A Day at NYC’s Best New Indian Restaurant

[lively music]

Adda is the newest restaurant by Unapologetic Foods.

We have a bunch of restaurants in the city, Semma,

which was named the number one restaurant in New York City

by The New York Times.

I used to be a chef

at the world-renowned Eleven Madison Park,

which is a three Michelin-starred restaurant.

I really wanted to cook food that was more my style

that speaks out to me.

As the chef de cuisine, I am responsible for everything,

from what ingredients come into the restaurant,

to how the food that is prepared

and plated goes out of the kitchen.

It's been one hell of a journey.

[lively music]

Good morning, guys. My name is Neel.

I am the chef de cuisine at Adda.

It is 10:30 in the morning.

I have to pick up some fish for the restaurant,

so I'm heading to Aqua Best.

Follow me. Let's get going.

[lively music]

So we are here. I'm here for the pomfret.

We have a dish on the menu, the Malawani macchi curry.

This dish should only be made with this fish.

And why is it so important that you have this fish

on the menu is the integrity of the dish.

The region where the dish comes from is Malvan,

which is in Maharashtra, which is where I am from.

I can get it frozen from a ton of places,

but the only one who can get it for me fresh

is this man standing right here.

I used to travel all around the world

and making like fishermen friends around the world.

So when Neel came in and said,

Hey, I need pomfret for this dish,

I know exactly where to get it.

Steven and his men are gonna fabricate it in front of us.

None of my boys back in the kitchen have to do it.

So I save a lot of labor. It's a win-win for everyone.

We're gonna put it on ice

and we're gonna take it back to the restaurant.

At the restaurant, these will get marinated

in some turmeric, some salt, some lemon juice.

We have a beautiful Malawani fish paste masala.

There's a lot of nostalgic value to this fish,

which is why when people see it on the menu,

they're absolutely mind blown.

My deliverables.

And there you go.

There they are. Amazing.

Have a good service, chef. They're all set. Thank you.

[lively music]

Welcome to Adda.

If you look at the interiors, right,

you're gonna see a lot of touches of retro designs

and a lot of vintage matchboxes.

But the one thing I really like

to always talk about is this beautiful wallpaper

that we have.

I have Dhamaka, which is the restaurant I used

to work at before this.

I have little Indian slang,

like [speaking in foreign language],

which means what's up?

I need to get this fish in the walk-in.

Here's the fish. This is the pomfret.

Hi chef. How are you?

I am gonna go get changed now

and then I'm gonna have a little meeting

with my morning sous chefs.

These are my sous chefs.

Without them, the team would not be what it is.

When I'm out there getting fish, they're the ones

who are making sure that the kitchen's tight,

the deliveries are coming in,

they're being put away the way they have to be put in.

How are we looking on deliveries? Everything's come in?

Everything. Everything.

Everything's come in, everything's been put away.

What are we doing for chaat?

What do we have in-house?

We can do the lotus root chaat.

Yeah, let's do the lotus root as the hot one for today.

And let's do the papri one as the cold one for today.

Chaat is the quintessential Indian style street food.

The word literally translates to lick,

and that's because it's so delicious

that everyone ends up licking their fingers.

So we looking good guys?

Yes, sir. Awesome.

Let's get started.

A big part of my role as chef de cuisine here

at this restaurant is making sure

that the restaurant's looking super tight.

I'm gonna go into the walk-in,

I'm gonna go into the dry storage

and make sure that everything is in its place.

Everything's looking neat, organized,

and just the way up to my standards.

I come from fine dining where everything was meant

to be at 90 degree angles with each other.

For example, these boxes, right?

This place has labels.

It's designed to go here so that everyone knows where it is.

Dry storage looks tight.

I am in the walk-in, I'm coming at night

to do my orders, right?

And when I reach the sheet, which has my dairy list on it,

I should be able to look at one rack

and finish it all in one go.

This is all about having everything in its place

as the word mise en place literally translates to

and making your life easier.

Two of my big tasks,

which are super important to me are done.

[lively music]

So it's 12:30 noon right now,

and one of my major tasks for the day is to come

and make sure that everything that's being produced

is up to par.

This is Saad, one of our senior line cooks.

He has started cooking some lamb offals,

tidbits, and some trimmings.

So we source so much lamb on the menu that it's impossible

for us to put every little cut on the menu

as an individual standout dish.

So what we thought is that, why don't we just incorporate

and make a lamb butter out of it?

The livers, the offals, they take a lot of time to cook.

So he has that going on.

I see that it's coming up to the consistency

that I wanted at where it is coating my spoon.

So I'm gonna give this a quick taste.

It's exactly where I want it to be. It's not too salty.

This is for the lamb parcha.

So the lamb parcha is hands down

were the most popular dishes on the menu.

It's thinly sliced lamb leg.

It gets slowly simmered in a saffron, cashew paste sauce,

and they get finished off lamb butter.

This has to be the most popular dish that we have.

