The tasting menu at Indienne is full of intrigue and painterly flourishes, but only once, at the end, did I hear a collective gasp of delight.
We had just eaten the most classic of petits fours, a tender triangle of blackberry pâte de fruit, elegant ancestor to the gummy but softer, closer to melt than chew. It was as dark as wine and French as can be, until I bit in and tasted kala namak, Indian black salt, sharpening the fruit’s sweetness even as it doubled down on tang and leaving a primordial beat of sulfur in its wake.
To my two companions, both of Bengali descent, this was childhood, the mineral undertone to tart tamarind candies in twists of wax paper and stain-your-teeth kala khatta syrup from pulped black plums, trickled over shaved ice.
We had experienced much of the meal — a modern, at times molecular reimagining of Indian flavors — with muted, tentative admiration. Here, at last, was love. The pâte de fruit was wholly French and then, suddenly, wholly Indian: not fusion, but transformation.
I wished everything on our plates had such clarity.
The chef, Sujan Sarkar, grew up in Kolkata, India, and has had a nomadic career, cooking in Mumbai, Delhi, London and Dubai, and running restaurants in places as far-flung as New York, San Francisco, Phoenix and Columbus, Ohio. When he opened the first Indienne, in Chicago in 2022, fine dining was not the plan, he told me. He wanted the food to revolve around live fire, then learned, mid-construction, that the site would not permit it. The tasting menu was a pivot, and a leap of faith.
Chicagoans approved. Now Mr. Sarkar is testing whether New Yorkers will, too. He’s set up shop in a luxury rental tower in the Hudson Yards area (the former home of Legacy Records), taking over the first two floors, with Indienne and a soon-to-be cocktail lounge above and a Raj-inflected chophouse, Elder, below.
On my first visit, the restaurant’s two conjoined dining rooms, with their antique rose banquettes and walls of eggshell and burgundy, felt curiously inert — occupied but not inhabited, and contextless, like so much of this lab-grown neighborhood. (The Chicago original is more warmly ensconced in a 19th-century warehouse.)
Since then, the music has been funked up and the lights dimmed, bringing on shadows and at least the suggestion of mood. But a sense of disconnect remains, content at odds with form. Some dishes appeal to the mind, others to the heart. The two don’t always coincide.
There’s a bit of promising hocus-pocus at the start, as the menu name-checks familiar street foods for amuse-bouches that turn out to be anything but. The hollow orb of pani puri is reconfigured as an oyster half-shell on a bed of reindeer moss. Bhel, that shaggy mix of crunchy puffed rice and chutneys, gets pared down to two sleek black rice wafers sandwiched around avocado semifreddo. (Yes, this is a dead ringer for a mint Oreo, and for a moment I tasted chocolate that wasn’t there.)
A porous cube of dhokla, a Gujarati steamed cake, is neither steamed nor cake. Instead, the traditional ingredients of chickpea flour, mustard seeds, curry leaves and green chiles are infused into cocoa butter, tinged with white chocolate, then aerated and immersed in an ice bath.
The ideas are interesting. But the not-dhokla proves brittle instead of spongy, which is the snack’s essential character. The semifreddo registers as simply cold, temperature trumping flavor. Somewhere in the faux oyster shell is a real, raw oyster, hidden under tamarind chutney, but I detected no plump slipperiness, and what is an oyster without texture?
Fortunately, as the dishes grow slightly larger, so do their pleasures. Technical tricks find purpose, as with a disk of yogurt dipped in liquid nitrogen for a crystal-free finish and immaculate snap. You crack it with a spoon and keep going, down into a thick pour of rhubarb, raspberry and rose, all summer sweet-sourness and phantom scent.
An egg in a “nest” (here crispy potato) gets no points for originality, but is frankly delicious. The egg is gently steamed at low temperature until it achieves that perfect just-past-liquid yolk, and set over a curry foam studded with peas, popping bright.
Three inches of shucked lobster tail are expertly charred over coal, every ridge caramelized. A delicate and very small lamb shami kebab comes brushed in lamb fat and pillowy enough to lull a carnivorous fairy to sleep, alongside a knuckle’s worth of lamb rib, poached in milk, Kashmiri style, and anointed with a fermented pomegranate glaze whose dark sweetness is pure American barbecue.
I appreciated the daintiness of the servings; better to be left wanting more, rather than stupefied, as happens so often with tasting menus. But the last course was heavy and overwrought: chicken three ways, terrine-like layers of poached breast, minced thigh and mousseline, all squish, cream and not quite chicken-y, unredeemed even by the excellent butter chicken sauce below.
I found myself questioning the very mission of the meal — the notion of elevation, shoehorning Mr. Sarkar’s vivid cooking to fit a dogmatic vision of what haute cuisine must be. The French strike again.
And yet Mr. Sarkar’s exuberance still shines through. He makes one of the best breads in town, marrying fluffy pao to sinkingly rich brioche and rolling it like babka, through caramelized onions and ginger. His vegetarian tasting — including a heady butternut squash sambar (stew) and a kebab of celeriac, confited and smoked until dense and velvety — goes head-to-head with its meaty counterpart.
The end is all charm: a silver-leafed peanut butter sandwich, only with cashew butter, pistachio fudge and vanilla sponge; a tart of puckery mishti doi, yogurt-turned-custard; a jolt of coffee sealed inside a chocolate shell, with a bitter heart of chicory. (The pastry chef is Shagun Mittal McNorton.)
The wines on hand stand up well to the potent flavors. But I’d choose the spirit-free pairing every time, each drink made in-house, with bright gulps of calamansi, brewed mushrooms, toasty hojicha or musky Darjeeling, smacking of cloves.
One late night, the music veered from R&B to hazy Bangla disco jazz. “Moja, bhari moja,” sang Rupa Biswas, who cut one brilliant record in 1982 and was rediscovered only a decade ago. “It’s yummy!” one of my companions exclaimed, then clarified that she was translating: “Moja” means “fun,” but in the right situations, also “delicious.” Surely, in English, we could use such a word.
Ligaya Mishan, our chief critic based in New York City, writes starred reviews of restaurants in New York and beyond. Tejal Rao, our chief critic based in Los Angeles, writes starred reviews of restaurants nationwide. Briefer starred reviews of New York restaurants are written by our contributing critics Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton, and first appear weekly in the Where to Eat newsletter (subscribe here).
Dining and Cooking