Let’s start with a trivia question. How many Indian restaurants in the United States have a Michelin star? Is it five? 10? Actually, there’s just one: Semma, a south Indian restaurant in New York’s West Village known for its tender lamb—and for turning away (most) celebrities who show up without reservations.
Semma is part of Unapologetic Foods, a hot restaurant group—founded by CEO Roni Mazumdar and executive chef Chintan Pandya—that’s built on bold, regional Indian flavors. The New York Times
New York Times
As with most entrepreneurs, the journey was personal. Mazumdar came to the States from Kolkata as a middle school kid. Back home, his father had been a lawyer. In New York, he sold fruit out of a cart before becoming a traffic cop. Pandya, meanwhile, emigrated from Mumbai in his 30s, having already cooked abroad at hotels in Singapore (among other locales).
Together they’ve launched seven restaurants since 2017—including an Indian fried chicken joint called Rowdy Rooster—and the business partners excel at both vision and execution. When the New York Times published its list of the 100 best restaurants in New York City in April, two of Unapologeticʼs restaurants made the cut. Said Mazumdar of the team’s innovation: “Nobody could figure out that regional Indian cuisine could stand on its feet more than a week in a place like New York.”
Being the only Indian restaurant in the country with a Michelin star comes with its own challenges. Over a bowl of original recipe Cheerios—“the supposedly healthier one,” Mazumdar says with a laugh—the Unapologetic Foods founders talk how to beat the reservation bots, teaching Americans to think outside the naan, and (yes) testicles.
MICKEY RAPKIN: Roni, you once said that Indian food in America was “working really hard to apologize for itself.” When did you first notice that?
RONI MAZUMDAR: You have this generic version of Indian cuisine that no Indian actually wants to eat. The real article, the genuine stuff, the actual food that I’m eating at home—I didn’t think there was any space for it. There was no media conversation, somebody with a megaphone who would say, ‘Hey, this is cool, this is interesting.’ My father and I decided to open a restaurant [in 2011]. The idea was we should serve what we know—food from our region. And nobody bought it. It would just go to waste day after day. I felt defeated. It did something far worse. It further reinforced the core beliefs that I already had—that this food doesn’t belong in a commercial setting. I thought, Let’s put the chicken tikka masala on the menu and survive. And then I met this character.
Goat On The Brain
RAPKIN: You’re known for pushing beyond the boundaries of what people expect—and putting testicles on the menu. Can we talk about testicles?
MAZUMDAR: Start with the goat brains?
Adda Indian Canteen opened in Long Island City in 2018.
CHINTAN PANDYA: Adda had goat brains on the menu. And I remember him saying, “Dude, who’s going to eat this?” I said, “We don’t have to serve 50 portions a night. There’ll be five people who will come up and ask for it because they will love it.”
MAZUMDAR: I didn’t think people beyond a ten-block radius would show up. You’re looking at a menu that has butter chicken, saag paneer—
RAPKIN: Dishes you could get anywhere.
MAZUMDAR: But you don’t know that it’s done in the absolute best version possible with the highest quality of ingredients. On the other side, I’m giving you goat brains. I’m like, Not only is it too familiar then it’s too scary. It’s like every box you can check for no one to ever show up.
ERIC RYAN: There’s something really powerful you said there. I always talk about the intersection of familiar and novel. If it’s too familiar, it’s not differentiated and you don’t get any traction. And if it’s too novel, it’s too scary and there’s too much of a learning curve. It sounds like you really found how to land that intersection the right way.
PANDYA: I always say, There’s a very thin line of difference between a passion and stupidity. If you do something and you succeed, it’s a passion. But if you do the same thing and you fail, you are stupid.
MAZUMDAR: We didn’t hire a McKinsey to tell us what the market was going to be like. We looked within ourselves. It’s the most powerful tool in any entrepreneur’s arsenal.
RYAN: When you looked inside, what did you find?
MAZUMDAR: Some goat brains.
Down To Business
RAPKIN: One of the smart things that you seem to do as a restaurant group is to keep your expenses low. You don’t spend a billion dollars renovating a space. You keep it reasonable so that you can take risks in the kitchen. Is that how you see it?
PANDYA: It’s not that we don’t spend money, but we spend it very wisely. He’s the CEO of the company, he runs the entire company, he’s the face of it. But if there is something where he can find it a few dollars cheaper somewhere, he’ll drive there personally.
