Roni Mazumdar: When we started, the goal was to share who we are with the world. Our community and cuisine have been misunderstood for a long time. We’ve either served a generic version — your Chicken Tikka Masala with heavy cream and “mild, medium, or hot” spice levels — or we’ve modernised it with techniques from other cuisines, thinking ours wasn’t good enough. That’s the very notion we wanted to break through, which is how we can stand on our own feet and take pride in who we are.

Today, Noma is conducting fermentation and writing books about it, and the rest of the world is applauding, which is incredible. However, at the same time, that same fermentation has been going on for thousands of years in India, and we dismiss it as just another dosa. It’s not. There’s so much more to it.

If you talk about the beginning, it’s for the first time that we are taking ownership of who we are, taking pride in our cuisine, and building a sense of empowerment for the next generation of chefs. Even today, it isn’t that we work with a specific number in mind or that we need to have 20 or 50 restaurants. That doesn’t measure success for us.

Roni Mazumdar: If we were to pinpoint a time when there was an inflexion point in our cuisine in this country (USA), it was Adda. It has always been a gamble. Even today, it feels like a gamble. If people knew that something like Adda would strike a chord the way it did, there would have been a thousand Addas before us.

We had absolutely no idea of the kind of reaction and the potential and the possibility that Adda would create by changing the concept of Indian cuisine.

I don’t think any of us had a clue. We were building something for the first time. It was the first time Chef Chintan (Pandya) wasn’t looking to please others. He was cooking because he believed in the authenticity of Indian food.

Chintan Pandya: There was no inspiration or anything behind it. It was something that I thought we ate regularly in India. It’s part of our culture; it’s part of our life. We wanted it on the menu to showcase our culture.

In the last 10 to 15 years, the Western world has been talking about the concept of nose-to-tail eating, but we have been doing it all our lives. Did we ever publicise it? No! I think we are bad at publicising and marketing our culture, community, and food. That’s what we have been bad at.

Roni Mazumdar: We are drawing inspiration from our homes and our own local roots, without worrying about how it might be judged and justified.

Chintan Pandya: We don’t compromise. If you’re from Bengal and I serve you sorshe bata maachh or kosha mangsho, my job is to make it taste as it should in Kolkata — maybe even better than it tastes in Kolkata. That’s it. We focus on making sure that the integrity of the dish is as close to India as possible.

Roni Mazumdar: To add to that — Italian chefs don’t change pasta to make us happy. Japanese chefs don’t put mustard or kasundi on sushi rolls for Bengalis. Yet Indians have often apologised for our food. I believe it has to do with our colonial past. That’s why we’re called Unapologetic Foods. We are done apologising for who we are. We refuse to tone down a dish to make it more palatable. Our Champaran meat has a whole head of garlic in it because that’s precisely where the essence of a Champaran dish is! If kosha mangsho comes out blackened, so be it. Our cuisine is excellent. It’s time the world recognised that.

Roni Mazumdar: We appreciate it, but I don’t think we set out on this journey to pat ourselves on the back. Awards are wonderful validations. Semma has held a Michelin star for nearly three years now, and, incredibly, the world is finally noticing.

Chef Vijay (Kumar) is working with snails, and he used to have coated intestines on the menu. There are certain things we cannot source that prevent us from pushing things even further.

Awards aren’t the North Star we look at. Awards and accolades can change people, and we are cautious about that. We don’t let it affect us too much. Our focus is always on telling our story with integrity.

Chintan Pandya: Media sells drama. It’s too animated. It’s too stretched. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m not a big fan of it. It exaggerates the reality of professional kitchens and sends the wrong message to young chefs that this is how the entire restaurant industry is. It’s toxic. It actually does a disservice to our profession.

Awards are part of the journey, not the final destination. If that’s all you chase, you’ll never achieve it. For us, the goal is excellence — everything else follows.

Chintan Pandya: I really don’t have a clear answer for you. You have to be in the right place at the right time in front of the right people. That is precisely what happened with us. When we opened Adda, we were just two people, two human beings trying to build a restaurant that would sustain us, our team, and our families. Everything else happened naturally. If you had asked me 20 years ago, I might have had a completely different plan. So, I genuinely don’t have a definitive answer for that.

Roni Mazumdar: If you look to the future, the future of our cuisine lies in regionalism. In every shape or form, I ask this question over and over. How much do you know about the cuisine of Bihar, Meghalaya, or Odisha? What is “mainstream” Indian food? Is it Punjabi food? Not really! It’s something we created that supposedly exists in restaurants, and we call it “mainstream” Indian food. We don’t do that with French, Italian, or Chinese cuisines. We are creating and perpetuating a narrative that shouldn’t exist.

Chintan Pandya: I’ll give you an example. Something that worries me a lot, as a Chef and an Indian Chef, is the loss of the art of mithai-making. You have these young people in India who want to open pastry shops, but nobody wants to open a mithai shop because they think it’s not glamorous. At some point in the next 25-30 years, the art of making mithai will diminish more and more. A halwai who has a mithai shop is not going to make his children study to become a halwai, but if they say they want to be a pastry chef, he’ll say, “Yeah, you should pursue that.”

I often think about that, and I’m genuinely very proud of what the Bombay Sweet Shop is doing. It’s a phenomenal thing that will elevate our cuisine and make a very talented team. India needs at least 70-80 such individuals across the country.

Roni Mazumdar: And that’s just mithai. Consider how many Indian chefs go abroad to learn about other cuisines that excite them more and never return to cook our own. Or when they do, they try to adapt Indian food instead of learning and applying our own principles, which may have been developed over centuries and could be taken to the world stage. I think what’s interesting about my conversations with Chintan is that he is very proud of the fact that he has only ever cooked classical Indian cuisine and learned that craft over the course of his entire career.

Roni Mazumdar: Never say never. But India already has its own cuisines. The rest of the world doesn’t. Our mission right now is to tell our stories abroad — to showcase our food in some of the USA’s largest metropolitan cities, and maybe even the UK. But like I said, never say never. Time will tell.

Roni Mazumdar: Sarbhaja (a traditional Bengali sweet prepared by frying full-fat cream in clarified butter). I’m headed to Goa in a couple of days, and my friend from Kolkata is coming to meet me. He just texted me and said, “What do you want me to bring?” And I told him, “Bring me sarbhaja.”

I couldn’t find a good one in Kolkata the last time I visited. The sarbhaja that sweetshops sell is not the real thing. It’s not the version I grew up with, and it’s something I have craved for a long time.

Chintan Pandya: Vegetables. The vegetables you get here don’t have the same depth of flavour as the vegetables you get back home. The vegetables in India taste very different. In terms of meat, chicken, and seafood, America is far ahead. So if I could somehow have the same kind of vegetables here, that would be a dream come true.