Indian restaurants in New York City go back over a century, and Times Square was an early hotspot. Perhaps the most famous was the paradoxically named Taj Mahal Hindu Indian Restaurant, founded in 1918 at 242 West 42nd Street at Eighth Avenue, when many South Asian students, businesspeople, dock workers, and sailors lived in nearby boarding houses. The New York Times mentioned it glowingly.
The Best Indian Restaurants in NYC
A selection of outstanding spots serving the subcontinent’s diverse cuisine throughout New York City
Midtown remained the main repository of Indian restaurants, as curries migrated onto the menus of more restaurants and hotels. By the 1970s, there were many steam table establishments serving Punjabi fare in various parts of the city, ladling rice, curries, and tandoori items into compartmentalized plates.
Then along came a plethora of Indian restaurants in places like Jackson Heights, Murray Hill, and Utopia Parkway (also in Jersey), with sit-down spots offering regional specialties. Eventually, we had restaurants dedicated to individual dishes like biryani and dosas, the food of a single city or region, and Mumbai and Kolkata street snacks. Finally, a new variety of luxury establishments appeared, offering more creative and nuanced takes on classic dishes as well as some invented ones, along with strong cocktails, attracting a whole new generation of diners.
The Best Indian Restaurants in NYC
A selection of outstanding spots serving the subcontinent’s diverse cuisine throughout New York City
Indian restaurants in New York City go back over a century, and Times Square was an early hotspot. Perhaps the most famous was the paradoxically named Taj Mahal Hindu Indian Restaurant, founded in 1918 at 242 West 42nd Street at Eighth Avenue, when many South Asian students, businesspeople, dock workers, and sailors lived in nearby boarding houses. The New York Times mentioned it glowingly.
Midtown remained the main repository of Indian restaurants, as curries migrated onto the menus of more restaurants and hotels. By the 1970s, there were many steam table establishments serving Punjabi fare in various parts of the city, ladling rice, curries, and tandoori items into compartmentalized plates.
Then along came a plethora of Indian restaurants in places like Jackson Heights, Murray Hill, and Utopia Parkway (also in Jersey), with sit-down spots offering regional specialties. Eventually, we had restaurants dedicated to individual dishes like biryani and dosas, the food of a single city or region, and Mumbai and Kolkata street snacks. Finally, a new variety of luxury establishments appeared, offering more creative and nuanced takes on classic dishes as well as some invented ones, along with strong cocktails, attracting a whole new generation of diners.
Baazi
This two-story, bright-blue space on the Upper West Side emphasizes hard-to-find regional recipes from India’s northern and southern regions, including Goa and Kolkata. Dishes include chicken sirka pyaaz laced with pickled onions; goat bihari in spiced buttermilk stew; and seven-leaf saag paneer.
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Jaz Indian Cuisine
Jaz Rupall founded this Hell’s Kitchen restaurant focusing on Northern Indian cooking with a Balti spin (a style of Indian cooking popular in the U.K.). On the menu, find a chicken shahi korma (with a cashew and almond sauce), mango shrimp grilled in the tandoor, and skewers of lamb shashlik rubbed with spices. The place is fancier than the usual Hell’s Kitchen restaurant — there are prix fixe options for lunch and dinner.
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Javitri
For decades, the Upper East Side has been a destination for Indian dining, but this newer restaurant takes the cuisine in unexpected directions. Javitra concentrates on Northern Indian cooking, which means meals might begin with an assortment of chutneys and snacks, then on to main courses of flame-grilled kebabs, curries, or biryanis — the latter offering five varieties, including jackfruit.
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Hyderabadi Zaiqa
The Eater Award-winning casual walk-down restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen specializes in Hyderabadi fare, with biryanis being the principal focus. Try the mango-flavored avakai chicken biryani, or goat fry biryani. Other southern Indian specialties abound, including a bang-up version of Chettinad chicken and a Malabar shrimp curry with plenty of coconut milk. There’s a new location with a bigger menu offering table service near Kips Bay.
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Temple Canteen
Founded in 1993 and located in the basement of Flushing’s Ganesh temple, this place serves a strictly vegetarian menu of South Indian dishes. That means multiple varieties of dosa, plus uttapam with a choice of stuffings, and idlis in several formats. There are vegetable curries and rice, too, in a family-friendly setting. Remove your shoes to visit the Hindu temple upstairs, where everyone is welcome.
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Veerays
Veerays is one of the most unusual Indian restaurants the city has yet seen, with a menu that incorporates inventions into conventional Indian fare, and serves strong cocktails as a matter of course. The East Midtown place styles itself as a speakeasy — there’s no sign at the front door other than a “V” — and adopts a Prohibition theme, complete with references to The Great Gatsby. Pheasant and camel are on the menu.
