Dindigul Biryani In Greenwich Village

WHEN CHINNALAGU Vijaya Kumar, dressed in a veshti at the glittering black-tie, tuxedos-only James Beard Awards—the equivalent of Oscars in gastronomy— spoke after receiving the title of Best Chef: New York, if he was applauded repeat­edly by the who’s who audience, it was because of the inspiring earthiness of his belief that “the food I grew up on, the food made with care, with fire, with soul, is now taking the main stage.”

The “dark-skinned boy from Tamil Nadu”, who grew up in a farming village Natham near Madurai, was not speaking only about his own victory in a market that took a long time to embrace Indian cuisine with all its complex diversity, looking beyond what a veteran of the business, KN Vinod, describes as “boring buffets and boilerplate menus”.

He was conveying the essence of the evolution of Indian restaurants in the US—from being the avoidable outposts of a cheap, greasy, spicy cuisine to becoming serious purveyors of good food deserving the price tags and waiting time they command today. The shift was evident when Semma on the tony Greenwich Avenue, where the 44-year-old Kumar is the executive chef, was ranked No. 1 on the New York Times Best 100 Restaurants List for 2025 (after being ranked 12th and seventh in 2023 and 2024, respectively).

For Kumar, it was like getting the Golden Globe before landing the Oscar. And he got it without courting the kind of celebrity status that Vikas Khanna has acquired over the years, without feeding the First Lady of the US or entertaining the wife of the richest Indian—it was like an indie filmmaker besting a big studio-backed blockbuster for the Best Film Oscar.

The good news is that Kumar is not alone in the rarefied world of chefs honoured by the James Beard Foundation (named after the iconic American food writer and teacher), despite Suvir Saran, whose restaurant Devi was the first in the US to earn a Michelin star, grumbling: “We need to stop pretending that one James Beard Award means Indian food has ‘made it’. It hasn’t.”

Before Kumar, three other Indian chefs have won James Beard awards. They include Chintan Pandya, co-owner of Semma with Roni Mazumdar, who won Best Chef: New York for Dhamaka, New York, in 2023; Vishwesh Bhatt, Best Chef: South, for Snackbar, Oxford (Mis­sissippi), in 2019; and Vikram Sunderam, Best Chef: Mid Atlantic, for Rasika (Washington DC) in 2014. Outside the world of chefs, Madhur Jaffrey, doyenne of cookbooks and cookery shows, was conferred with the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.

Getting a James Beard Award is one of the toughest tests for a chef to clear any­where in the world. Sujan Sarkar of the Michelin one-star restaurant Indienne in Chicago, who was a semi-finalist in the Best Chef: Great Lakes category this year, after being a finalist in 2024, deconstructs the steps leading up to an award.

It starts with thousands of nomina­tions being filed by contending chefs, or on behalf of them by their peers. These nominations are first vetted by panels consisting of industry leaders and leading food journalists (together, they add up to more than 600 judges), who evaluate the nominees based on their culinary work, leadership, mentorship, and alignment with the James Beard Foundation’s ethi­cal standards, which include integrity, equity and community impact.

Following this initial review of creden­tials, the judges check out unannounced the restaurant of each chef in the race for the awards and then shortlist the top five chefs or top ten restaurants in each category. These finalists are then judged in a second round of tastings and delibera­tions before the winners are revealed at the annual gala in Chicago’s Lyric Opera. This process has worked for the past 35 years the awards have been around.

“Just reaching the finals is a huge hon­our—it means your work has resonated on multiple levels with some of the most respected voices in the industry,” Sarkar says. “Winning is the ultimate recogni­tion, but even being in the conversation is a career-defining moment.” Even if, for someone like Vishwesh Bhatt of Snackbar, it meant being lucky only after six nerve-wracking attempts.

Indian restaurants are also showing up in bigger numbers than before on the Michelin Guide US. It now recognises 43 of them, which is an honour in itself, but it has been more sparing in awarding single stars to just four: Semma, fourth year in a row; Indienne; Musaafer (Chef: Mayank Istwal; Houston, Texas); Rania (Chef: Chetan Shetty; Washington DC). Additionally, it has handed out the Bib Gourmand, which is more like a consolation prize, to 14 others, but this is not enough for Saran, who’s today regarded as both a celebrity chef and social tastemaker.

“People like to say Indian food is finally getting its due,” Saran points out emphatically. “But we’ve been the ‘next big thing’ for over 30 years. We’re always almost there, never quite arrived. We still haven’t broken through the way Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, or Mexican food has globally.”

STILL, INDIAN FOOD in America today is light years ahead of the time when a man named J Ranji Smile defined it for a clueless nation. America’s first laughable ‘exposure’ to Indian food was courtesy of this scandalous self-styled ‘Prince’, who claimed to be from Baluchistan, worked for a chic Manhattan restaurant named Sherry’s in 1899, and apparently “dazzled diners”, as we are informed by the James Beard Award-nominated author Mayukh Sen, with his ‘Curry of Chicken Madras’ and ‘Bombay Duck’.

