I’m constantly asked about my favorite meals, but recently, a friend pointed out that many of them have been Indian. There was the mutton thali I mentioned on the Taste podcast, and the thatte idli from my column on coffee. And last weekend, I recommended kacchi gosht ki biryani to a nice couple I met while watching the World Cup …
OK, I admit it: I’ve fallen for many of the new Indian restaurants around town. It’s hard not to when they serve Hyderabadi biryani, Maharashtrian mutton and other regional dishes that are increasingly easy to find. (Calling them rare is the understatement of the year.) When chefs take a regional, rather than national approach to cooking, delicious things happen. We’ve seen it with Thai restaurants and Japanese kissatens. And I have a hunch you’ll feel the same way about these three restaurants.
Bottomless thali
Five days a week, Pangat in Park Slope serves bubbling curries and Mumbai street foods, like vada pav, which both warrant a visit. That’s what I hear at least. I’ve only visited Pangat — three times now — on Sunday afternoons, when the chef Soham Deshpande and his wife, Aarti Awate, arrange their dining room tables in long Hogwartsian rows and swap out the regular menu for their weekly thali. It’s one of the best introductions to the food of Maharashtra, the western Indian state where Ms. Awate grew up.
In theory, it works like this: You pick between chicken, mutton, fish and vegetarian pithla curry when you make a reservation online and once you arrive, the dishes appear in high-rimmed cafeteria trays. Only, different from virtually every other thali in town, the food never stops coming.
The first sign of trouble is the puri chaat, fried orbs of chutney that are passed around family style at the start of the meal — with enough for every person to have thirds. Then comes the bhakri, a flatbread made from sorghum that Ms. Awate bakes throughout the meal. Near the end, the chefs parade from the kitchen with pots of surplus sukat (tiny dried shrimp) and kala mutton, inky black from charred onions, and attempt to scrape them over your tray. Only then will they bring out your two desserts: syrupy gulab jamun and orange swirls of jalebi.
369 Fifth Avenue (Fifth Street), Park Slope, Brooklyn
Biryani 101
Everything I thought I knew about biryani went out the window the minute I stepped inside Hyderabadi Zaiqa in Hell’s Kitchen — and, really, a few seconds before that, since the smells of saffron and ghee knock right into you on the sidewalk. It’s a portal to Hyderabad, a metropolis with deep ties to the Arab world in the South Indian state of Telangana, where biryani exists in more configurations than the American mind can comprehend. Here can you try more than a dozen of them, flecked with fish, goat, hard-boiled egg and sour sorrel.
Before opening Hyderabadi Zaiqa in 2023, the chef Mohammad Tarique Khan worked at Eleven Madison Park, as a line cook, and also as a delivery driver for Uber Eats. Having grown up in Odisha, the eastern Indian state above Telangana, he wanted “to understand what New Yorkers really eat,” he said, “and what they were missing.” These days, Mr. Khan is known for his platters of kacche gosht ki biryani, a specialty of Hyderabad made by patiently steaming rice over raw meats until the whole pot smells like goat. Last year, Mr. Khan moved his biryani shop into a larger restaurant across the street and started serving mandi, curved stalks of long-grain rice swimming with softened cashews and golden raisins. Whole peppercorns crunch between your molars and the nuggets of chicken, scattered over the top, are unusually tender. Squint, and you can almost see the Charminar.
785 Ninth Avenue (West 52nd Street), Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan
184 Lexington Avenue (East 32nd Street), NoMad, Manhattan
Much ado about chutney
Lucky me: Earlier this month, I snatched a last-minute cancellation for dinner at Kidilum in Flatiron, where the menu looks to the coasts of southern India. We now have several places dedicated to that region, including Semma, Chatti and Kanyakumari. The reason Kidilum doesn’t have a reservation available for the next week or so is because of its kitchen, which borrows ideas from Kerala, a criminally underrepresented state in southern India, and serves them with a side of stagecraft.
Or maybe it’s stagecraft with a side of Keralalite food. I chuckled when our thayir wada appeared on a rechargeable, light up plate, but not too loudly because here came our neighbor’s rice cakes, balanced on an artificial tree branch like cairns. This, of course, was followed by our plum chutney lamb chops, orbited by fresh flowers and cinnamon sticks. I wasn’t laughing when our nanducurry arrived, the stir-fried crab meat tucked beneath its shell. You can find crustaceans plated this way all over town, but only this one hums with the heat of a hundred chiles. After picking the shell clean, mop up the last of the curry with breads made from fermented lentil, tapioca or egg.
31 West 21st Street (Fifth Avenue), Flatiron, Manhattan
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