When we are thinking of a lamb dish, what we are thinking is

how do we give you so much lamb in one flavor

where you're like, okay, I can actually

taste the lamb in this.

This is why Indian food, I feel sometimes gets a bad rep

because you can't distinctively tell and eat each flavor,

and we're trying to kind of break that wall.

I'm gonna go take this to the prep kitchen

and finish processing the lamb butter.

This is basically the service kitchen.

Anything related to cooking happens here.

We don't have any of the big,

bulky equipment like the Magimix and the Robot Coupe

or the KitchenAid in this kitchen.

This gives you the mindset that this is

where the food comes out from.

No big tasks should happen here,

or we have a little relay going on here.

I'm gonna pass off the cook lamb, the offals,

the trimmings off to Shaham

and he's gonna finish off the lamb butter.

I'm gonna start rolling out the dough for the papri chaat.

He finished making out the dough.

It's been resting, the gluten's kind of relaxed.

My old friend, the KitchenAid.

The reason that we don't have the same chaats on the menu

every day is we wanna do something different.

If you came in on a Monday night and you had two chaats,

A and B, when you come back on Thursday night,

the chaats are gonna be C and D.

It gives you that little element of surprise that,

Oh, I wonder what chaats they're doing today.

This is for the papri chaat.

Thin, super crispy wafers made with flour

and clarified butter.

Layers of potato inside of it.

Three chutneys, tamarind and mint chutney,

sweet yogurt, pomegranate all layered up.

So every time this goes to the table,

the one thing we always tell them to do is mix it up

and then have your first bite

'cause it's supposed to feel like

an explosion of flavors in your mouth.

And now I'm just gonna separate up the layers.

Now that the papri dough is done,

I'm gonna hand this over to the cooks who are responsible

for the chaat and they'll give it a fry.

They'll stay fresh and crispy for service.

[groovy music]

It is 1:15 right now

and it is time for me to fix the marinade for the lamb chop.

It's a marinade that's made with ghost chili peppers,

ginger, garlic, mustard oil.

Chef Gurmehr is working right now on the lotus root.

That's the second chaat for the day.

Just look at this.

Isn't that beautiful? That's nature's creation.

Fun fact, Gurmehr and I went to school together

and it's such a privilege having him in the kitchen,

working as my sous chef.

Onto the next task.

I have the marinade with me right now,

as you see super intense, super strong.

Gloves because this is ghost chili

and I do not want to touch my face

even by mistake or rub my eyes.

So I'm gonna give it a quick mix.

This marinade is for the dish, half pound lamb chop.

These beautiful lamb chops that we cut hasselback,

we stuff it with onion

and the marinade goes deep inside those different slits.

'Cause usually what happens is

when you make a lamb chop, right,

all the marination just sits on the top

and the flavor doesn't actually permeate through the lamb.

When we did this, it created slits in the lamb.

So the marinade was able to permeate all the way through

It's good, but it does need that yogurt to like

really, really round off the flavors.

So just Greek yogurt, whisk it in

and then let's see how it tastes.

I'm gonna add a little bit of salt.

So now that this is done, I'm gonna quote this sauce back up

and I'm gonna pass it on to Shiam,

who is gonna then later marinate these lamb chops.

I could use a spatula or I could use my hands.

And as much as it is about the cost point of view,

and as much as I could say that this is probably 70 cents

of yogurt and 70 cents and a 52 is that much,

it's just that it's so delicious

that I don't wanna waste any of it.

The marination is done.

The next thing we are gonna be doing is we are gonna be

making the sauce for the peppercorn bone marrow.

It's a roasted seven-inch bone marrow.

It's finished with this beautiful sauce of curry leaves

and green peppercorn, and it gets served with a side

of bread slathered with coconut butter on top.

I love curry leaves.

I feel they're one of the most indigenous

ingredients to India.

I'm looking for these curry leaves to really soften.

Curry leaves have a fibrous center

that runs through the leaf.

The sauce would come out really grainy

and we had to strain the sauce a lot.

And when we cut the curry leaves really fine

and thin, they soften much faster

and the sauce comes out really nice, green, smooth.

I have this beautiful saute just going on with some oil,

some onions, some ginger,

some green chilies, and some curry leaves.

I'm gonna add a little bit more oil here.

We are an Indian restaurant,

but we have a lot of beef on the menu.

Yes, it's the animal that's worshiped in India

and it's not consumed in probably 70% of the country,

but there is still a population of the country

that consumes the protein.

We just wanted to pay a homage to all the flavors

of the country, not from a particular region,

but through the length and breadth of the country.

I'm gonna add a little bit of turmeric powder, coconut milk.

Yeah, it's perfect.

Cooling the sauce down,

maintains the color of the curry leaves.

The longer this stays hot,

the more the curry leaves will discolor

and that's not gonna make the sauce

look very nice and bright.

[blender whirring]

Look how smooth that is.

This gets taken to the kitchen upstairs, gets finished.

I have a meeting now to attend.

