On our weekend jaunt to New York in mid-October, the missus and I ate sushi for early lunch on both days (at Gouie and Momokawa) and then ate rather excessive blowout dinners. The first of those dinners was at Foxface Natural on the Saturday evening, but that’s not the meal I’m reporting on today. On the Sunday evening we met friends at Semma, the South Indian restaurant that has taken New York by storm in the last year and a half, picking up a Michelin star in the process. One of our friends is a good friend of the house, which is how we managed to get a table on pretty short notice. As it turned out, this also meant that we were comped out the wazoo, with the chef sending out not only everything we’d ordered but also almost everything we had not ordered. I note this upfront so you can keep this special treatment in mind as you read my account of the food itself. On the whole, I thought it was a very good meal—better than my dinner at Adda in 2019—but not without some issues.

I mention my dinner at Adda because Semma is owned by the same restaurant group: Unapologetic Foods. In addition to Adda and Semma, they also operate Dhamaka (also at Essex Market, one floor up from Gouie) and the newest property, Masalawala. The proffer at all the properties, as indicated by the group’s name, is full-throated Indian cooking, unfettered from concerns about spice levels and unburdened by American diners’ identification of Indian food with a short list of familiar dishes.

Now to credit the latter, you have to look past the fact that Adda’s menu, for example, while serving up goat brains and whole pompano, also includes butter chicken, tandoori chicken, dal makhni (even if billed as “Black Dal”) and biryani–and in 2019, palak paneer as well; but there’s no denying that the cooking makes no concessions to spice-cautious palates. It’s a different matter that at my dinner there in 2019, I was not convinced that this was entirely to the good: some dishes tasted very similar to each other; some didn’t seem significantly better than versions served at places that will never be reviewed by the New York Times; and pretty much everything seemed over-spiced (and I am certainly not a spice-cautious person). I enjoyed the meal on the whole but struggled to see it as anything very revelatory.

What is more interesting to me is the discursive shift that Unapologetic Foods seems to be selling very successfully in the high-end market in New York. Historically, Indian restaurants in the US aimed at non-desi audiences have, broadly speaking, gone down two paths: on the one hand, you have your regulation curry houses with their nearly-identical menus; on the other, you have far more expensive places with p.r budgets, tasting menus, an approach to cooking that is often marked by a restrained hand with heat and oil, and an approach to presentation of dishes that passes through a contemporary Western filter (I don’t want to seem old-fashioned by using that hoary word “fusion”)—think places like Rasika in D.C or the outpost of Indian Accent in New York. Unapologetic Foods seeks to operate in a different space, to offer something different.

In an obvious sense, of course, their restaurants are all themselves very much contemporary high-end American restaurants in terms of genre: from the cocktail programs to the division of menus into small and large plates, to the presentation as “appetizers” of what in India would be snack foods eaten in completely different contexts and so on. There is no real paradigm shift happening in that sense in their restaurants. What they offer instead is the promise that the food has not been toned down to appeal to the palates and expectations of non-Indians. In other words, what they offer is a narrative of authenticity: they won’t plate the food to look pretty in a Western high-end restaurant sense, they won’t back away from robust spicing, they won’t buy into a conception of quality that is synonymous with subtlety. It’s not for nothing that their p.r—regurgitated uncritically by American critics—often mentions village origins for dishes.

Now, in some ways this is all very welcome. The notion that Indian food can only be recognized as refined (i.e worth paying a lot of money for) if it conforms to bourgeois Western notions of refinement is tiresome. And so anything that strikes a blow against that can seem revolutionary. As Pete Wells says in his review of Masalawala & Sons, “[Unapologetic Foods is] being taken seriously for interpreting their own culture, not imitating somebody else’s”. The problem, however, as Krishnendu Ray recently noted on Instagram, is that while Unapologetic Foods seeks to recode the notion of heavily-spiced food, they also re-inscribe an identification of Indian food with heavily-spiced food. In many Indian foodways, in fact, vast swathes of dishes are unapologetically not heavily-spiced. The Bengali repertoire, for one, is replete with mild(er) dishes but you wouldn’t know that by looking at the menu of Masalawala & Sons—despite the name, a Bengali restaurant—or reading Wells’ experience of it. This part of the discursive shift proffered by Unapologetic Foods doesn’t seem to me to be a very progressive one and seems hard to separate from a post-Bourdain/Chang valourization of “ethnic foods” as offering a burst of authenticity to the jaded Western palate.