MAZUMDAR: When I started, I started everything with a little credit card. It wasn’t that long ago. So for me to all of a sudden start thinking in a different way? The real high, the joy comes from the process of creation. Indian food was truly broken. Because every single person tried to take a subcontinent and shove it down one menu, which is humanly impossible to do. Because it’s a subcontinent.
RAPKIN: Right. Indian food doesn’t mean curry.
Masalawala & Sons (which specializes in Bengali food) opened in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood … [+]
MAZUMDAR: That has been the belief that has driven us more than ‘let’s keep costs low.’ When you start a restaurant that has a focus on Bengal—which is the eastern part of the country where I come from—I think it’s a bad business decision to go and create a 300-seat restaurant. It’s so regional. I wasn’t sure if people would fully understand it or give it the respect that it demands. So, it’s better to do that and keep growing and creating this cluster of various different kinds of things so that at the end of my generation, our children can look back and say, I think we get Indian food a little bit better than before.
RYAN: I love how you said you get that high from the creative and the building process, and I think that’s so true with so many entrepreneurs. It’s addictive, too. You do truly get a high from creating.
MAZUMDAR: But the high is a little bit more than just the creation process. The high is also to be able to push yourself. There’s an incredible joy that you get out of it—to present other people with something that they connect with in a way they never imagined. That little moment of connection is what we all seek as entrepreneurs. That’s life worth living.
Getting A Michelin Star
RAPKIN: Would you take us through the night you won the Michelin star for Semma?
MAZUMDAR: Here’s how much we actually believed we’ll get a star—Chintan had already committed to a different event that night. I’m like, Why did you sign up for this? He’s like, How would I have known?!
PANDYA: I was actually doing a cooking class. And my phone started blowing up.
Semma (with food from chef-partner Vijay Kumar) received its first Michelin star in the fall of … [+]
MAZUMDAR: I remember standing there in that room when they announced the name, crowd cheered— I got a little quiet for some reason. And I got a little quiet because somewhere I knew that night we were the only Indian restaurant in the United States of America with a Michelin star. It comes with a tremendous responsibility. Multiple organizations are seeing you as a flag bearer of what the cuisine is becoming. What does that mean for us? What are our core values? Are we going to lose those values the moment the star comes in? Are we going to start changing ourselves because now we have to chase for something else?
RAPKIN: I’m guessing it resonated on many levels. Didn’t your father once tell you that he didn’t have the luxury of being an entrepreneur?
MAZUMDAR: When he retired, I’m like, dad, “If you had to find your purpose, what would it be?” He’s like, “Not all of us are born with finding purposes in our lives.” To me that was heartbreaking. And also, I realized, it represented not just my father, but many, many first generation immigrant fathers in this country.
Vegas, Baby.
RAPKIN: All of these big New York restaurants are opening in Vegas. When are we going to see Semma at the Bellagio?
MAZUMDAR: I think—post Dhamaka—we could have done that big ticket blockbuster kind of a restaurant. But instead we opened a fried chicken shop.
PANDYA: It’s a 400-square foot fried chicken shop and everybody was laughing at us.
MAZUMDAR: We got calls from some of the diplomats from India saying, ‘We would like to come in tonight for a reservation. Is there any possibility you can get us a table?’ I’m like, I can’t because there are no real tables. It’s more like a takeout.
RYAN: (laughing) Bring Your Own Table.
Beating The Robots
RAPKIN: If you want to come to Semma, you have to go to Resy and you have to prepay $50. This was designed to beat the robots that were claiming these reservations, is that right?
MAZUMDAR: We didn’t have a choice.
RAPKIN: There are apps now where you can buy coveted reservations.
PANDYA: A lot of consumers who were buying these reservations thought that we were selling it. We had to personally explain that we are not making money out of it, somebody else doing it, and if you are buying it, you are paying them. Our system is very clear. He or I want a reservation in the restaurant, we have to request for it, we just can’t walk in and take the table.
RAPKIN: What is the spark between the two of you? When did you realize there was a kinship?
PANDYA: (laughing) When we swiped right on Tinder.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Click here for season two’s first episode, where Bombas co-founders Randy Goldberg and David Heath talk Shark Tank, getting lucky, and learning when to say no.
“Cereal Entrepreneur” is a new interview series from Forbes hosted by Method co-founder Eric Ryan … [+]