Punjabi food is having a moment. It has travelled from Pandara Road and the Moti Mahal-type restaurants to find new fame in the world’s capitals.
Event Context
In London, Ambassadors Clubhouse, which serves Punjabi food, is packing them in and its new New York outpost is so successful that the New York Times headlined its review last week by noting that “It’s one of the hardest reservations in New York.” The Times liked the restaurant (it got two stars, a sign of favour) and Ligaya Mishan, its reviewer (who really knows her Indian food), said about the cuisine that “If Ambassadors Clubhouse is not quite a revelation, it’s in part because of this bounty, but also because Punjabi food was the gateway to Indian cuisine for many New Yorkers.”
The gateway thing may be the problem for north-Indian food everywhere. Because nearly everyone is familiar with say, Tandoori Chicken and Black Dal, it is hard to surprise people with Punjabi restaurant food. Most Indian chefs who find recognition abroad (and increasingly, back home in India too) get around the familiarity problem by being creative and moving away from traditional dishes.
The JKS group, run by the three Sethi siblings (Punjabis who grew up in England) has taken a different approach: even if they serve traditional Indian food, they do it better. Their flagship restaurant, Gymkhana, in London does not specialise in modern Indian food, but won two Michelin stars anyway. And Ambassadors Clubhouse (one Michelin star) is determinedly Punjabi in both its London and New York restaurants.
It’s the same approach that Vikas Khanna, who proudly advertises his Punjabiness, took with Bungalow, his New York restaurant, which is almost impossible to get into, and which won three stars from the New York Times.
It’s strange though to talk about the popularity of Punjabi food because Indian restaurant cuisine, as a whole, is largely a Punjabi phenomenon. Tandoori Chicken was invented by Punjabis in Peshawar, and Butter Chicken by Punjabis in Delhi. The first successful Indian restaurants were opened by Punjabis. The best-known Indian chefs are Punjabis: Sanjeev Kapoor, Gaggan Anand, Garima Arora, Vineet Bhatia and others. And every single judge on MasterChef India, (with the exception of Farah Khan) has been a Punjabi. The three largest Indian hotel chains are run by Punjabis. Even India’s ‘Chinese’ food is a branch of Punjabi cuisine.
But around a decade ago, the Punjabi restaurant culture hit a road block. People were so tired of eating the same Punjabi food at every place that most north-Indian restaurants came to be seen as Punjabi-owned operations in which the entire menu was based around three basic curries. Each time an order came into the kitchen, the cooks would tweak one of these three curries (add cream to one, more masala to another, etc) and claim they had made a new dish.
Even Punjabi chefs are no longer the stars they used to be. While researching this piece, I looked at Culinary Culture’s list of India’s top 30 Chefs, and was surprised to find that there was only one Punjabi in the top 20. (Nikhil Nagpal, and he cooks South Indian food at Avartana.) I can’t think of any other time in our culinary history when this would have happened.
But that may be changing again. Punjabi food is making a comeback, but this time it’s real Punjabi food not the three-curry formula of yore that’s finding favour.
Two decades ago, the late great Jiggs Kalra opened Punjab Grill, serving authentic Punjabi food made to traditional recipes he had gathered. Jiggs partnered with Lite Bite Foods, but later his son Zorawar sold his shares to Lite Bite and went off to start an empire of his own: Masala Library, Farzi Cafe etc. But now, the Punjab Grill chain has suddenly exploded. There are around 60 Punjab Grills around the country, all still using Jiggs’s original recipes.
Until a few months ago, Lite Bite was mostly run by Rohit Aggarwal, who founded it with Amit Burman, and Punjab Grill has become the money machine of the group. Rohit recently retired from the group (he is tight-lipped about his future plans, but there is no shortage of investors and restaurateurs lining up to hire him as an advisor) and looking back, he attributes Punjab Grill’s success to its ability to fill a gap in the market.
People always liked Punjabi food, he says, they were just fed up of what many restaurants were doing to it. With Jiggs’s recipes, they were able to take the chain upmarket and offer better and more authentic food.
Rajan Sethi tells a similar story. A well-established Delhi restaurateur, he was tired of the food served at so-called Punjabi restaurants and wanted to go back to the food of his parents who were born in undivided Punjab. His successful Ikk Panjab restaurants try and recreate the food his parents would have eaten. Dishes such as Kotkapura Aata Chicken are rarely seen on restaurant menus (though Ambassadors Clubhouse serves it in New York) and the Amritsari Aloo Vadiyan and Tarn-Taran Di Jalebi Rabdi have a specific provenance. Sethi has four Ikk Punjab restaurants in Delhi, but the real test came when he opened a 120-seat restaurant in Chandigarh. To his relief, it has been a huge success.
What all of these restaurants have in common is one basic principle: Stop treating Punjabi food as a generic north- Indian cuisine and accord it the respect we would give to a great regional cuisine.
Nobody does that better than Amninder Sandhu. I first ate her Punjabi food at Masala Bay at the Taj Lands End (which is not as odd as it sounds: The Masala restaurants were an early attempt to recreate the cuisine of undivided Punjab). Sandhu’s cooking was actually better than the restaurant itself.
I lost track of her until she resurfaced in Mumbai at Arth, where every dish was cooked on an open fire, and then at Bawri also in Mumbai. She was already on her way to becoming one of India’s top chefs when she opened Kikli in Delhi’s Connaught Place. I went there with my Punjabi wife, who normally refuses to eat at Punjabi restaurants (“No discerning Punjabi eats this stuff”) and much to my surprise, she loved it. She has since been back several times with her friends and family.
Match Outlook
What makes Kikli so good? Well, it’s partly what you would expect: The food is authentic with light and distinct flavours. But mostly it is because Sandhu is such a good chef. Until now, most great chefs – even the Punjabis themselves – have not bothered to explore the true flavours of Punjab. Sandhu comes from a Sikh family that has lived in Assam for three generations. For her family, food and the recipes that were handed down from mother to daughter became a way of asserting their Punjabiness in faraway Assam and staying in touch with their roots.
Perhaps the success of places like Ambassadors Clubhouse abroad, the global popularity of Vikas Khanna and the willingness of newer Indian restaurants and chefs to make real Punjabi food will change the way we look at the state and its cuisine.
Tandoori Chicken is a great invention. But it’s an invention nevertheless. May be it’s time for us to eat what Punjabis have eaten at home for generations.
From HT Brunch, July 25, 2026
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