The other interesting thing that becomes obvious when reading laudatory reviews by people like Pete Wells (a critic I generally respect) is how little awareness they seem to have of developments in the Indian restaurant world in very different circuits in the US. As I’ve noted in the context of the Twin Cities, in the last decade and more South Indian chains have exploded, not in major cities but in their suburbs, where new Indian immigrants live. The menus of these restaurants are aimed at people who are not just Indian but from specific regions. And it’s not just South Indian food. In New Jersey in April I ate a thali at a Kathiawadi restaurant that made no concessions whatsoever to cliched expectations of Indian food (while also not drowning everything in spices). It’s in these restaurants that Indian food in the US is really being reworked. If nothing else, eating at some of them might make some of what is offer on the menus of restaurants like Semma (and yes, I’m finally coming to my meal there) seem a little less novel.

Among the things we ate at Semma, for example, was a very good Gunpowder Dosa. But I’d be lying if I said it was very much better than the dosas on offer at a number of the newer South Indian places in the Twin Cities metro. I would say the same about the Dindigul Biryani—it was much better than the ho-hum biryani I ate at Adda in 2019 but I’d be hard-pressed to pick it over a number of biryanis at the local South Indian places here. I wouldn’t say this about everything we ate, of course. The flavour of the Eral Thokku with massive tiger prawns was very good indeed, even if the prawns themselves were inconsistently cooked (the one that fell to my share was over-cooked while the missus’ was perfectly tender). The Valiya Chemmeen Moilee, on the other hand, was excellent in every regard, from the quality and texture of the lobster to the moilee itself.

Other highlights included the Mulaikattiya Thaniyam (with sprouted mung beans), the Paniyaram (rice and lentil dumplings) and the Nathai Pirattal (snails served with kal dosas). Both the Atti Kari Sukka (a dry-fry of mutton) and the Chettinad Maan (with venison) were pretty good—though the mutton itself was not tender enough—but not very much more. The one savoury dish that did nothing for me was the Mangalore Huukosu which features batter-fried cauliflower in fairly anonymous spicing (I did like the chutney it came with though). Very good coconut rice and Malabar parottas rounded out the savoury dishes. There were only two desserts on the menu but we were given three. One of these was on the menu, the Elaneer Payasam, made with coconut milk and quite tasty. It was outmatched, however, by an off-menu Passionfruit Pudding that the chef sent out—I can only hope it’s on the regular menu now. (The third was a small serving of vanilla ice cream and chocolate sent to our friends to congratulate them on a recent major life event.)

Oh yes, drinks. Our friends had a few of their cocktails. Having heard variable reports of their cocktails from people I trust, I stuck to wine. We got a bottle of orange wine for the table and I later added on a glass of a Malbec.

For a look at the restaurant and what we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down for details on the check, thoughts on service and to see what’s coming next.

Service was very good as well. I was glad to note a lot of desi faces not only eating in the dining room but also among the servers (not something that you can take for granted at the high end in the US).

Cost? As you can tell if you squinted at the picture of the check, there are a lot of comps on it. It’s not just that some of what we ordered was comped; the chef sent out a large number of dishes that we had not ordered (and some are not on the check at all). These included the prawns, the cauliflower, the lobster, the biryani, the coconut rice and all the desserts. But you can work out how much all of this would have cost if we had been allowed to pay for all of it. Which is not to say that we would have ordered all of this food. It’s not like we had ordered lightly to begin but there was no way to finish, or come close to finishing all of what showed up on the table. It was enough food for 8-10 hungry adults.

On the whole, then, a very good meal, and one of the best Indian restaurant meals I’ve had in the US in a while. Please note that while I’ve compared of some of Semma’s dishes to those available in less vaunted South Indian restaurants in the Twin Cities metro, it is, of course, true that Semma is working with far superior ingredients. My comments in the longer, first part of this write-up are about the larger phenomenon and reception of Unapologetic Foods and not a criticism of their cooking per se.

Alright, only one more report left to come from both Dublin and New York. Both of those were high-end meals as well. I should have them out before the end of the week/year.