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Magazine
FINE DINING
A hint of spice
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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Tabla, the "Indian" restaurant in New York City, thrives on a philosophy of food that is unorthodox yet not needlessly radical.
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PHOTOS: SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
SUCCESSFUL PACKAGE: The upper deck at Tabla
EVEN as Indian cuisine in England was getting out of bed and shaking itself awake in the early 1990s, it remained obdurately asleep in America. Chutney-ed Marys across the Atlantic notwithstanding, most restaurants in the bigger American cities steeped themselves in oil-slicked chicken tikka masalas and refused to budge. Tandoori chicken was always vermillion to the point of neon, food was always North Indian, and spices were always unsubtle. And then, in 1998, came Tabla.
On a recent, windy Friday afternoon in New York City, Tabla is buzzing only moderately. Its patio is shut, its main dining room is slow, and the Bread Bar — an open kitchen that rapidly assembly-lines lunch and dinner options — has enough time to train an apprentice on the job. "It gets much more insane when the patio is open," the apprentice is told, once he has finished assembling a round of steak sandwiches on naan.
In Tabla, that involves slicing up sizzling steak, wedging it in lettuce between two naan halves, and serving it with horseradish raita, mung masala, and cucumber-onion salad. That is, mind you, one of the more obviously Indian menu picks; elsewhere, detecting the Indian touch is the culinary equivalent of hunt-the-slipper, only to find it in a coriander afterthought or a faint mustard seasoning.
Rethinking a cliche
Tabla was born with that approach to the philosophy of food — unorthodox, but not needlessly radical. In 1998, Danny Meyer, a New York restaurateur, knew he wanted to go Indian for his next venture. "One of his employees overheard that, and since he had worked me with me earlier, he suggested my name to Danny," says Floyd Cardoz, executive chef at Tabla. "So I was explained the concept and given inputs, and I found that it was totally what I wanted to do."
The patio
Cardoz had worked, in the 1980s, with the Taj and Oberoi groups in Mumbai, and he fled restaurants in India precisely because they weren't willing to go beyond the conventional. "When I was growing up, Indian restaurants were mainly North Indian. Indian cuisine was Indian cuisine, and that was that." Cardoz wanted something else altogether. "I wanted to build my food around fresh ingredients, around the best produce that is available at a particular time," he says. "Once you do that, all you have to do, as a chef, is make it shine." In mid-autumn, therefore, there are preliminary designs for pumpkin-y dishes, and Tabla's deep freezers are stocked with only the most select meat and seafood. "The sushi fish does come from Japan," says Cardoz, almost grudgingly, "but everything else is locally sourced." Tabla also conducts a thrice-weekly excursion to the local greenmarket, where beady-eyed chefs buy only what's absolutely, absolutely fresh.
Winning acclaim
That may involve an inconstant menu and a couple of disappointed diners every now and then, but Tabla has stuck to its dictum for eight years now and been none the worse for it; quite the opposite, in fact. In that time, it has earned numerous awards, not to mention big savings on wall paint from simply papering corridors with its reams of press acclaim. "Sometimes, late at night when we are hungry and dreaming of food," gushed Gourmet magazine in 2003, "we think of tamarind-glazed crab cakes wrapped in pappadams or spice oxtails on tapioca and beets."
Chef Cardoz.
Not everybody, though, has been uniformly thrilled out of their skulls by the thought of oxtail in their Indian food, and Tabla's shrimp and sea-urchin upma some years ago could have put a few South Indians off rava for life. "The few Indians who came in initially did not like it at all. They were looking for a $3.99 buffet, chicken tikka masala, all the food that Bangladeshis have passed off as Indian," says Cardoz. "I pissed a lot of people off." Just a couple of days ago, a Bread Bar chef remembers, a huge Indian party filed in and then filed out, minutes later, after one look at Tabla's meat-dominated menu.
Headed for big-time
"We opened way before the ground was ready, really, but it is all becoming more mainstream now," says Cardoz. "People are beginning to accept our philosophy at Tabla, and they're coming back because they like the way we do food." Almost in parallel, Indian cuisine itself is beginning to boom in the United States, and "in a year or two, it will be exploding."
Tabla is looking to ride that wave in style. Cardoz wants to go national and international, and on popular demand, Tabla's signature range of chutneys — tamarind, tomato kalonji, and mango — is already out in a chain of grocery stores. Cardoz's cookbook, One Spice, Two Spices, is releasing later this year, promising to show a nation how to cook "American food with Indian flavours". That isn't as far-fetched as it sounds — considering Cardoz's theory of wrapping flavour around food, considering how Tabla has propelled itself on that theory for eight successful years now, and considering how the Bread Bar downstairs manages to smell two parts Indian, one part deli, two parts Italian and all parts heavenly. In New York City, near Madison Park, Indian cuisine has, very definitively, gotten out of bed.
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