Indian Food Is Flourishing in the U.S.It has always felt like a given: Indian restaurants are better in Britain than in the United States. But Karam Sethi, the co-founder of JKS Restaurants, which runs several acclaimed Indian restaurants in London, doesn’t believe that’s true anymore. On a recent trip to New York, he found the Indian food “100 percent” on par with London, he said. “There has been a huge shift in quality in the last five years.” Mr. Sethi is more than just enthusiastic about this shift. This year he’s bringing two of his group’s most popular restaurants to the States: Ambassadors Clubhouse, a full-throated paean to Punjabi food, will open in the Flatiron district of New York in October, and Gymkhana, inspired by India’s elite social clubs, will open at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas in November, joining outposts of the famed restaurants Carbone and Din Tai Fung. London may be a global capital for Indian restaurants, but those same establishments are now setting their eyes on the United States, motivated by their own large American customer bases (30 percent of Gymkhana and Ambassadors Clubhouse’s customers are American, Mr. Sethi said) and the dynamism of the Indian dining scene in the United States. The America-bound list comprises a veritable who’s who of Indian restaurants in London. Alongside Gymkhana and Ambassadors Clubhouse, Dishoom, a beloved chain inspired by the casual cafes started by Zoroastrian Irani immigrants in Mumbai, will open in Lower Manhattan as early as next year. The chef Asma Khan, who runs the home-style Indian restaurant Darjeeling Express and was included on the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2024, is dreaming up a restaurant in New York that will serve food from Kolkata, on the eastern tip of India, and open “at least a year” from now, she said. Kricket, a more modern Indian small plates restaurant from the restaurateurs Will Bowlby and Rik Campbell, will debut in Manhattan, likely at the end of next year. London has a long, complex history with South Asian restaurants, which have evolved from the inexpensive curry houses of the 1970s and ’80s to the fine dining kitchens of the ’90s and 2000s to today’s establishments, many of which are sophisticated but not white-tablecloth. A similar shift is occurring in the United States, Mr. Sethi said, with restaurants like Bungalow in New York and Copra in San Francisco that balance regional cooking with an ambitious cocktail menu and feel more personal than the butter-chicken places of a decade ago. These restaurants are also winning prestigious awards and becoming difficult tables to get, showing just how much perceptions of Indian food have changed, he said. “And it’s not just cuisine. It is fashion, it is music,” he said, pointing to the success of musicians like Diljit Dosanjh, and Prada copying Indian shoe styles. “Everything is thriving out there.” But Indian food is not nearly as embedded into American culture as it is in Britain, a nation that violently colonized India for years, and where chicken tikka masala is now considered the national dish. Mr. Sethi hopes to change that, “to make it like one out of every seven days of week, you are going to be eating Indian food.”
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