Chef Vijaya is one of a kind

It’s a funny thing, but in all of New York City, there is only one Indian restaurant with a Michelin star.

And that’s been true for the last three years. Contrast this with London, where six Indian restaurants have a Michelin star each, and one restaurant (Gymkhana) has two.

 

Is the Indian food in New York so bad? Most foodies will say it isn’t, and will tell you that New York’s Indian restaurants have been discriminated against by Michelin. They will tell you there are at least three that easily deserve a star (Bungalow, Dhamaka, Indian Accent), and that Michelin finds reasons to overlook them.

 

   But knee-jerk generalisations aren’t always accurate. For years, it was said that the New York Michelin inspectors did not understand chilli or spice, hence the bias against Indian food. That explanation no longer fits. Because of the very spicy food served at the one restaurant that actually does have a star: Semma.

 

   You may have heard of Semma. There was a new round of excitement when it was recently announced that it had retained its star for a third year. And yet, nothing one has heard prepares you for the first experience of this restaurant. It is not a fancy establishment. It is comfortable and cheerful and makes no attempt to look like a Michelin-starred eatery.

 

   The first thing one notices is how much everyone is enjoying themselves.

 

   The second: How Semma has dispensed with the whole idea of fancy modern Indian cuisine. One of its bestsellers is a classic Masala Dosa. Other dishes may be unfamiliar to most of us. The restaurant’s speciality is a casserole of heavily spiced snails. Also popular is a dish made from goat intestines.

 

   The third thing you notice at Semma is that, unlike most Michelin-starred restaurants, where much is made of the chef, here you will be lucky to catch a glimpse of Vijaya Kumar in the dining room. A shy man, he is happiest toiling away in his kitchen, focusing on the food. He has to be prodded into going out to meet his guests.

 

   Shy or not, Vijaya is now contented, fulfilled. He was 40 when Semma first got its star, so he was not particularly old. Dig into his career, though, and it becomes clear that, despite the appearance of instant success, it has been a long, hard journey to this point.

 

   Vijaya was born into a poor family in a small town near Madurai, Tamil Nadu. His father had a government job that did not pay enough for the family to survive on, so his mother supplemented that income by helping out at her parents’ farm.

 

   Vijaya’s earliest memories, he says, are of that farm. At school, he was talented and hardworking, and dreamed of becoming an engineer. “Like all South Indian boys,” he says, laughing. He did secure admission to an engineering college, but as he had feared, his parents couldn’t afford the fees.

 

   As a fallback, he had applied to catering school. It wasn’t what he wanted, he says, but it was cheaper. Some of his classmates mocked him. “So you came first in school only so you could learn how to be a cook?” they said.

 

"Vijaya’s menu was daring. He had spent long enough making food that attempted to straddle two continents. He wanted now to reproduce his mother’s cooking."

   Vijaya had no choice, so he persevered, finding a job at the coffee shop of the Chennai Taj Connemara after he graduated. It was a good training ground, but when a better-paid cruise ship offer came along, he switched jobs. Though he was now earning more, and could send money home, he remembers the work on the ship boring and frustrating.

 

   His fortunes changed when a friend told him about a job at an Indian restaurant in America, which came with a coveted work visa. He grabbed the offer and then found a better opportunity in San Francisco, cooking at the south Indian restaurant Dosa until he was poached by Rasa, one of the best-known Indian restaurants on the West Coast. Rasa even got a Michelin star, but Vijaya wasn’t happy.

 

   Which was odd, because he’d done extremely well. When he joined the catering college, he didn’t speak a word of English and yet here he was! Somehow, he says, it didn’t seem enough.

 

   "What was I doing with Rasa?” he adds. “I was cooking modified Indian food for white people. It was not my food; it was not the food I had grown up eating.”

 

   It was at this point that he met Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya of Unapologetic Foods. They were the toast of New York for Dhamaka opened in 2021, which offered real Indian food, packed with authentic flavours and masalas. Vijaya had heard of Dhamaka. When he spoke to Mazumdar and Pandya, he says, he realised he had found kindred souls.

 

   They had no great job to offer him. They wanted to start a south Indian restaurant, and Vijaya could be the chef if he wanted, they said. He wouldn’t be walking into a successful enterprise. He would have to try to set one up.

 

   Vijaya says he didn’t hesitate. He quit his job at Rasa, piled his belongings into his car, and drove across America from San Francisco to New York.

 

   He was surprised when Mazumdar and Pandya, who is a chef himself, told him he was free to design the menu. He realised he was in the right place, he adds, when he discovered that Pandya, a Gujarati, was a fan of south Indian cinema. The name Semma (Tamil for awesome or excellent) came from Pandya.

 

   Vijaya’s menu was daring. He had spent long enough making food that attempted to straddle two continents. He wanted now to reproduce his mother’s cooking.

 

   Because his family had very little money, they had foraged for ingredients, and eaten the parts of animals that others did not want. So, he put a goat-intestine dish on the menu.

 

   When Mazumdar and Pandya encouraged him to serve a childhood favourite, the snail casserole, he realised he could cook, at Semma, the kind of food that no Indian restaurant in America had ever served.

 

   Semma was a success from the day it opened. There was a queue for the very first service. Guests came because of Pandya and Mazumdar, but stayed for Vijaya’s food.

 

  Then the reviews started flowing in. Eater, The New York Times and everyone else hailed Vijaya’s menu. People he admired — from Padma Lakshmi to Vikas Khanna — praised his restaurant. He was completely overwhelmed, he says.

 

   When he received an email saying he had won an award from Bon Appetit magazine, he burst into tears. At the end of Semma’s first year, the Michelin star arrived.

 

   Why has Semma got a star when so many other good Indian restaurants in this city have not? Vijaya says he does not know. He cares about only one thing: He wanted to show the world that the food eaten in the villages of Tamil Nadu was as great a cuisine as you could find anywhere. He would make no compromises, not with the spices and not with the presentation. And he thinks now that he may have done it.

 

   Which, of course, he has. Like the snails he loves so much, he has worked steadily to get where he is. And like Semma itself, Vijaya is one of a kind.