The Tastemakers (31 page)

Lately the company's chefs have begun experimenting with less-traditional fare, such as a line of pressed naan sandwiches, that they sell at Whole Foods and on college campuses. “It's catered to the global palate,” said Sameer Malhotra's wife, Payal, who works in the business as well. She described the naan sandwich as Café Spice's entry-level item, something that curious curry virgins might be willing to try. “To the consumer it's just another flatbread sandwich with a different filling. People eat it and then say, ‘This sandwich had chicken tikka in it, and I like that, so what else is comparable?' ” While taste testing several new flavors of the sandwiches one morning, including crumbled paneer with Monterey jack cheese, potato with turmeric, and chicken tikka, Payal picked a chunk of green chili out of the paneer sandwich and made a note to have the plant workers dice the chilies into smaller pieces. “If someone bites into that, they might be put off our food for a while,” Payal said, shaking her head.

T
he Malhotras also own Junoon, a lavish, multimillion-dollar, Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant in the flatiron district of Manhattan, the jewel in their curry empire's crown. With two hundred seats, hand-carved latticed screens of imported khadd-apa stone, a gleaming open kitchen, rolling wine carts driven by stewards, and a dedicated spice grinding room, it illustrates Sushil and Sameer's multipronged approach to propel Indian food into a viable mainstream trend. Café Spice's cafeteria food can convert multitudes and masses one meal at a time, but the prestige and exposure a place like Junoon can generate through reviews, articles, and word of mouth from well-connected, wealthy tastemakers has the same multiplier effect that Ricardo Zarate's success has generated for Peruvian ingredients. Although Café Spice customers at Hurley Medical will likely never get to taste tequila with muddled tandoori pineapple or monkfish tikka with a mango and mustard
chutney, those flavors may eventually trickle down through other chefs, trend forecasters, and supermarket products, thus becoming less foreign and more familiar to Americans. This is the chef-driven approach, and though Sushil Malhotra has tried it time and again since the 1970s, no Indian restaurateur or chef in America has yet succeeded at elevating their cuisine into a trend.

To be fair, there are several successful, highly praised Indian chefs and restaurants around the continent. In Vancouver Vikram Vij is one of the most respected Indian chefs working globally today, and he runs two of that city's arguably hottest restaurants. In Los Angeles the Indian-style gastropub Badmash (which means “naughty” in Hindi) opened to great fanfare in 2013, and San Francisco's DOSA is consistently packed, serving updated South Indian crepes in a space that feels like a nightclub. The one Indian chef who has achieved celebrity status in North America is Floyd Cardoz, who lives in New York. A native of Bombay, Cardoz quit a master's degree in biochemistry to enter hospitality school with the prestigious Taj Group. He trained in global cuisines, including French, Italian, and classical Indian, but he drew his biggest inspiration from his family, who came from the province of Goa, which has strong Portuguese roots. In 1988 Cardoz moved to New York and cooked at the type of cookie-cutter Indian restaurant that made one pot of curry in the morning and spread it out over all their dishes. “These owners were farmers and truck drivers in India,” Cardoz recalled when we spoke at his restaurant North End Grill, an American brasserie in the financial district. “The cuisine was like a game of broken telephone, until these restaurants got diluted down to what they were.”

At the time there were several fine dining Indian restaurants in the city, including Akbar, Bombay Palace, and Raga, though each was a model of traditional service and dishes, with little distinction in the kitchen. Replace their copper serving pots with cheap dishware, and they were no different from the curry houses, right down to the old sitars hanging on their walls. Cardoz wanted to do something different. He ended up in the kitchen of Lespinasse, an innovative French restaurant whose chef at the time was interested
in global flavors and let Cardoz integrate Indian influences into several dishes. He made a duck curry; lamb with eggplant caviar, cumin, and ginger; and a dish of soft shell crabs breaded in a cream of wheat crust like he had known back in Goa. All of it was very restrained and understated, but it helped establish Cardoz's reputation among chefs and diners in the city and caught the attention of the powerful restaurateur Danny Meyer, who approached him to open an Indian restaurant. “I was twenty-seven at that point, and I didn't want to do just another Indian restaurant,” Cardoz recalled. “I convinced Danny we had to do something different. I knew there'd be pushback at another upscale Indian place. People had preconceived notions: it was too spicy, too dark, they won't understand it, etcetera. But India had to be more than chicken tikka masala and saag paneer. There were various different flavors from around India that never got used and local produce you could use.”

Starting with a local, seasonal approach to ingredients and a restrained flavor profile, Cardoz and Meyer build the foundation for what would become Tabla, which, in 1998, opened to great reviews. Cardoz took some of his favorite dishes from back home and deconstructed them for a more Westernized dining experience. He fried skate in a semolina crust, then served it with a Goan curry and tamarind paste, but with the heat turned down so the contrast of sour, bitter, sweet, and spiced flavors was more pronounced. He braised, steamed, and glazed oxtail so it was candied on the outside, resulting in this tender, unctuous piece of meat when you bit in. The biggest hit was the crab cake, an American spin on the fresh crab dishes he'd grown up with in Goa, served with a tamarind chutney. “After we did that you saw crab cakes in Indian restaurants all over town,” Cardoz said. Every dish was plated individually rather than served in the family style (as was traditional in Indian cooking), and Cardoz refused substitutions and special requests. “I wanted to showcase the food in the best possible way,” he said, “so you had no choice but to enjoy it.”

