The numbers say yes. The full story is more interesting than that.
By Kazi Zaman
Consider what happened in New York in 2025. The city's most argued-over, most fiercely contested restaurant list — the New York Times' 100 Best Restaurants — put an Indian restaurant at number one. That restaurant was Semma, a small Greenwich Village room dedicated entirely to the food of Tamil Nadu, led by Chef Vijay Kumar, a man who grew up in a small South Indian town and described the moment as something he had never once dared to imagine. Standing first in a city of 27,000 restaurants, evaluated against every cuisine from every corner of the world — if Indian food in America needed a single moment to point to, that is probably it. But arrival is a complicated word, and the more honest answer is: it depends entirely on where you're standing and how far back you're willing to look.
Because this story didn't begin in 2025. It began much earlier, in quieter rooms, with less fanfare.
When Vikram Sunderam opened Rasika in Washington DC in 2005 alongside restaurateur Ashok Bajaj, most of America was not ready to have a serious conversation about Indian fine dining. Sunderam changed that, patiently and without drama, building a restaurant that collected James Beard Awards and Washington Post four-star ratings and became the place a sitting US president chose to celebrate his birthday — twice. Rasika didn't shout about what Indian food could be. It simply demonstrated it, year after year, until the argument became undeniable. Two decades on it remains one of America's essential restaurants and the foundation on which much of what followed was built.
Further south, in Houston, a different kind of statement was being made. Musaafer — the name means traveller in Hindi — was conceived around a genuinely remarkable idea: send the chef on a hundred-day journey across all of India's states, collect the stories, and bring them back to the table. Executive Chef Mayank Istwal did exactly that, and what emerged is a restaurant of extraordinary ambition housed in a ten-thousand-square-foot space that feels more like a palace than a shopping mall. The Michelin Guide arrived in Texas in 2024 and gave Musaafer a star immediately, recognising what Houston's desi community had known for years — that this was cooking of serious intent, rooted in the full breadth of the subcontinent, not the usual edited highlights.
In New York, Vikas Khanna — Michelin-starred chef, MasterChef India judge, and one of Indian food's most recognisable global ambassadors — opened Bungalow in the East Village in 2024, describing it as perhaps his most personal project yet. The menu spans Kashmir to Kerala, the seekh kebab layered six ways deep, the chicken tikka finished with Amul cheese as a quiet nod to childhood. Bungalow earned three stars from the New York Times and promptly became one of the hardest reservations in the city.
What makes this current moment genuinely different from previous waves of interest is the wholesale rejection of the generic. The group that perhaps best embodies this shift is Unapologetic Foods — the restaurant collective built by Mumbai-born Chef Chintan Pandya and restaurateur Roni Mazumdar. The name came from a real moment: a customer once demanded Pandya apologise for his food being too spicy. He declined. That refusal to dilute, to soften, to second-guess the cuisine for a non-Indian audience became the founding philosophy of a group that now includes Dhamaka — serving fiercely regional Indian food you struggle to find even in India's own restaurants — and Semma, where Chef Vijay Kumar's Tamil Nadu cooking earned a Michelin star and ultimately that New York Times number one. Pandya himself won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: New York State in 2022; Kumar followed in 2025. Two James Beard Awards. One restaurant group. The cuisine, cooked entirely on its own terms, had arrived at America's highest table.
And now London is watching — and following. The wave of celebrated British Indian restaurants heading stateside is perhaps the clearest signal yet that America has become a market worth competing for. Gymkhana, the two-Michelin-starred jewel of Mayfair, has already opened in Las Vegas. Its sibling restaurant Ambassadors Clubhouse is headed to Manhattan's NoMad neighbourhood. Kricket, the modern Indian small-plates concept with a devoted following in London, is set to debut in Manhattan shortly after. And Dishoom — arguably the most culturally embedded Indian restaurant brand in Britain, beloved for its Bombay café atmosphere and famously long queues — confirmed its New York opening for 2026 after a pop-up at the Meatpacking District's Pastis that sold out in under five minutes and left 20,000 people on a waiting list. That number alone tells you something significant about where American appetite for this food now stands. The British Indian dining scene spent a decade building the template. America, it seems, is ready to receive it.
The gap between what Sunderam, Khanna, Istwal, Pandya, Kumar and their contemporaries are doing and what passes for Indian food in most mid-sized American cities remains significant. The deeper question is whether the momentum concentrated at the top will eventually travel outward — whether a generation of young Indian American cooks, emboldened by what they're witnessing, will carry this further than their predecessors imagined possible.
The signs say yes. But arrival, in any meaningful sense, means being present everywhere. That part of the journey is still underway.
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