The menu is huge, and considerably conceptual—dishes are divided, at instances, by kind (a piece for papads and chaat), however then additionally by dimension (“bitings,” or finger meals), or by cooking technique (baked within the tandoor, grilled over charcoal, crisped up in cast-iron tawa skillets, and so forth)—and the meals is particularly, celebratorily Punjabi. This restaurant, like so many current high-profile openings, is a part of the genuinely thrilling wave of South Asian eating places arguing for regional precision, pushing again in opposition to a long time of commodity Indian delicacies, the culture- and geography-flattening tikka masalas and garlic naans. Nonetheless, it was primarily immigrants from Punjab, and the eating places they opened in neighborhoods just like the East Village, or Richmond Hill, in Queens, who set the usual for what at the moment are New York Metropolis’s Indian-restaurant clichés. The result’s that a lot of the menu at Ambassadors Clubhouse is acquainted in description, if not at all times in execution. The restaurant is especially happy with its tandoor, a coal-burning oven that’s, it seems, the one certainly one of its type within the metropolis (most tandoors ’spherical these components run on fuel). The oven lends an beautiful depth to every part that passes via it—a roundness and tang, a kiss of smolder. It’s there within the tiles of paneer, house-made from buffalo milk and springy-soft, bathed in a tomato-and-cashew sauce. It chars the shells of prawns, barely husky with the scent of carom seeds and so spectacularly huge that, as they had been set on the desk, I briefly, disorientingly thought they had been boneless rooster breasts.
The kitchen extends the room’s theatricality to the plate: every dish, virtually with out exception, is introduced as an occasion. A tangy kachori chaat, shiny with beetroot yogurt, arrives inside a semolina puffball the scale of a regulation slow-pitch softball, which cracks open on the lightest spoon whack; a deftly spiced paan patta chaat with fried betel leaves and tender black chickpeas is piled excessive as a haystack and glimmers with sauces. Even the breads—varied naans and rotis, a flaky whole-wheat lachcha paratha—are attractive, chewy and yeasty, lots of them slick with clarified butter, introduced, virtually sculpturally, in oval baskets. A “seafood tower” includes seafood, and is actually a tower, however, in contrast to the chilled-shellfish subtlety of the American steak-house staple, right here it’s extra of a vertical sampler of dramatic, snacky appetizers: shrimp kofta pressed round soft-boiled quail eggs; a crab-and-egg scramble folded in a savory lentil pancake; gently cooked scallops served of their shells, beneath herbaceous lashings of parsnip chutney. None of your standard-issue tetrahedral samosas right here: they’ve been reimagined as “seven layered” issues—the layers are wings of crisp pastry, which radiate out from a pocket of spiced aloo-and-pea filling like sunbeams, or the ruffled pages of a guide.
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