(gas hissing)
- Yeah, so what I'm doing now is our chicken pulao.
- Pressure cooker chicken
is only cooked when you order it.
- Red chile, mace, bay leaves, cloves.
You'll know it's ready
when the spices start to pop.
Then you put the soaked rice.
And then you add the raw chicken
and just cook it,
it usually takes around 9 to 10 minutes.
(upbeat music)
The kitchen is small,
so we cannot cook more than three at a time.
So when you have so many orders,
you have to somehow just start churning it out faster.
- If you see all the burned rice
on the side of the pan,
that's the best part.
So you shouldn't scrape it.
That's the good stuff.
- [Chintan] And it comes fresh in a pressure cooker
on your table.
A lot of people think
that we actually cook the pulao,
just put it in pressure cooker to serve it.
And you have to personally explain them,
it's not about it.
It's cooked in there from raw rice.
The intention was nothing to do with presentation.
It was to do with the integrity of that product.
(upbeat music continues)
So it's 9:00 AM in the early morning.
That's how normally I start my day off.
I go to the butcher.
So he's Didar Dada.
"Dada" is like an elder brother
that we call out of respect.
He supplies most of the raw mutton lamb
to all our restaurants.
Basically, when we have the whole carcass with us,
what we do is we try to pick up as many parts as possible.
What are gonna pick up today is the goat neck,
the testicles and the kidney.
He's an expert on this. He's a master of it.
So he knows it.
And he can cut this faster than this.
This was slow.
(blade whirring)
Now you have the neck over here.
This meat has a very different fattiness
and juiciness to it,
and also gets a lot of tenderness
when you cook it slowly.
So these are testicles.
So you need to remove the skin off.
Here it becomes like a very novelty product
of using kidneys and liver and testicle.
In India, it's a part and parcel of it.
A lot of people who want to do it,
but they are afraid of doing it.
We are not scared of anything.
The fear of failure is not present in our universe.
So there's the start of our gurda kapoora.
This is exactly two portions over here.
These are the trotters.
We make a stock for this.
And this is the base for the curry for this.
So the last thing that we are gonna pick up today
are the livers.
We're just gonna try a new dish with it,
and let's see if it works out.
We are trying to grill the kidneys over the fire,
and then just toss it up in some chopped chile and onion,
with some spice blend and lemon juice.
The first thing we need to do
is get off to the bigger tasks,
which we can finish off as early as possible
before the entire team comes in.
As you can see, it's a smaller kitchen.
So we need to be very efficient
in our planning and the workflow.
What I'm trying to do is make the stock for tonight
for the testicles and the kidneys.
We have these bones from the butcher shop.
So I'm gonna use half of them.
I'm gonna add in some red onions,
there's the green chile.
That's some red chile powder.
That's a Kashmiri red chile.
It's a little bit of turmeric.
So these are some stems of cilantro
that we save for the stocks.
We try to minimize the wastage as much as possible.
So, guys, that's a ginger-garlic paste.
Just mix up everything.
So this is for the gurda kapoora,
which is the testicles and the kidney.
And this basically forms the base of the sauce.
So we are gonna cook this,
we are gonna get all the marrow
out of those trotters,
and it's gonna make it a thick curry,
and that's the base of the sauce.
(dynamic percussive music)
So these are testicles.
We are just removing off the skin over here.
They're basically a two-skin layer,
so usually this is the one skin
and this is the other skin.
Normally the portion that we work on
is one testicle and one kidney per order.
On a weekday, we sell between five to six.
Weekends, we try to sell six to seven,
just because the rush is higher.
I added the salt. I added the turmeric.
So I just add in the ginger garlic paste like this,
and then we just toss it up.
(dynamic percussive music continues)
The concept of the entire restaurant is,
whatever we cook will be served in the same dish.
So it's actually cooked in this
and it's served in this.
As a chef, you have to think through a dish.
There's a way my mother would cook something,
but I cannot replicate the same version of it
and give it to you.
I have to think through it,
how I'm going to produce that dish
in a way it will be elevated,
but still maintain the integrity of that original dish
and then serve it.
(dynamic percussive music continues)
That's Chef Eric.
He's the chef de cuisine and the big boss over here.
I just work for him over here. Trust me.
So Chef Eric is gonna show us
the marination for the goat neck.
- All right, so the first thing we do
is pour the mustard oil and the spices
and then mix it with the yogurt.
Ginger, garlic, chopped mint, chopped cilantro,
fried onion, and sharp green chile.
- Something I wanted to show, very importantly,
is the fried onions.
If you see this,
we fry the onions very fresh everyday.
And we use a humongous amount of this,
it goes in a lot of our marinades,
a lot of our curries.
- [Eric] Just mix everything up.
That's it.
- Biryani as a dish was never done right.
Everybody was doing it in a way where we thought
there was no integrity maintained with the dish
and everything.
And that's why it's very close to us.
- [Eric] Some ginger juliennes.
Some fried onion.
- That's why we do it in a specific pot.
We layer it up.
There should be around 16 to 17 layers in the entire dish.
I think it's a phenomenal product.
And we found that goat neck
was giving a humongously amazing effect
on the entire dish of biryani.
Even if you're doing five things,
we wanted to do those five things at perfection.
If you have to put effort
which is 10 times the more effort
than doing a simple thing,
let's do it.
That's why we want to elevate the entire Indian cuisine.
And I think biryani as a dish
has a humongous potential,
which I think nobody in the market
is able to realize it.
That's the entire vision of doing this dish,
how it's cooked and how it's finished.
That's very important.
(cheerful music)
- So, guys, it's 4:30.
We are finishing a few things.