[upbeat music]

I have a meeting with the business development team,

but guess who's here?

The big boss. The big boss. [laughing]

It's the chef owner and the big boss at Adda,

and all of unapologetic Foods actually.

He's been an incredible mentor.

I'm just at his service.

I just come here and you know, I learn from all these guys

as a young team over here, super talented,

and I just come for my own selfish reasons to run from them

and just help him in whatever ways I can.

For someone like him to hand me this restaurant

and be like, you run it the way you want to

and like this is your restaurant.

It's incredible.

I'm gonna head for my meeting, Chef.

So I'll see you.

Thank you. Thank you, Chef.

[Chintan] Thank you. Thank you.

It is 3:30.

I am heading for my meeting with Saadhya and Mike.

Saadhya is the business development

and Mike is the beverage director for the whole group.

Since we've opened up, we've changed a bunch

of the dishes on the menu, including the cocktails.

So when we opened the restaurant,

we had a pre-opening photo shoot,

but some of the dishes are not on the menu anymore.

Some of the dishes have been changed.

We need something of the bhatti da murgh. We have nothing.

We have no picture of this at all.

We've changed the menu so many times.

We've worked so hard on this menu

that having it photographed

and having the food look sexy in the pictures

is very important in luring the guests

and new diners to come into the restaurant

and try something.

And then how many times have you seen a picture somewhere

on the web or Instagram

and... Yeah, exactly.

You're like, I wanna go try this item

and then you come in.

We've changed the Chetney trio,

so we actually have the onion now on,

so we should probably get a new picture of that as well.

Yeah, so just let me know on a date and just let me

and Mike know on a date probably we can loop Aaron in.

[lively music]

It is four o'clock and we are one hour away from service.

This is when you'll see that the kitchen is most chaotic.

I read this beautiful quote, which says,

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

And this is peaceful for us, right?

No guests walking through the door.

It's so peaceful right now.

The more we push right now,

the more peaceful we we will be later.

Being on expo means being the last point of contact

between the food that gets prepared in the kitchen

and before it goes out to the table.

I'm a real particular about the way I like my expo station

set up because everything has to be at an arm's length

or literally two steps away walking from me.

I don't wanna be struggling in the middle of service,

scrambling for this, scrambling for that,

looking for something.

This is my expo, this is my hot holding station,

and this is also my pass.

This is my ticket rail.

I really love a traditional expo ticket system.

I'm a little old fashioned, it's thrilling

and it's very joyful when a dish that goes out

of the kitchen, you get to mark it off.

I feel like the electric way just doesn't give you

that same set of satisfaction.

This is where all the magic happens.

[groovy music]

What I have right now is the team,

every day puts up a little sampling of all the sauces,

all the bases that we have in house,

and I'm gonna taste them.

I'm gonna give my feedback to the team

while they continue doing their work.

This is the time where we can fix it

if something's going wrong.

The tomato chutney needs salt, huh?

Is this is too thick.

So when you do heat it, we're gonna turn it down

with the little of cream.

Just fix those two. The rest is good.

Thank you. Thanks guys.

[groovy music]

It is five o'clock. It's showtime now.

They're coming in now.

This is when the push starts.

So now you'll see a bunch of tickets coming in.

Can I have the sauce please for the bone marrow?

[Sous Chef] Yes, Chef.

Four spoons please.

You have the cauliflower inside.

Yes. Can I have a cauliflower

set up please?

I need the cheese for the cauliflower.

[Neel speaking a foreign language]

These are amazing.

So we use everything in house is from Le Creuset,

but they also have these coasters, which are magnetic.

So what happens is that they get placed on

and then the hotpot directly comes onto these.

So it just catches on and it's perfect.

You don't need to lay out another coaster.

There's no worry about the coaster

slipping on with the hot tray.

Everything's magnetic.

Everything's designed for Le Creuset,

so it's kind of genius.

Other restaurants, food is usually cooked and sauteed

and then it's plated into the bowls.

At Adda, what we do is that everything is fired fresh

to order in the same pots that it's served in.

We wanted to mimic the feeling

that you get when you eat at someone's home

'cause back home in India, when we cook,

the food just came off the stove to your table.

[people chattering]

Nah.

So that wasn't up to temp,

so I had to send it back to the kitchen.

If the temperature's not correct, the time's not correct.

It just gets sent back.

They either refire it, they reheat it.

Nothing leaves the kitchen if it's not

up to the standard that I want it to be at.

And I learned this at Eleven Madison Park, actually,

they would say, Make it nice or do it twice.

And that's the philosophy that we kind of follow here.

These are my two best friends in the kitchen.

This helps me make sure

that everything's up to the correct temperature.

Nothing's going cold.

And this allows me to reheat things

right before it hits the tray.

It's just a simple picnic butane burner,

but so helpful and such a incredible tool.

It's 6:10 PM.

I have a long day, lot more tables coming in.

I need you to get the hell out of here.

You've been great, but I need to focus on work now.

[groovy music]