22 Stellar Indian Restaurants in NYC
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Robert Sietsema/Eater NY
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Indian restaurants in New York City go back over a century, and Times Square was an early hotspot. Perhaps the most famous example of the era was the paradoxically named Taj Mahal Hindu Indian Restaurant, founded in 1918 at 242 West 42nd Street at a time when many South Asian students, businesspeople, dock workers, and sailors lived in boarding houses in the vicinity. The
New York Times mentioned it glowingly.
Midtown remained the main repository of Indian restaurants, also causing curries to migrate onto the menus of more effete restaurants and hotels. By the 1970s, there were many steam table establishments serving Punjabi fare in various parts of the city, ladling rice and curries into compartmentalized plates and slinging tandoori items that competed with our earliest barbecue joints when it came to smoky flavors.