“If the women of America will but eat the food I prepare, they will be more beautiful than they as yet imagine,” the charlatan chef promised in a Harper’s Ba­zaar article quoted by Sen. “The eye will grow lustrous, the complexion will be yet so lovely and the figure like unto those of our beautiful India women.” Of course, it turned out that the ‘Prince’ was more of a womaniser than a chef and eventually he disappeared—ignominiously in this instance—as suddenly from the columns of newspapers as he had appeared.

In the decades that followed, Indian restaurants may have gotten a little more serious about their business, but as the celebrated writer Salman Rushdie wrote in the Foreword to the 2018 reprint of his sister Sameen’s Indian Cookery, “Indian food was still very much the poor relation of the American family of cuisines,” add­ing, “Along with Indian movies, Indian literature, Indian art, and even India itself, Indian food occupied a sort of junk-yard corner of the American mind, little thought about, arousing little interest.”

All this seems like fiction in a year when an Indian restaurant, best known for its nathai pirattal, or snails spiked with ginger and tamarind, and served with kal dosa—namely, Semma—is No 1 on NYT’s 100 Best Restaurants List. And at a time when the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, last famous for its association with Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner, most unex­pectedly, is home to one of the four Indian James Beard award-winners. Gujarat-born Bhatt moved with his family to the US when he was 17 years old; he pursued a Master’s in Public Administration, but is best known for his take on fried okra, a delicacy in America’s Deep South, spiked with chaat masala.

American understanding of Indian food was minuscule at the time when KN Vinod broke out of the butter chick­en-lamb vindaloo-naan bread stereotype with business partner Surfy Rahman at Indique (Washington DC) in the early 1990s. Worse, people representing India in an official capacity knew even less.

Around the same time, when Ashok Bajaj opened The Bombay Club in Washington DC, in 1989, he discov­ered that French restaurants and steak houses dominated the culinary scene in the American capital. It was hard to find an Indian eatery of any class or calibre, so Bajaj was determined, to quote him, to “introduce Indian food to Americans who had never been to India and make them keep coming back for it.” Today, as the owner of nine restaurants, this former manager of the Bombay Brasserie, London, can proudly say his Executive Chef and James Beard Awardee, Vikram Sunderam, has served three US Presidents—Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama—at their flagship Washington DC, restaurant, Rasika. And he has himself been a James Beard Restau­rateur of the Year nominee.

Today, Bajaj may love to point out how American chefs are happily using Indian spices, but in his early years in America, the scene was dramatically different. Vinod remembers a tell-tale incident that he hasn’t been able to forget even after more than 30 years. “We took a huge leap by serving only tapas-style street food on small plates. We gave guests free idiyappam instead of bread. But I’ll never forget the time an American food critic brought an officer from the Indian embassy to dine with him. The embassy official, unfamiliar with idiappam, told the critic it wasn’t Indian because it ‘looks like noodles’.”

TODAY, WHEN TWO TikTok­ers dare to diss Semma, saying the restaurant’s “mystery sauce” that “drowned” every dish, appar­ently, almost made them “go full Helen Keller when it got in my eye”, Indian American food celebrity Padma Lakshmi jumps to the restaurant’s defence and shuts the influencers up.

“Semma isn’t made for you,” thunders the ‘Queen of Spice’ in her social media repost. “It’s not. It’s made for us. I’m pretty sure that if nobody but desis went there for the rest of its existence, it would still be booked solid for the next decade.” As Vinod puts it philosophically, “The stars seem to be aligned in favour of Indian food in America.” And to quote Manish Mehrotra, who forayed into New York in 2016, in the days he was the star chef helming Indian Accent, “We are no longer seen as being fit only for Curry Hill.” He was referring to the stretch of Lexington Avenue crowded with old-world Indian restaurants.

The Padma Lakshmi incident has also cast the spotlight on a parallel develop­ment complementing the upward mobility of Indian restaurants and chefs, namely, the surge in the number of Indian Americans in the food media. Cut from the past when Madhur Jaffery and Santha Rama Rau were creating an interest in Indian food in a nation that seemed least interested to the present, when NYT has elevated Indian American Tejal Rao as its restaurant critic (a position previously held by legends such as Mimi Sheraton and Craig Claiborne).

Before Rao made headlines less than a fortnight ago, multiple Prime Time Emmy-nominated Padma Lakshmi was the celebrated host of the cookery reality show, Top Chef; chef-restaurateur Maneet Chauhan was a judge on the popular Food Network show Chopped and appeared on the cover of Parade magazine; and Palak Patel, author of the best-selling book, Food Is Love, has the distinction of winning Chopped and Beat Bobby Flay.

If these are the omnipresent celebrities of the food business, prolific writers such as Monica Saigal Bhide and Colleen Tay­lor Sen, the New York University profes­sor Krishnendu Ray, the blogger Mayukh Sen and food journalist Priya Krishna, who co-compiled NYT’s 2025 List of Best Restaurants in New York City and whose cookbook Indian-ish became quite the rage for its roti pizza, are all doing their bit to ensure Indian spice has never smelt as nice in America. And yes, Americans no longer need to be told that idiyappam is as Indian as the veshti that Vijaya Kumar sported at the Oscars of gastronomy.