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Angel Indian Restaurant
The Jackson Heights restaurant — convenient to all the subway trains in the neighborhood — offers a full complement of vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes, mainly from northern India. Its pastry-topped dum biryani is available with goat or vegetables, both equally good. Anything incorporating the homemade paneer is also recommended. It expanded with a second restaurant also in Jackson Heights, over the summer.
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Cardamom
Located on a side street in Sunnyside, this charming spot specializes in the food of Goa, which has its own distinct cuisine that sometimes features ingredients like red wine and pork. The menu is geographically broad-ranging, with kebabs, biryanis, and curries.
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Oh! Calcutta
Taking its name from a racy Broadway musical, Long Island City restaurant Oh! Calcutta dives into the food of Kolkata, the West Bengal metropolis right on the border of Bangladesh. The mustard oil flows here like a river, found in the mango and cucumber-filled aamer chutney as well as the Bengali goat curry, kosha mangsho.
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Vatan
A prix fixe, all-you-can-eat, vegetarian (and kosher) Gujarati meal is the focus of this Murray Hill fixture owned for decades by Prashant Shah. The entire premises is made to look like an Indian village, where there’s seating inside a small building, on a balcony, or beneath a spreading banyan tree.
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Sahib
The Rose Hill restaurant travels all over northern India to collect recipes. There are four kinds of bone-in goat curry alone, including one from Kashmir and another from Kolkata, which is a good measure of the seriousness of an Indian restaurant. The vegetarian dishes keep pace with the meat-bearing ones, including paneer kali murch in a creamy black pepper sauce, and achari bhindi: okra flavored with tart Indian pickles. This is one of a handful of chef Hemant Mathur’s Fine Indian Dining group’s restaurants in Manhattan.
Liz Barclay/Eater NY
Saravanaa Bhavan
This massive international restaurant chain, founded in 1981 by P. Rajagopa, now boasts branches in Manhattan, with this one in Rose Hill and the other on the Upper West Side. The menu focuses on the strictly vegetarian dishes of South India, and goes further than the usual dosas and idlis. There’s bisi bele baath, a vegetable-studded rice dish.
Robert Sietsema/Eater NY
Passerine
The Union Square restaurant from chef Chetan Shetty focuses on high-end regional Indian cuisines in the former Sona space. The Drawing Room — aka the lounge — serves snacks like chile-garlic chakli and tuna papdi chaat. The main dining room spans the country, from the Kolhapuri chicken bao, Bengali beef nihari, to the monkfish with Konkani curry. There are tasting menu options too.
Passerine
Kanyakumari
The Eater Award-winning Union Square restaurant — whose name stems from a town at the southern tip of the subcontinent — offers a refreshing take on the regional Indian cuisine. It treats its menu like a seagoing voyage along the coastline, mainly from Kerala to Mumbai, making stops along the way at places like Goa, Karnataka, and Maharashtra, where chef Dipesh Shinde is from, offering Malvani chicken. Every dish here is a geographic adventure.
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GupShup
With a name that means essentially “idle talk,” this Flatiron restaurant took the neighborhood by storm when it opened in 2018, slinging opulent dishes with elaborate platings, along with strong cocktails and a decor that is, at times, playful and garish. Like other places intent on delivering Indian food into the realm of fine dining, it tweaked flavors in stylish offerings with international references, like charcoal-grilled salmon tikka with cream cheese and jackfruit tacos, sometimes featuring specialties like paneer and pineapple tikka.
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Semma
The southern Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu — where chef Vijay Kumar is from — are the menu focuses of the award-winning Unapologetic Foods restaurant in the West Village. It’s a really wonderful West Village spot from the team of Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya. It wows with dishes like the Goanese oxtail and the paniyaram, little rice and lentil cakes. The gunpowder dosa is one of the best in town. Be sure to check out the group’s other restaurants, ranging from the Eastern Indian-Bengali Masalawala & Sons in Park Slope to the recently relocated pan-Indian regional Adda in East Village.
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Bungalow
Bungalow, in the former Lucky Cheng’s space in the southern reaches of the East Village, caused a sensation when it opened in 2024. The chef is Vikas Khanna, who had worked at Junoon. His food is richly flavored and colorful, and — in the case of appetizers like purple sweet potato chaat and spice-roasted pineapples — totally Instagram-ready. The setting is L-shaped, sofa-strewn, and luxurious.
Andrei Severny/Bungalow
Indika House
Located in a corner of Bushwick beneath the clattering elevated tracks, this restaurant is decorated with colorful floor-to-ceiling murals of flowers, elephants, the Taj Mahal, and other Indian landmarks. The menu is broad, from commonplace dishes like butter chicken and lamb curry, to rarer regional viands like lamb gassi, a recipe from Mangalore laced with coconut milk and tamarind, making for a haunting sweetness.
Robert Sietsema/Eater NY