We have the murgh kofta over here.
Murgh kofta is a phenomenal dish.
It's basically a spiced chicken mince.
And then there's a soft-boiled egg
and we encase the soft-boiled egg
within the chicken mince.
And then we have a cashew nut-based curry,
and we just cook it inside it.
By the time it comes on your table,
it's piping hot, the steam coming out,
you open up and when you cut through it,
it just breaks open,
and then there's egg in the middle,
which nobody's expecting, actually.
Doh khleh comes from northern-eastern part of the country.
There's a state called Meghalaya.
He found about it and then he researched about it.
And that's how we came up with this dish.
He's very proud of the dish,
and I think it's one of the phenomenal dishes
which nobody has even explored in Indian food till now.
- [Eric] We're gonna pressure cook the pig face,
'cause it takes a lot of time.
So right there...
So we're gonna cook this for about 30 to 35 minutes.
- The concept of head to toe
came to this country, I don't know when,
and a lot of people started doing it,
but in our country we have been always doing it.
(dynamic percussive music)
So what they do is they cook the entire pig,
but they don't want to waste the head.
So they basically slow cook it
and then they grill it
and make a salad out of it.
So that's what we are trying to do over here.
We pressure cook it,
then we are gonna grill it
and we'll make a salad out of it.
(dynamic percussive music resumes)
- So the last major task right now
we are doing is the ribs,
we are adding in some fennel seeds over here.
We have chile powder, turmeric.
These are very specific ribs that we get
and you can see
there are two layers of fat inside it.
These are expensive ones.
We tried to invest a humongous amount of money
in the ingredients that we buy.
I think that's the key to it.
Trust me. There's nothing else.
To do justice to it,
we have to cook it in a certain way.
We have to cook it fresh.
We have to cook it on slow heat.
I think on grill products often.
Now I personally love grill products.
We just found the lamb ribs,
I think a year back, these ones.
The ingredient has to be right to make that dish.
So now this will go inside the oven for four hours.
You know, a lot of people will take the entire rack
and they'll just cook it that way.
But what happens is here it falls off the bone
and we have to still grill it.
We try to cook it,
cut it into these portions
and then we slow poach it
and then we grill it before we serve it.
So it's already poached.
We are just gonna grill it on top of this.
(cheerful music)
So guys, what we have over here is the mutton.
We started doing this dish.
It's a very traditional recipe called Champaran meat,
which comes from eastern part of India.
It's a small place called Champaran.
We take a batch of mutton,
we marinate it.
Then you have cilantro, mint, ginger, fried onion.
The mutton is actually specially flown from Arizona.
We couldn't find mutton anywhere local,
so it's bought from Arizona.
That's a whole garlic bulb which goes inside this.
We just pour the stock over the entire thing,
(lively classical music)
we seal it, and then we cook it.
So most of the things in this restaurant,
if they are sold out, they're sold out.
We don't make new, fresh ones.
We only make limited quantity.
So we look at the reservations
and then we look at the number
and we just...
(lively classical music continues)
So we are experimenting with the liver.
We haven't found the right taste yet.
Just hoping today's the eureka moment
and we get it right.
Basically we have four different kinds of liver
to our yogurt base, to our dry rub.
I'm gonna cook two in the pot
with little bit of stock.
The other two ones I'm gonna grill
over the grill.
As I'm doing it,
something that goes through my mind
is how am I gonna get 10 orders out
at the same point of time.
Let's say 10 people order this together,
how am I gonna cook this?
We fail humongously.
You know, people think,
"Oh, these guys are doing this."
We actually fail so many times.
We keep on trying new things.
We keep on failing about it.
And that's when,
after failing multiple times,
you get it right once.
So that's what we keep in our mind,
that failure is a part of the process that we are doing.
(lively classical music)
So that's Roni.
Roni is the CEO of the company.
So we you have four different versions
of liver over here.
This was a yogurt base, dry rub,
that's a dry rub with the masalas,
that's a yogurt with the masalas.
- Which one do you want us to try first?
- I think we should start with a dry rub.
This one is good.
No, this one is flat.
- We all equally hated the dry rub.
- So that is the one with the yogurt base.
So this is the one with the dry rub.
The yogurt one was typically not clear
of anybody that nobody liked it,
including me.
We decided to do something more with this,
explore more on the grill part of it,
then to go with a little bit curried version of it.
So we are going to work more on this now.
(receipt printer whirring)
Hey guys, it's 5 o'clock.
We have the first ticket in, guys. Come on.
(tense music)
So this year it's crazy.
It's like from 5 to 9:30, 9:45
or 10, I would say.
Yeah, 9 till 10.
It's like a engine room, which is pumping.
One kofta gone already,
there are two kofta gone!
Cheesecake coming, guys. Cheesecake coming.
This kitchen and the entire restaurant
was planned pre-COVID.
So we never had the outside seats.
The volume of the restaurant has literally doubled
and that's how the kitchen was built,
to support 44 seats in the restaurant
and 12 seats on the bar.
But now we are literally doing
double the seating capacity.
So that's where it gets a little tighter.
In today's time, to find simple things is very difficult.
And it's the simplicity of this restaurant
which I think excites people.
Guys, one new order!
Veg pressure pulao, one goat biryani, straight fire.
What I feel is, it's a very honest product
and lot of people use the word soul food.
It's done with a lot of heart.
And I think that's what excites people.
(bell dinging)
We actually want more and more Indian restaurants
doing quality Indian food,
because that's how the cuisine will move forward.
(bell dinging)
I think next five years is gonna define
the Indian food in New York.
And I pray God every day
that we get more and more quality,
good Indian restaurants.
(lively music)