In its first year of business a large percentage of Tabla's clientele were curious Indians and Indian Americans who often resisted what Cardoz was doing. “How dare you!” they told Cardoz. “Where's
my free papadum? My buffet? The chicken tikka masala?” Nevertheless, the restaurant was a success, both critically and financially. Then 9/11 happened. “We got hammered,” Cardoz said, noting how Tabla's drop in business had more to it than the citywide recession that hit other New York restaurants following the attack. “People associated [Tabla] with the Middle East. People didn't want to eat ethnic or Indian food at that time. All the other restaurants in the Union Square Hospitality Group [Meyer's company] were doing fine, but we saw a sixty percent decline in business from before nine-eleven.” Tabla took a full two years to return to its previous pace, but it never recovered the energy or buzz that it had when it first opened. Though Tabla remained profitable until 2010, the size of the large restaurant and the cost associated with running it led Meyer to close Tabla down at the end of that year—his first failure in an otherwise perfect streak of opening restaurants. Cardoz went on to win
Top Chef Masters
a year later and opened North End Grill, also with Meyer, shortly after that.

“I think high-cost Indian food will almost never be accepted,” Cardoz said with a sigh when asked about his thoughts on Tabla's impact. “The hard part is there are still so many people afraid of those flavors. It's halfway where it needs to go.” Cardoz now felt that a big-name chef, such as himself, couldn't pave the pathway to locking in Indian cuisine as a trend; it had to be something targeted at the average American. “The day it'll become popular is the day you have a fast food concept. It needs to be more mainstream so people can hang their hat on it.” It needed to have presentation that was clean and fresh in a format that was easy to relate to and eat by hand, Cardoz said, adding that it needed names that don't require explanation and translation—do you know the difference between aloo gobi, rogan josh, and chaat papri?—at a price point that was accessible. In other words, Indian food needed its Chipotle.

T
o North American diners Chipotle Mexican Grill is a place to get delicious, fresh burritos and other quick Mexican foods, but to
aspiring restaurant tastemakers looking to turn a global cuisine into a widely accepted trend and profitable business model, it is nothing short of the holy grail. Founded in Denver, Colorado, in 1993 by chef Steve Ells, Chipotle's concept was based on the idea that fresh, quality Mexican food, similar to what Ells had eaten in San Francisco, could be served in a standardized, highly replicable quick-service format without turning to the processed glop that was found at Taco Bell. Instead of premade meals waiting under a heat lamp, assembled from outsourced products, Chipotle offered a selection of freshly cooked proteins, toppings, and entrée formats that could be combined to make any variation of burrito, taco, or salad on an efficient assembly line. The chain's success, with over a billion dollars in annual sales at more than fourteen hundred stores (serving 750,000 customers each day), did more to bring fresh Mexican flavors, such as chipotle peppers and chopped cilantro, into the American mainstream than the great Tex-Mex chips-and-salsa boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

Two major trends emerged from Chipotle. First, it helped Mexican food spread to far more places, both in North America and abroad. In London, England, Mexican food previously had a limited presence. “Taco Bell had tried and failed in the UK,” said my friend Ben Fordham, who operates the London quick-service Mexican chain Benito's. What was typically found in the city were small chains like Chiquitos. “It was the worst Tex-Mex stuff; coated in cheese and tasteless,” Fordham said. “That became what was known as Mexican food. All were places called Amigos or Desperados and had walls littered with sombreros and donkeys.” In the early 2000s, when Fordham was in law school, he spent a year on exchange at the University of Texas, in Austin, where he fell in love with both his future wife and Mexican food, especially Chipotle. Years later, after a miserable stint practicing law at one of the top firms in London, he struck out to open Benito's and brought Chipotle-style quick-service Mexican to the United Kingdom. Several other entrepreneurs were launching similar concepts at the time, and a Mexican food trend hit London like the blitz. “The boom of Mexican food is incredible. It's all the food trade has talked about,” Fordham said. “It's gone
from not being on the radar to a central part of what they'll put on the high street.” One of the reasons Fordham credits for Mexican's success in the United Kingdom is the cuisine's similarity with aspects of Indian food, which is firmly wedged into the mainstream of British eating culture. Both cuisines share a diverse spiciness, a mix of textures—stewed and grilled and fried, all together on one plate—and a colorful palate, all of which is why American entrepreneurs betting on Indian food believe they can ride the coattails of the Mexican boom stateside to great success.

The larger trend that Chipotle spawned was its business model, the quick-service restaurant, or QSR, which essentially took over the 1950s fast food model McDonald's established. Less processed and more streamlined than typical fast food models, QSR provided a template to modernize and mass market any global cuisine. There are QSR concepts for nearly every single culture food now on the market, from Vietnamese (Shop House, a prototype devised by Chipotle), to Middle Eastern (Roti, in DC), Chinese buns (Wow Bow, in Chicago), and Philippine-style burgers (Jollibee, in California). Each of these is essentially a Chipotle with different food. “Chipotle has become a verb,” Sanjog Sikand, of Sukhi's, said, adding that the winning format for Indian food in America is still up for grabs. A number of concepts are already trying to stake a claim as the Indian Chipotle, including the Kati Roll Company, with three New York locations serving Indian-style roti wraps. In Chipotle's hometown of Denver, Amar Singh, a former financier from Delhi, with no relation to the Singhs from California, launched Bombay Bowl in 2007 with the idea to deconstruct Indian food so it would appear healthier and fresher. Meals are served in bowls—sort of like a hot salad—on divided plates, or in burrito-style wraps. “Consumers say, ‘It looks fresh, it looks healthy,' when we show a photo of the bowl in presentations,” Singh said. “But I've yet to see someone say, ‘It looks Indian,' which is key. Traditionally you won't have a bowl with rice, meat, and vegetables in it. We've changed the way you look, eat, taste, and perceive Indian food.” So far there is only one location, but Singh hopes to start franchising new Bombay Bowls this year.