened in the past couple of years. Our Assam runneth over.

At the forefront of this charge is Unapologetic Foods, the restaurant group that opened Adda Indian Canteen in Long Island City in 2018. In the most diverse and most Indian borough, Adda was cheap and cheerful but no less ambitious or uncompromising for that. The ecstatic reception of Adda led to the opening of Dhamaka in 2021 and, later that year, Semma, with a style closer to fine dining. Like Junoon before them, where Unapologetic's executive chef, Chintan Pandya, once cooked, these restaurants yanked Indian food to echelons, and neighborhoods, where it had often been unfairly overlooked. Now they seem as Manhattan as any of their neighbors. On a recent Friday night, waits at Semma were hours long; I spotted Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the great comic actress Poorna Jagannathan gliding to their tables.

When Unapologetic decided this year to move Adda to a storefront on First Avenue—Chile Pepper Way—it felt like a statement of purpose. Adda has now been reconfigured from its scrappier origins into a recognizable sibling of Semma and Dhamaka. “Long Island City was version one, but this isn’t version two,” Pandya told me. “It’s version eight, nine, or ten.”