when you want, where you want.
Not So Little India
Photo: Hugo Yu
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 sub-continental 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.”
What Unapologetic has managed to do is to take the lessons learned at its blockbuster hits and apply them to its firstborn without softening the focus. Adda hasn’t bowdlerized or gentrified much in the move from Queens. Pandya has always insisted on serving a number of dishes that might cow timid diners: testicles and kidneys at Dhamaka, snails and intestines at Semma, and goat brain here at Adda — with enough success that the night I tried to order it, it had sold out. Even then, Pandya is a chef willing to meet many of his customers where they are. “We couldn’t go to Manhattan without butter chicken,” he said.
So this Adda’s calling card is a reservation-only $42-per-person Butter Chicken Experience. Adda doesn’t stint on bells and whistles — rolling chutney carts followed by pretty chaatwallas with cigarette-girl trays of street-food chaats (fried lotus root one day, potato another) — and the BCE is its maximal expression. Performed tableside, it’s almost more experience than chicken: a tin-can smoker for the bird (with a choice of wood chips) and a customized sauce built on a cart in front of diners’ eyes. Butter is a non-negotiable, of course, but which butter? You’ll taste three — pickled tomato, fenugreek, and smoked chile — before deciding which will be melted, with yet more unaccented butter, into your sauce, plus more to crown the finished plate. The usual cuboid hunks of breast meat are here a halved or quartered chicken, which moves, post-smoking, into a tableside Le Creuset (everything at Adda is Le Creuset, like an influencer fantasy) to meet tomatoes, butter, cream, and more honey than I needed to know about.
(I stopped counting dipper lashings at three.) The result is so richly creamy, so thick with butter, that my lips were moisturized by the third bite. It’s recognizably a relation of the butter chicken of a million Seamless orders but more yielding and flapping dangerously close to too rich and too sweet. It is saved by a slow creep of chile heat and a blessedly earthy sidecar of dal.
Butter chicken may be a Manhattan prerequisite, but I don’t believe it’s the best way to experience Adda. The restaurant still has to do some of the work of luring unaccustomed diners to its wilder ways — “I think I like this better with my eyes closed,” admitted a friend while drinking his shochu-and-yogurt Raita cocktail — but greater rewards await them on the other side. I’d run back for Adda’s baby-goat biryani (scraggly shreds of braised leg hidden among the sweetly frizzled onions in a fluffy tower of basmati rice) or the paneer khurchan (a ruddy, brick-red stew of homemade cheese in a sprightly coriander-brightened tomato-and-pepper sauce). I’ll confess to a fondness for the squeaky cheese cubes of more workaday places, but Adda’s paneer doesn’t so much melt in your mouth as it scatters like a cloud. The chef de cuisine, Neel Kajale, boasts that if anyone can make a more tender paneer than his, he’ll comp their meal. The paneer comes from the vegetarian menu, which could float its own restaurant.
Not every dish rises to these heights. A coconut-curry stew, served with a choice of fish — sea bass, mackerel, or the more authentically Indian pomfret — was tough and bony. (The latter is the fish’s fault, but the former is the restaurant’s.) What should have been a showstopper shank of lamb, which a server hoists to standing with a skewer, the better to appreciate the braised meat falling off the bone, was indeed succulent and gamy in its korma-spiced cashew sauce, but it needed more spice to balance its chocolaty richness.
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
These are nits, not tragedies, quickly assuaged with the swoop of a flaky fried paratha through any and every dish of sauce, and if anything is not spicy or sharp enough, there’s always the ready adulteration of one’s chosen chutneys: “the Indian salt and pepper,” as the chutney-cart driver will remind you.
The long railroad-style space is festive and bright with the usual Unapologetic décor — Indian-newspaper-headline wallpaper abutting prismatic walls — and a bubbly Hindi soundtrack. Drinks are given more priority than at the other restaurants with a longer and judiciously chosen wine list, house beers made in collaboration with Brooklyn’s Transmitter Brewing, and a number of involved themed cocktails. (I didn’t bring myself to order the $32 trio of chutney-inspired cocktails, including an onion-flavored one, and there’s a $36 special to complement the butter chicken that’s only available with the Experience.) It all suggests that despite Unapologetic’s significant corporate footprint (in addition to the restaurants already mentioned, the group runs Naks nearby, Rowdy Rooster, Masalawala & Sons in Brooklyn, and a biryani-delivery service), it hasn’t resorted to merely syndicating itself. Adda isn’t set to unseat Semma as the jewel in the company’s crown. Given its homier ambitions, that’s likely by design. It’s a welcome addition in its own right, and a happy elevation of the old Indian corridor. There’s not a chile light to be found, but might one be ripe for reclamation?
Adda
What About LIC?
Unapologetic isn’t leaving Queens. Instead, the original Adda space is being turned into a company testing lab and catering arm.
Just Two Desserts
Chocolate-dipped kulfi pops are less sweet; a puddingy milk-solids cake with butterscotch ice cream is more extreme.
Next Up
Pandya says that the rejiggering of Dhamaka — now smaller, thanks to the closure of Essex Market — is in the offing.
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