Beef, Burrata, and Poutine: Indian Cuisine’s New Wave
Chicken Tikka Poutine: Badmaash spices up Canada’s comfort food, dusting french fries with kala namak (black salt), paprika, and dried mango powder.
Photographer: Kristyna Archer for Bloomberg Businessweek
The first thing you notice when you enter Badmaash, an Indian restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, is that it looks nothing like an Indian restaurant. There are no burgundy banquettes, no tinny sitar soundtrack. Instead, Kanye West thumps from the speakers. Waitresses wear high-waisted jeans under kimonos. There’s a wine list—noteworthy by itself—with bottles of Nero d’Avola. And there’s the food: mango-infused pork belly, a seafood stew with Indian spices, none of it served in a hammered copper pot. The naan is baked with white cheddar and serrano chilies.
Badmaash is one of several new restaurants rehabilitating Indian cuisine’s hole-in-the-wall, curry-in-a-hurry image. “Up until recently, Indian food was in a 9-1-1 state in America, the way Chinese food was in the ’80s and ’90s,” says co-owner Nakul Mahendro. Here, Mahendro; Jessi Singh, co-owner of Babu Ji in New York; and Manish Mehrotra, head chef at Indian Accent in New York, talk about what inspires their cooking.