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Sahib, in Curry Hill, Lets You Eat All Over India
Sahib
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- Sahib
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- Indian
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- 104 Lexington Avenue, Kips Bay
- 646-590-0994
Anybody who tries to tell you that the place to go for Indian food is Jackson Heights, Queens, hasn’t been there in a long time. Beyond question, Jackson Heights is the first stop for anyone seeking an education in the Tibetan syllabus: momos filled with brothy beef under their bellybutton pleats; laphing, noodles neatly rolled and sliced like strudel and set loose in a puddle of chile oil; steaming, salty, bracing cups of yak butter tea. Most of the neighborhood’s places for samosas and naan, though, either are gone or have faded into insignificance.
You less often meet somebody who sends you to Curry Hill for the cooking of India. But it’s the correct answer. Once known mainly for cheap buffet lunches (Haandi, long the reigning champion of the steam table, is still one of Manhattan’s unnatural wonders), Lexington Avenue in the upper 20s has over the past few years become home to the most diverse and concentrated hub of Indian restaurants in New York City.
A disproportionate amount of this diversity is the work of two veteran chefs and restaurateurs. Shiva Natarajan opened one Curry Hill restaurant that paid tribute to Kolkata, particularly its Jewish cuisine; another that showcased food from India’s southwest coast; a third that brought together dishes from the cities of Lucknow and Hyderabad; and a fourth that specialized in the Punjab.
He sold all four to Hemant Mathur two years ago. Together they started working on a fifth, Sahib. It opened in the fall.
More than those other restaurants, one of which has closed, Sahib darts around India. Mr. Natarajan, who worked as the consulting chef, organized the menu around dishes he has been gathering in India while researching a cookbook. He isn’t trying to be encyclopedic, and the menu reflects that; it pays a little bit of attention to several regions and ignores others entirely. This makes it hard to get a firm sense of any one regional style, but easy to enjoy several dishes you may have never seen before.
This may even be true for Indians. Goans might not recognize Sahib’s wonderful blend of fried eggplant stirred into a smoky mash of eggplant that has been softened in a tandoor; the dish, only casually spiced, comes from the northern city of Varanasi, on the Ganges.
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