There was a time when a young boy growing up in Natham village, in Dindigul district of Tamil Nadu, would hide his school tiffin. He loved the stir-fried snail curry and the slivers of coconut to go with it, but the rich boys would make fun of him for eating something dug out from the soil, from under a rock or the giant coconut palm leaf squelched by the rain. \u201cDespite being the school topper, they judged me, belittled me because snails were considered no man\u2019s food, they shamed me\u2026 for years I carried that shame, fear and anxiety. Now that shame is my badge of honour. Look where the snails got me,\u201d says a teary-eyed chef Vijay Kumar, who has just won the James Beard award for being the best chef in New York.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, much of the honour, regarded as the food Nobel of sorts, had to do with the chef\u2019s signature dish, Nathai PirattalI, the spicy, peppery snail curry from his childhood \u2014 humble, grounded, unabashed and unapologetic. The Michelin-starred restaurant, Semma, which he helms, means fantastic in Tamil. It keeps to the tiffin-house look with wooden tables and chairs, wicker lamps and ceilings. \u201cThat\u2019s my truth and truth has no colour, it is bare, it will stand strong anywhere\u2026 provided you stick to it,\u201d says the 43-year-old, who refuses to be invisibilised and has redefined the contours of the subaltern, upturning it even. \u201cThe food I grew up on, the food made with care, with fire, with soul is now taking the main stage. There is no such thing as a poor person\u2019s food or a rich person\u2019s food. It\u2019s food. It\u2019s powerful. And the real luxury is to be able to connect with each other around the dinner table,\u201d he said in his winning speech, proudly wearing a veshti.<\/p>\n
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Vijay\u2019s story came under the arclights after The New York Times named Semma as the best restaurant in its annual list of 100 best restaurants for 2025. This is the first time an Indian restaurant has topped the list. This is a metaphor at many levels. He is the quintessential immigrant, who has seized the American dream with his warm, toothy smile, turned the tide of scepticism with his flavours and tossed in his bit of history in a salad bowl. Eleven other immigrant chefs have also won the \u201cbest chef\u201d crown in their zones but Vijay has the heart of NYC. He may have been a societal castaway but has stormed Greenwich Village as its cultural stakeholder. He is the self-made Indian who couldn\u2019t afford Ivy League but has been on the grind to raise resources for himself and save up for his family back home. \u201cI have not been home for the last five years. My parents still live at Natham, my mother still doesn\u2019t know what this award means. All she understands is that her son is famous because neighbours and local TV channels have been visiting her. My sister and brother, both state government employees, try explaining but she never understands how the dishes she cooked at home would be such an asset for me,\u201d says Vijay over a Zoom call.<\/p>\n
Story continues below this ad<\/p>\n
His office seems spartan and functional as he pores over the menu. On a typical night, about 1,000 people wait in queue for hours to get a table at the 65-seater restaurant. Reservations open at 7 am every 15 days but are booked by 12 noon. That doesn\u2019t stop the walk-ins. Vijay has an easy way of meeting the pressure of expectation, going out for a short drive in the woods hugging New York and listening to Ilaiyaraaja\u2019s songs from the \u201980s. These sensory experiences are from his childhood of which he doesn\u2019t have many photographs. \u201cMaking ends meet, we did not have cameras to record our childhood except when we got photographed for IDs,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
![\"vikas\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Semma_Interior-19_Will-Ellis.jpg\")
The homey interiors of his Michelin-starred restaurant Semma (Credit: Will Ellis)
\nThe Making of a Chef<\/p>\n
Vijay grew up in a farmer\u2019s family. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have big tracts of land, just enough to sustain ourselves. Our parents worked hard to give us an education. Like any kid from our time, I wanted to become an engineer or a doctor,\u201d he says. He was a consistent topper at the Government Higher Secondary School. But scores were not enough to pursue the civil engineering course he wanted. \u201cIn 1998, the course cost between Rs 1 and 2 lakh, which my parents could not afford. I ticked off my second-best skill \u2014 cooking. So, I went to the State Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology at Tiruchirapalli, where I graduated in 2001,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
