I am often asked what I do when I want Chennai food in New York. I matter-of-factly say I go to Semma — the best-known Indian restaurant in America — like getting a table there isn’t an ordeal. In truth, though, I have long dismissed people who live between countries and hanker for one place when they are in another. This applies to those fools who complain about the lack of good pizza in Delhi while they eat at an Indian restaurant in London every third day. Ditto for those craving the perfect filter coffee in San Francisco and then crying about the inauthentic Mexican food in Pune. One of the privileges of actually living between cities is that you don’t have to miss a particular food for too long.
Besides, why would I want to eat Indian food outside India, I have often argued.
All that was, of course, until I started seeing someone who has taken it upon herself to convince me that no cuisine can quite measure up to Indian. After countless battles about where to eat, especially when we travel, we have come to a compromise. Because my deliciously alliterative name would be well accentuated with a middle initial — Prajwal P for Pretentious Parajuly — I have consented to visiting an Indian restaurant abroad only if it has at least a Michelin star.
So, yes, I’ll allow myself to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to one of the seven starred Indian restaurants in London or to the above-mentioned Semma, the lone starred Indian place in New York, all the while feeling smug that I have come out far ahead in the bargain. Sometimes I’ll altruistically make exceptions for non-starred restaurants: Bungalow, Dhamaka and Kanyakumari in New York (fair, good, good). Chutney Mary in London (very good). And the just-opened Chatti in New York, the first foreign foray of Chef Regi of the Kappa Chakka Kandhari fame, which is too young to earn a star.
Now, I have been a KCK fan for a while. The food that’s served at the Nungambakkam, Chennai, establishment is what your nonagenarian Malayalee grandmother might whip up. Everything I have eaten there — the lobster fry, the coconut prawn, the duck mappas — is wholesome. But my relationship with the restaurant is somewhat mangled by the cloud pudding — that ridiculous, magnificent tender-coconut dome. The blancmange is as light as a cloud, fluffy as a cloud, luminescent as a cloud. It feels like you’re consuming air, if air were filled with whimsy and delight and agar agar. As a novelist, I am wary of PhD theses finding symbolism in my books where there’s none, but I see, after the many times I have intellectualised a damn pudding, how the temptation might arise. Still, I now realise I’ve done KCK a disservice by being fanatical about the cloud pudding, which is just one exceptional item on a menu bursting with exceptional foods.
Chef Regi Mathew’s Chatti in New York
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
I’d have to redeem myself at Chatti.
First, the size hits me. I’ve been told it’s toddy-shop food, so I expect the restaurant to look a bit distressed, down-market even, but the two-storied Chatti is a ritzier iteration of KCK. There are marble tables, teak chairs and conches on every placemat. The 90-seat restaurant, a hop and a skip from the hell that is Times Square, is ambitious all right. Despite its being just four months old, tables are hard to come by. I’d know because I have gone twice in 10 days. The first time, we went as a twosome. Greedy to try out more food, we cobbled together a group of four to return. Getting a Saturday-evening reservation involved some dexterously placed phone calls.
The tablemats show off a mind-boggling array of appetisers; we tell Chef Regi our order is in his hands. Plates of perfectly spiced prawn pouches steamed in banana leaves materialise. These are followed by scallops, mini appams, curry-leaf mushrooms and a slow-simmered seafood moilee soup. I pop in my mouth the flavour bomb that’s the Calicut mussel, seasoned with curry leaves, coconut oil, chilli, coriander powder, turmeric, and lemon juice. It’s sensational. Others are distracted by the Ramapuram chicken curry. Many variations of “homey” are thrown around. The rice dumplings in coconut milk are unlike anything I’ve had before. The overnight-fermented clay pot fish curry is unusual in that it is served at room temperature.
I fall for the black-chickpea kadala curry. It’s so light. The snapper — spiced with tender peppercorn, gooseberry, Kandhari chilli and turmeric — makes me want to cry with joy. And there’s ghee rice. How can rice — rice! — be so magical? It smells of cardamom and ghee and tastes exactly like it smells.
Chef Regi and Prajwal at Chatti
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
It’s toddy-shop cuisine, so the drinks can’t be far behind. The Malayalee Old-Fashioned — embellished with toasted coconut, bitters and jaggery — is theatrically revealed, but it’s the tequila-based Kandhari drink, in which the flavour of the lethal Kandhari chilli has been playfully captured, that does it for me. The clarified sambar drink—appropriately named Sam Bar—is someone else’s favourite.
“Will it get a star?” one of us asks. I think it will. It better. This is good, sincere food. It’s quality food. It’s happy food. It’s food that transcends what’s on the plate. It’s food that tells stories.
I am eager for others to experience the dessert, my slice of Chennai, the divine dome of KCK. The cloud pudding — an eye-wateringly expensive $16 — pinches me hard because I have eaten it in Chennai for 245 rupees. Our group is divided. Two of us declare the pudding sublime. The other two pronounce the palada superior. It doesn’t matter. We order another cloud pudding. It’s worth every one of those darn sixteen dollars. The chef sends us yet another.
Prajwal Parajuly is the author of The Gurkha’s Daughter and Land Where I Flee. He loves idli, loathes naan, and is indifferent to coffee. He teaches Creative Writing at Krea University and oscillates between New York City and Sri City.
Published – July 02, 2025 03:30 pm IST
