“When I started cooking, I never thought a dark-skinned boy from Tamil Nadu could make it to a room like this.”
Chef Vijay Kumar’s poignant speech on winning the James Beard Awards, 2025, for best chef in New York State, is especially powerful because it celebrates a huge change in attitude towards Indians and Indian food, and more specifically South Indians and South Indian food — a change that has been tirelessly fought for in Indian, and foreign kitchens for decades. Semma, set in New York City’s trendy Greenwich, is bright and buzzy, with a menu that embraces the food Vijay grew up eating in Natham, near Madurai, where his parents still live.
For a long time, Indian cooking abroad was dismissed as spicy, greasy and generic, with curry houses serving an amalgamation of vaguely Punjab-inspired food: vivid bowls of butter chicken, spicy vindaloo and ‘naan bread.’
Growing up in Natham, Vijay’s cooking and palate was moulded by his grandmother, with whom he spent his summer holidays. “My grandparents lived in Arasampatti, where there wasn’t even a bus. We would go there on school holidays, and we were not such a rich family, so they kept us busy with fishing, hunting and searching for snails,” he told me, in an earlier interview, when Semma first opened.
Nathai pirattal at Semma
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After a stint at the Taj Connemara in Chennai, Vijay had moved to the US where he worked as a sous chef in Virginia, cooked at the popular Dosa in San Francisco, and then worked with Rasa, a contemporary Indian restaurant in California with one Michelin star.
Backed by Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya, who run the popular restaurants Dhamaka and Adda in New York, Vijay was given the space to cook food that he really believed in, without making the once-mandatory adjustments for western palates. When Semma launched in 2021, his grandmother’s nathai pirattal, snails spiked with ginger and tamarind, served with kal dosa helmed the menu — a dish that would be unfamiliar even in most mainstream Indian restaurants.
New York loved it. The Indian community rallied around Vijay, and the restaurant, becoming its greatest flag bearers. Semma also became an inadvertent ambassador for South India in America.
When I met him in New York, at Semma, where it is next to impossible to get a reservation now (the perks of hanging out with chefs!), the restaurant was buzzy with cheer, as Indians and Americans tucked into spicy gun powder dosas and slow cooked lamb curry with flavours deepened by black cardamom, mace and Telicherry pepper.
Dindigul mutton biryani at Semma
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Special Arrangement
In his acceptance speech at the James Beard Awards, Vijay said, “The food I grew up on, the food made with care, with fire, with soul is now taking the mainstage. There is no such thing as a poor person’s food, or a rich person’s food. It’s food. It’s powerful. And the real luxury is to be able to connect with each other around the dinner table.”
He walks the talk. At Semma, I watched him chat with diners, making genuine connections, between ducking into the kitchen to cook. When dinner ended, he joined us outside, chatting with newly made friends as they clambered into their cars, clutching takeaway bags of warm, fragrant Dindigul biryani. As the restaurant closed after yet another packed night, he looked tired, but happy. “What I cook is unapologetically Indian,” he said, “I won’t tone down spice, I won’t change anything.”
It is a reassuring message for not just scores of Indians who have moved abroad and feel they need to change who they are, and what they eat to fit in, but really anyone who is fighting to be accepted.
“Tonight, Indian cuisine stands tall. Tamil food stands tall,” said Vijay, to a rousing round of applause and whistles, at the James Beard stage. He added, “My own food and my heritage stand tall, and it all matters. I stand here for everyone who never thought their story belongs on a stage like this.”
Published – June 18, 2025 01:08 pm IST