Restaurants & Food
The Best Indian Restaurants in Houston
India’s serves the usual tikka masala as well as specialties like chicken Ceylon and Goan fish curry.
The breadth and depth of Houston’s Indian food scene is hard to beat. The city offers exceptional choices for traditional North Indian cuisine, as well as restaurants specializing in South and West Indian dishes, high-end and playful fusions, and dessert shops and breakfast spots. From the seafood dishes of Goa to the menu options from recently opened Kitchen Rumors, here’s a guide to the best Indian restaurants in Houston.
Houstonia has updated this map to include the recently opened restaurant Kitchen Rumors.
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The India’s Restaurant buffet has been a Houston staple since the 1980s.
The chile-pepper string lights of First Avenue, two stories’ worth of them, have long been the beacon of the East Village’s Indian-food corridor, the compact shorthand to generations of New Yorkers for the whole variegated sub-continental cuisine. (When a friend of mine first moved to town, he frequented a restaurant he only ever knew as “Chile Pepper.”) It’s no huge slight to these restaurants to say that in the years since they first appeared, the Indian-food scene has expanded dramatically in variety and quality, and now we are enjoying a masala boom. Jazba, Kanyakumari, Passerine, and Chatti have all opened in the past couple of years. Our Assam runneth over.
At the forefront of this charge is Unapologetic Foods, the restaurant group that opened Adda Indian Canteen in Long Island City in 2018. In the most diverse and most Indian borough, Adda was cheap and cheerful but no less ambitious or uncompromising for that. The ecstatic reception of Adda led to the opening of Dhamaka in 2021 and, later that year, Semma, with a style closer to fine dining. Like Junoon before them, where Unapologetic’s executive chef, Chintan Pandya, once cooked, these restaurants yanked Indian food to echelons, and neighborhoods, where it had often been unfairly overlooked. Now they seem as Manhattan as any of their neighbors. On a recent Friday night, waits at Semma were hours long; I spotted Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the great comic actress Poorna Jagannathan gliding to their tables.
So when Unapologetic decided this year to move Adda to a storefront on First Avenue — Chile Pepper Way — it felt like a statement of purpose. Adda has now been reconfigured from its scrappier origins into a recognizable sibling of Semma and Dhamaka. “Long Island City was version one, but this isn’t version two,” Pandya told me. “It’s version eight, nine, or ten.”
What Unapologetic has managed to do is to take the lessons learned at its blockbuster hits and apply them to its firstborn without softening its focus. It hasn’t bowdlerized or gentrified much in the move from Queens. Pandya has always insisted on serving a number of dishes that might cow timid diners: testicles and kidneys at Dhamaka, snails and intestines at Semma, and goat brains here at Adda — with enough success that the night I tried to order it, it had sold out. Even then, Pandya is a chef willing to meet many of his customers where they are. “We couldn’t go to Manhattan without butter chicken,” he said.
So this Adda’s calling card is a reservation-only $42-per-person Butter Chicken Experience. Adda doesn’t stint on bells and whistles — rolling chutney carts followed by pretty chaatwallas with cigarette-girl trays of street-food chaats (fried lotus root one day, potato another) — but the BCE is its maximal expression. Performed tableside, it’s almost more experience than chicken: a tin-can smoker for the bird (with a choice of wood chips) and a customized sauce built on a cart in front of diners’ eyes. Butter is a non-negotiable, of course, but which butter? You’ll taste three — pickled tomato, fenugreek, and smoked chile — before deciding which will be melted, with yet more unaccented butter, into your sauce, plus more to crown the finished plate. The usual cuboid hunks of breast meat are here a halved or quartered chicken, which moves, post-smoking, into a tableside Le Creuset (everything at Adda is Le Creuset, like an influencer fantasy) to meet tomatoes, butter, cream, and more honey than I needed to know about.
(I stopped counting dipper lashings at three.) The result is so richly creamy, so thick with butter, that my lips were moisturized by the third bite. It’s recognizably a relation of the butter chicken of a million Seamless orders but more yielding and flapping dangerously close to too rich and too sweet. It is saved by a slow creep of chile heat and a blessedly earthy sidecar of dal.
Butter chicken may be a Manhattan prerequisite, but I don’t believe it’s the best way to experience Adda. The restaurant still has to do some of the work of luring unaccustomed diners to its wilder ways — “I think I like this better with my eyes closed,” admitted a friend while drinking his shochu-and-yogurt Raita cocktail — but greater rewards await them on the other side. I’d run back for Adda’s baby-goat biryani (scraggly shreds of braised leg hidden among the sweetly frizzled onions in a fluffy tower of basmati rice) or the paneer khurchan (a ruddy, brick-red stew of homemade cheese in a sprightly coriander-brightened tomato-and-pepper sauce). I’ll confess to a fondness for the squeaky cheese cubes of more workaday places, but Adda’s paneer doesn’t so much melt in your mouth as it scatters like a cloud. The chef de cuisine, Neel Kajale, boasts that if anyone can make a more tender paneer than his, he’ll comp their meal. The paneer comes from the vegetarian menu, which could float its own restaurant.
