New York: Four restaurants serving Indian cuisine figure in the list of New York City’s 100 best restaurants of 2024. They were ranked in the New York Times by its food critic, Pete Wells. Located in Greenwich Village, Semma takes the 7th spot, climbing five places from the previous year. The others are: Dhamaka (54), Temple Canteen (80) and Hyderabadi Zaika (95).
Both Dhamaka and Temple Canteen too have substantially improved their positions. Dhamaka, situated on the Lower East Side, was ranked 74 in 2023 while Temple Canteen, located in Flushing, Queens, stood at 96. Hyderabadi Zaika, stationed in Midtown, Manhattan, is a new entrant.
Seema’s chef Vijay Kumar was raised on a rice farm outside Madurai in Tamil Nadu. “At Semma he serves two dishes from his childhood that you’d have a hard time finding at another New York restaurant. One is nathai pirattal, snails stir-fried with onions and tomatoes, soured with tamarind and served in a small box made of banana leaves. The other is Chettinad-style venison, a shank braised into sticky tenderness with star anise and a lichen called black stone flower that is one of the prized seasonings of the Chettinad pantry,” wrote Wells on Semma in 2022.
Mumbai-born Chintan Pandya is the chef at Dhamaka. In a 2021 review, Wells described its biryani as “a polyphonic riot of flavour.” He further wrote, “Black peppercorns and green chilies rip through the rice, through the darkly browned chunks of goat neck on the bone and, finally, through your central nervous system. But even as your eyes start to water, the heat is broken by a blast of fresh mint that arrives like a mojito on a humid summer afternoon.”