For Vijay, cooking wasn\u2019t so much of a passion; instead it was a life skill. \u201cI have three other siblings and since my mother worked on a farm, all of us helped her in cooking and chores. But the way my mother rustled up a quick meal for us fascinated me,\u201d he says. So strong is the memory that his mother\u2019s after-school snack, sprouted moong with spices (Mulaikattiya Thaniyam) and stir-fried seasonal vegetables (Uzhavar Santhai Poriyal) that grew on their farm are now part of Semma\u2019s menu. As are goat intestines or Kudal Varuval, something that the village butcher gave away for free and his mother made into a delicacy for her children. \u201cOffals were the best protein in our growing up years. A throwaway food is now New York\u2019s most wanted,\u201d he says as he serves them with caramelised onions and coconut milk gravy, accompanied by a toddy-fermented dosa. So he never regrets the scarcity that he fought all his life. \u201cThat was a blessing. It taught me not only to survive but think of life\u2019s possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the real introduction to cooking was when his parents sent him over to his grandparents\u2019 during school holidays. \u201cThey lived in a tiny village called Arasampatti near Madurai. We would be sent there to help them. This village had no electricity, no bus service and no roads till about 30 years ago. We had to walk at least 3-4 km on muddy tracks to reach their home. We woke up with the sun and went with our grandparents foraging for snails, hunting deer or fishing. Remember there was no market, no refrigeration, no store. My grandmother would cook fresh vegetables with home-ground spices and aromatics in a mud pot on an open fire pit in the middle of a paddy farm; you could feel the soil breathe. Then she would ladle out the snail curry in tamarind sauce and coconut on banana leaves. The seared venison meat was the perfect example of slow cooking,\u201d he says. Assisting his mother and grandparents, Vijay developed a photographic memory of each stage of cooking. The culinary school just helped him understand the science of food.<\/p>\n
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Taking Over NYC<\/p>\n
It was at culinary school that he was first taught about the French delicacy escargot, snails cooked in garlic butter. \u201cI was pleasantly surprised that a poor man\u2019s food in India was a delicacy in France,\u201d says Vijay. That helped him shed his inhibitions about owning his kind of food. That confidence saw him work at Taj Connemara in Chennai<\/a>, followed by a cruise ship, where he hated the monotony of an assembly line job that seldom allowed any creativity. \u201cBut I had a family to take care of. Then my dad passed away and I came back to be with my family. That\u2019s when a friend offered me an opportunity to work in the US,\u201d says Vijay. He worked at Dosa in San Francisco and then at Rasa in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he got his first Michelin star in 2016. Semma now has three. \u201cThese were high volume restaurants, offering South Indian staples in a contemporary manner. But I was not happy cooking with artichokes, asparagus and California vegetables. I just wanted to cook like my mother and grandmother, have a kitchen where I could thrive and not debone the meat but let it melt and glide off the bone instead,\u201d says Vijay, almost recreating his childhood kitchen with animated gestures. He had two choices: do his job, make money and help his family back home or follow his passion, risk his everything and stir up a revolution.<\/p>\n It was at this juncture that he was introduced to Roni Mazumdar, CEO of Unapologetic Foods and his partner chef Chintan Pandya, himself a James Beard winner for best chef (2022). For the last few years, the two have been consistently changing the curry-house narrative of Indian cuisine, confined to chicken tikka masala, samosa chaats, saag paneer, gobhi masala and lassi. Nor are they pushing nouvelle cuisine. They are picking up Michelin stars simply because their Indian restaurants present regional cuisine at their purest. \u201cIt is unfair to reduce the food democracy of India into 10-odd recognisable dishes, when we have tens and thousands of recipes to offer to the world. Even South Indian food itself is stereotyped by idli, dosa and sambar. We aren\u2019t the cult phenomenon that Italian, Chinese or Japanese cuisine has achieved,\u201d says Vijay, whose underdog story convinced Mazumdar and Pandya that the simple farmer\u2019s food from the heart deserved an equal place at the high table.