At 4:58 p.m. on a recent Thursday, a group had gathered along First Avenue. In passing, one might have assumed they were mourners at the R. G. Ortiz funeral home, whose black awning dominates the block, except that — contra Ortiz — they were exclusively South Asian: ammis in saris, tourists corralling sulky teenagers, a pair of beautiful 20-something women in unseasonable suits and Hermès sandals livestreaming into an iPhone. “He’s hosted MasterChef India for seven consecutive seasons,” one of them said to whomever was watching. The “he” is Vikas Khanna of the ready smile and the Byronic curl of thick black hair, who at that moment was snipping a fistful of chamomile from a sidewalk planter. At five on the dot, the doors were opened and everyone poured in.
Bungalow, Khanna’s new restaurant in collaboration with the restaurateur Jimmy Rizvi, takes its name and its inspiration from India’s Raj-era country clubs. It is, accordingly, a fairly Brahmin experience. A flotilla of waiters patrol the large dining room, offering serving suggestions in Bungalow-embroidered uniforms, two or three to the table; it wouldn’t have surprised me to have been offered a robe or a pool towel.
Despite its squashed frontage, the restaurant is cavernous, decorated in pinks and leafy greens and looking like a Bollywood set, down to the wall-mounted, bell-topped telephone. This is of course only a prop. The restaurant takes its reservations via Resy and has had near none to offer since it opened in March. “Bungalow is making history, breaking records by being the most difficult to secure a reservation,” India Today reported in July. What records? What history? What’s the difference? The point stands well enough to anyone trying for a table. But for all of this, among many of the city’s dining class, Bungalow — despite plenty of opening press — has little of the name recognition of the usual raft European-focused openings of the moment. Bungalow may well be the most popular restaurant that most of the city has never heard of.
The popularity doesn’t seem to have much to do with the food. Bungalow’s cooking expands on the reach of New York’s traditionally Punjab-focused Indian cuisine by venturing all over the subcontinent — as have restaurants like Dhamaka and Semma and the excellent Kanyakumari. There are borrowings from Sikh cooking, Diasporic Baghdadi-Jewish cooking, Goan cooking, Kashimiri cooking.
A few dishes were out-and-out wonderful. Lamb chops — a small plate that should have been a large one — were roasted in a thick spackle of amchur (green-mango powder), garlic, and ginger, tender as if they’d been braised and adapted from a recipe of Rizvi’s mother’s. Chicken biryani was also very good, arriving in a Mughal-decorated tureen sealed shut with a round of biscuity bread.
But many felt overly decorative. A yogurt kebab, highly recommended by our server, packed a cloying filling into a deep-fried exterior — a sweet, leaden opening to a meal. The lamb seekh kebab was better, though it, too, had a sweet, cheesy interior, encased by ground lamb and poppy seeds, like a gamy Twinkie.
I never quite got the hang of ordering at Bungalow, between small plates, large plates, and “classics” (a section of the menu that, confusingly, included both full-size dishes like the biryani and side orders of basmati rice and grape-studded raita). A pineapple curry, a nod to vegan curries offered during harvest celebrations by temple cooks, was in practice a single wagon wheel of roasted pineapple, too little; a hulking braised lamb shank with cinnamon and cardamom, too much. One senses kinks are still being worked out. Despite the attentive staff, pacing can speed or lag. Despite the clamor for reservations, several tables sat empty. At the end of one meal, we were gifted, mysteriously, an open jar of ground ginger.
Khanna knows what the people really want, and since his earliest days, he’s been happy to offer it. He roams the dining room, gamely posing for selfie after selfie, shaking hands, hugging. Though he has lived in New York since the 2010s, when he was the chef at Junoon in Flatiron, his profile in India is enormous as a chef, cookbook author, and humanitarian who used his platform to arrange for millions of prepared meals to be distributed in India during the privations of the pandemic. Some 270 million people watch MasterChef India. (By comparison, 51 million people watched the Biden-Trump debate.) All of this has made Khanna the kind of draw that American food culture, even in the age of Top Chef and Chopped, no longer produces, the kind who has to tweet, “If you are sending a marriage proposals in the emails, please say so in the Subject. ????It will help save time to filter them from the Ration Coordinations.” One night, stopping by our table on his rounds, he greeted us with, “Thank you for bearing with the craziness.”
It wasn’t so crazy, really, but during my meals, I found it hard to shake the feeling that I was eating on TV, accepting plates of bright, beautiful food prepared for maximum telegenicity, the results of challenges — “Homage to Goa!”; “Feed a cranky vegan!” — a producer might dream up. But the next day, when I found my boyfriend pawing through the leftovers, it was the single remaining lamb chop he had cold in his grip, from Rizvi’s mother’s recipe. “This,” he said, “is absolutely delicious.” There’s no master like Mom.