Not every dish rises to these heights. A coconut-curry stew, served with a choice of fish — sea bass, mackerel, or the more authentically Indian pomfret — was tough and bony. (The latter is the fish’s fault, but the former is the restaurant’s.) What should have been a showstopper shank of lamb, which a server hoists to standing with a skewer, the better to appreciate the braised meat falling off the bone, was indeed succulent and gamy in its korma-spiced cashew sauce, but it needed more spice to balance its chocolaty richness.
These are nits, not tragedies, quickly assuaged with the swoop of a flaky fried paratha through any and every dish of sauce, and if anything is not spicy or sharp enough, there’s always the ready adulteration of one’s chosen chutneys: “the Indian salt and pepper,” as the chutney-cart driver will remind you.
The long railroad-style space is festive and bright with the usual Unapologetic décor — Indian-newspaper-headline wallpaper abutting prismatic walls — and a bubbly Hindi soundtrack. Drinks are given more priority than at the other restaurants with a longer and judiciously chosen wine list, house beers made in collaboration with Brooklyn’s Transmitter Brewing, and a number of involved themed cocktails. (I didn’t bring myself to order the $32 trio of chutney-inspired cocktails, including an onion-flavored one, and there’s a $36 special to complement the butter chicken that’s only available with the Experience.) It all suggests that despite Unapologetic’s significant corporate footprint (in addition to the restaurants already mentioned, the group runs Naks nearby, the Rowdy Rooster, Masalawala & Sons in Brooklyn, and a biryani-delivery service), it hasn’t resorted to merely syndicating itself. Adda isn’t set to unseat Semma as the jewel in the company’s crown. Given its homier ambitions, that’s likely by design. It’s a welcome addition in its own right, and a happy elevation of the old Indian corridor. There’s not a chile light to be found, but might one be ripe for reclamation?
What About LIC?
Unapologetic isn’t leaving Queens. Instead, the original Adda space is being turned into a company testing lab and catering arm.
Just Two Desserts
Chocolate-dipped kulfi pops are less sweet; a puddingy milk-solids cake with butterscotch ice cream is more extreme.
Next Up
Pandya says that the rejiggering of Dhamaka — now smaller, thanks to the closure of Essex Market — is in the offing soon.
Sapphire Foods India, which operates Pizza Hut and KFC restaurants in the country, reported a quarterly loss on Wednesday, as fast-food restaurant chains face stiff competition from local cafes and online kitchens.
The restaurant operator posted a net loss of 18 million rupees ($208,345.39) for the first quarter ended June 30, compared to a profit of 85.2 million rupees a year earlier, according to a regulatory filing.
($1 = 86.3950 Indian rupees)
Making Fine Dining Accessible
A native of Kolkata, Sarkar began his career in Mumbai before moving to London, where he spent 11 years honing his skills. He eventually became head chef at Automat at age 27, then opened the exclusive Almada next door.
From there, Sarkar moved to San Francisco, where he helped concept and open the upscale Indian restaurant Rooh. Multiple Rooh locations followed, including Chicago—where he ultimately left to open his own restaurant, Indienne, with the goal of proving that high-quality Indian cuisine can still be approachable.
Unlike many high-end establishments, Sarkar has deliberately kept Indienne’s pricing accessible—a decision inspired by Mexico City’s Pujol. “We share the same philosophy,” he says of Pujol chef-owner Enrique Olvera. “The prices aren’t crazy and they’re representing their culture and food and being creative without losing the integrity of the cuisine.”
That philosophy extends to Indienne’s multiple tasting menus, which include vegetarian and vegan options at slightly lower price points than the non-vegetarian menus. No matter the dish, Sarkar ensures it receives the same level of care. “I love cooking vegetables because it’s very challenging,” he says. “I have been to top restaurants and when you talk about veg food, they say they’ll do adjustments. Why? It has to be as good as anything else.”
Building a Restaurant Group with Purpose
While Indienne serves as Sarkar’s creative flagship, his ambitions reach far beyond a single concept. In 2023, he partnered with Sahil Sethi—who had worked with him at both Rooh and Indienne—to open Sifr, a Middle Eastern restaurant. He then joined forces with his brother, Pujan, to open Tiya in San Francisco, and with mentee Yash Kishinchand to launch the Indian chai café Swadesi in Chicago. In each case, Sarkar gives his partners space to showcase their own creativity.
His newest venture, Nadu—meaning “homeland”—highlights regional Indian food. For this, he partnered with Indian chef Sanchit Sahu to introduce a wider range of traditional Indian dishes to American diners, something Sarkar says he “needs to do.”
“We’re trying to do dishes from all over that have not been done before, exactly how it’s done in that particular region of India,” he says. “There will be no modernization.”
This deliberate contrast between concepts reflects Sarkar’s broader vision for presenting Indian cuisine in all its forms—and his interest in cross-cultural collaboration. He recently teamed up with Lucho Martinez of Mexico City’s Em and Norman Fenton of Chicago’s Cariño, learning to work with Mexican ingredients like masa.
Could a Mexican-inspired concept be in Sarkar’s future? “I am not convinced I am ready and I have to spend more time learning,” he says. But with Sarkar, new ideas seem to arise where you least expect.
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