<\/p>\n Vijay was hesitant at first. That old fear of being judged, derided and lampooned chipped away at his confidence in the run-up to Semma, which was started in 2021. But once New Yorkers sampled the robust flavours of the hearth, it jogged everybody\u2019s memory of where they had come from and the food they grew up with. \u201cSome guests cried, some blessed me, one of them gave me a little Ganesha statue for good luck. At that moment Semma was not just about food or my story, it became the pot of stories that had never been told by millions,\u201d says Vijay.<\/p>\n A confident New Yorker now, Vijay doesn\u2019t want to pander to Western sensibilities and taste. \u201cFor far too long, we have bowed down to the preferences of others, tweaked our food to feel accepted and been ashamed to cook the food we would like to eat. Why do we shy away from our spices? They give our food character. Do you see any other cuisine humouring our palate? Will the Italians add more paprika for an Indian? Why then are we expected to do that?,\u201d asks Vijay. He believes being real will always be appreciated and rewarded though he was once told that people might not be willing to pay for his kind of food. \u201cThis is the biggest misconception Indians have. Authentic food will always be prized. Indian food has been overlooked for such a long time only because we are not being who we are. Even the hyperlocal can be global provided it tastes good,\u201d says the chef who is now hoping to present the street food of Chennai and Hyderabad<\/a>.<\/p>\n Story continues below this ad<\/p>\n Before that, there are some speed breakers he has to negotiate, particularly when the immigrant experience is being tested all across the US. Vijay, too, had a turbulent ride in between when two social influencers questioned the Michelin star for Semma, trolling its indigenous food, misspelling dishes and making culturally insensitive remarks. However, Vijay was unperturbed. \u201cPeople showed love, voted for me, hugged me and were ready to wait in 100\u00b0F (38 \u00b0C) heat. No troll can understand this. I choose to be positive and a few people cannot change the multi-cultural matrix that is New York,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Fully aware of the constituency he has carefully built, Vijay never lets the ball drop, beginning his work day at 9.30 am and finishing it at 2 am. \u201cThat\u2019s why I am only married to my restaurant,\u201d he says, laughing out loud. While he refuses to divulge anything more about his personal life, he lets us in on one secret. \u201cI use kalpasi or black stone flower, a very underappreciated spice. Once you cook with it, there\u2019s so much flavour and smokiness,\u201d says Vijay. There are many more secrets to be unearthed. But Vijay believes in the Tamil proverb, \u201cKadamai sei, palanai etharparathey (Do your duty, don\u2019t worry about the result).\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was a time when a young boy growing up in Natham village, in Dindigul district of Tamil…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":42810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,33596,33597,33580,33593,33591,33589,33587,33585,33581,33598,15605,33583,33588,405,403,33582,5226,5225,5228,5227,33595,33592,11800,33584,33590,33586,33594,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-42809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-authentic-cuisine","10":"tag-black-stone-flower","11":"tag-chef-vijay-kumar","12":"tag-chintan-pandya","13":"tag-culinary-revolution","14":"tag-dindigul","15":"tag-immigrant-story","16":"tag-indian-cuisine","17":"tag-james-beard-award","18":"tag-kalpasi","19":"tag-michelin-star","20":"tag-nathai-pirattal","21":"tag-natham-village","22":"tag-new-york","23":"tag-new-york-city","24":"tag-new-york-times-best-restaurant","25":"tag-newyork","26":"tag-newyorkcity","27":"tag-ny","28":"tag-nyc","29":"tag-regional-indian-food","30":"tag-roni-mazumdar","31":"tag-semma","32":"tag-snail-curry","33":"tag-subaltern-food","34":"tag-tamil-nadu","35":"tag-unapologetic-foods","36":"tag-united-states","37":"tag-united-states-of-america","38":"tag-unitedstates","39":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","40":"tag-us","41":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"vikas\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Gunpowder-Dosa-overhead-photo-credit-Paul-McDonough.jpeg\")
Chef Vijay Kumar\u2019s signature dishes at Semma (Credit: Paul McDonough)
\nRedrawing the Indian Cuisine Map<\/p>\n
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