Adda – the East Village return of New York's unapologetic Indian table

Adda occupies a former Huertas dining room at 107 First Avenue in the East Village, and it is the second life of a restaurant that already changed how New York eats Indian food once before. Chef Chintan Pandya and restaurateur Roni Mazumdar opened the original Adda in Long Island City in the autumn of 2018, wanting, as Mazumdar remembers it, to challenge the clichés about Indian cuisine. That gamble helped found Unapologetic Foods, the group that went on to open the Michelin-starred Semma, the regional-Indian room Dhamaka, and the Bengali kitchen Masalawala & Sons. After the pandemic thinned out its original Queens neighbourhood, Adda closed quietly in the spring of 2025 and reopened six weeks later in a larger, more polished East Village room, with executive chef Neel Kajale now running the kitchen alongside Pandya. It is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, a canteen turned destination that still insists on bone marrow, goat brain and a butter chicken nobody apologises for.

01The room and the setting

The dining room sits in the former home of Huertas, on First Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets, in a space Unapologetic Foods rebuilt rather than simply moved into. The group's hallmark is fierce seasoning and ornate plating, often arriving in large Le Creuset Dutch ovens, and the East Village room was designed to carry that same handmade, scavenged-together feel into a bigger footprint, now seating around seventy.

One detail was carried over on purpose: the graffiti-covered newspaper and magazine wallpaper from the original Long Island City restaurant was peeled off and reapplied on the new walls, a deliberate thread back to where the whole project began. Basket light fixtures, warm wood tones and a bar seating ten complete a room built to run loud and full most nights.

02The chef

Neel Kajale, born in Mumbai and trained at the Institute of Hotel Management there before completing culinary studies at the Culinary Institute of America, cut his teeth on the line at Eleven Madison Park. He joined Unapologetic Foods as a sous chef at Dhamaka and worked his way up to running that kitchen before taking over as Adda's chef, where he helped shape the restaurant's headline act: a butter chicken experience smoked tableside and built around house-churned butter.

Insider tip

Open nightly 5–10pm; book around two weeks ahead via SevenRooms or Dorsia.

He works alongside founding chef Chintan Pandya, who arrived in New York in 2016 to run the kitchen at the Indian fine-dining restaurant Junoon before co-founding Unapologetic Foods with Mazumdar. Pandya won the James Beard Foundation's 2022 award for Best Chef: New York State for his work at Dhamaka, which was also named restaurant of the year by the New York Times and Esquire that same year.

03What to order

The Butter Chicken Experience is the main event: a full-table, pre-ordered feast built around Heritage Green Circle chicken raised on a Pennsylvania farm, a trio of house-churned butters, and organic Maine tomatoes smoked daily over charcoal, served with fresh bread, rice and the restaurant's black daal. It is halal, served in half-bird or full-bird portions, and the sauce's cashews mean it cannot be made nut-free.

Beyond that, the kitchen reprises cult hits from the Long Island City days alongside newer dishes: bone-marrow with a three-pepper sauce, lamb shanks with turnips and fenugreek, and a Nagaland-style chili pork belly fry sit near the returning bheja fry, soft housemade paneer, baby goat biryani and lukmi. The Roti Aur Boti pairs excellently seasoned minced lamb pressed between layers of flatbread and skewered, finished with a dollop of walnut chutney, while a vegetarian menu runs to roasted cauliflower with cream, dried fruit and pomegranate, served in the same Le Creuset dish it was cooked in.

04Wine and drinks

The bar programme treats condiments as cocktails: a chutney trio built from the kitchen's own tamarind, mango and onion-brine pickles arrives as a trio of small drinks, meant to be sipped alongside the dishes they're drawn from. Zero-proof options are not an afterthought either, running to a curry-leaf and cumin-seed aperitif built for drinkers skipping alcohol altogether.

05When to go and booking

Adda is open every evening. Reservations are released roughly two weeks ahead and are taken through SevenRooms or Dorsia; parties of seven or more are directed to the private dining page rather than the standard booking flow. Children are welcome throughout the dining room, though anyone over five joining a Butter Chicken Experience is counted and charged as a full participant, a rule the restaurant applies to keep that particular table consistent for everyone seated at it.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.