december decadence
When someone asks me what my favorite food is, or the last meal I would want to eat, I’m always torn between something comforting from my childhood and something decadent from my adulthood. The foods of my childhood are what I crave when I’ve had a long day, or if I’m sick, or hungover. Matar ke chawal (spiced rice and peas) and a bowl of dahi (homemade yogurt) are so kind to a sad stomach. Kadhi chawal feels like a special occasion meal, mostly because of the onion pakoras my mom fries to put in it - the leftovers were my pre-dinner snack when I was little. I don’t tend to think of Indian food as decadent, perhaps because it was so commonplace for me for so long. Most Indian restaurants serve the same food I grew up eating at the dinner parties my mom and other aunties would host, albeit with more cream and oil. There are the occasional upscale Indian restaurants here in New York City, like Indian Accent, which is a great meal with clever twists on more traditional dishes, but they don’t make me think decadence - more refined. Perhaps that’s why Dhamaka and Semma were such a surprise for me.
Dhamaka and Semma both came from the team behind Adda, which had made a splash a few years ago (in the before times). I had eaten at Adda once, but to be fair, I wasn’t adventurous enough to try to the goat brain biryani everyone was raving about, so perhaps I had missed what made it different from other Indian restaurants. I needed no one to tell me what was different when I dined at these two restaurants, even though I had read many, many reviews already.
A friend visiting from out of town with her husband had managed to get a reservation at Dhamaka for a Tuesday night at 5:45pm in early December. I had looked a few months ago for a reservation, but they were nearly impossible to get back then, too. There were four of us at dinner; all Indian, but from three different parts of India with different experiences of Indian food. In the U.S., Indian food is treated as a monolith, and what you usually find in a restaurant is North Indian food - a lot of the food I grew up with. There are some South Indian restaurants as well, and even a Gujarati restaurant in the city, but that’s about it. India is a huge country, and with that comes a vast diversity in food that is rarely seen in restaurants but easily found in the homes of our aunties. Dhamaka (and by extension, Unapologetic Indian, the company behind Dhamaka and Semma) was on a mission to bring home-cooking to the forefront, from all over India.
My friend’s brother, who was the fourth in our party, had been to Dhamaka once already, so he steered us through the menu. It was largely composed of dishes I had never heard of, an unfamiliar experience for me at an Indian restaurant. Though I eat meat and fish, it’s not a daily occurrence for me (a side effect of my vegetarian childhood, I suspect). This was not a dinner for vegetarians. We started with an array of snacks and grills. I loved the paplet fry, a whole fried fish with numerous spices in the batter. It reminded me of a trip to Kerala, though the fish there had not been quite as flavorful. The sigdiwala chicken was a whole roasted young chicken, the skin infused with spices that made my lips tingle. We had ordered the tabak maaz as well, a dish of lamb ribs that my friend and her brother said reminded them of the Kashmiri food they had grown up with. I don’t eat a lot of lamb, but it was so good - and the flavor profile was different from what I was used to, though still familiar.
Our entrees were perhaps more impressive for me, as I spent much of our first course struggling to get all the meat off the bones of the chicken and the lamb. I hate being wasteful, and this was not my area of expertise. The paneer methi was a dish I resolved to try and recreate at home. I didn’t realize until the next day while eating leftovers that it was cashew cream and not dairy in the rich sauce, and the addition of fenugreek added a twist to the paneer makhani of my childhood. The macher jhol, baby shark, was wonderfully tender and had potatoes hiding at the bottom, an unexpected surprise. The champaran meat was again lamb, but in a sauce, with whole roasted garlic cloves that I eagerly added to my plate.
In Hindi, we use the word mirchi when something is spicy - the kind of spicy that makes your tongue burn. In English, spicy is used to mean both “hot” and literally, “full of spices”. The use of this word in English to describe Indian food frustrates me, as the latter definition simply translates to delicious, in my opinion, not something to shy away from. At Dhamaka, it felt like the spices in each dish had been bumped up to eleven out of ten - as though someone had taken a recipe and upped the amount of cumin and garam masala and ginger and coriander. All the flavors were familiar, but they were more intense, and intersecting in new ways. As I heated up the leftover paneer the next day, my mouth began to water (just as it is now). My only lament was that there was no regional context on the menu for each item. Despite the regional diversity sitting at the table, we couldn’t determine where most of the dishes originated from.
The next afternoon, I received an alert for an opening at Semma that Friday. It seemed serendipitous to try both restaurants in the same week, though I wondered if my palette could handle it. And had Dhamaka and the reviews set my expectations too high?
My dinner companion at Semma was Sarah, a friend who loves food as much as I do. This was my first visit to Semma, but this time, I led the way through the menu, drawing on my experience from eating South Indian food and visiting Kerala eight years ago. It was Sarah’s first introduction to the region. The menu here was more familiar to me than Dhamaka’s, but there were plenty of dishes I hadn’t heard of before, too. The South Indian restaurants of my childhood (and even of my adulthood) were all vegetarian, with nearly identical offerings. We asked our waitress for her advice, as I was wary of my own biases.
The attu kari sukka arrived first. It was my third lamb dish of the week, a record for me. It had been described as a small plate, but was such a generous serving it could have been a main course. The cardamom and tellicherry peppers made each bite pop. The eral thokku came over to the table next, though we didn’t immediately give the huge prawns the attention they deserved between the lamb and our conversation. The prawns had been served with their shells, but slipped out of them like butter. I was disappointed that each was gone in two bites. We had ordered the seasonal uttapam as well; as Sarah hadn’t had South Indian food before, I felt obligated to get either an uttapam or a dosa, two of my favorite foods growing up. It came with the requisite sambar and chutneys, and I smiled when I saw Sarah rip off a piece and dip it in the sambar, just as I would have.
Our main course was another blend of land and sea, with the Goanese oxtail and the valiya chemmeen moilee and a side of coconut rice and kal dosa. The oxtail was stewed, likely for hours, with warming spices, and it was good, though I preferred the lamb of the first course. The lobster, though; I thought that was the crown jewel of our little table. The meat of the tail was draped over the shell, surrounded by coconut curry and dotted with spiced oil for a dramatic effect. The lobster was cooked perfectly, but what I enjoyed most was the coconut curry it came with. It had nearly a cooling effect after the punches of spice in the other dishes we had ordered, but without any less flavor. Even after the tail was long gone, I was spooning the curry over my rice so as not to leave anything behind.
Semma left me with the same intense impression as Dhamaka had, of familiar flavors deeper and brighter and bigger than I had had before. This, I thought, is decadence in Indian food. There’s a phrase we use in Hindi: ‘ghar ka khana’, which means ‘home cooking’. These menus were comprised of those dishes. To have such a heavy hand with spices on a daily basis wouldn’t work at home, but in a restaurant, it hit just the right note on my palette. I look forward to visiting them both again soon - if I can get a reservation.
