Restaurant Review: Ambassadors Clubhouse

The paper is vast, and somewhat conceptual—dishes are divided, astatine times, by benignant (a conception for papads and chaat), but past besides by size (“bitings,” oregon digit foods), oregon by cooking method (baked successful the tandoor, grilled implicit charcoal, crisped up successful cast-iron tawa skillets, and truthful on)—and the nutrient is specifically, celebratorily Punjabi. This restaurant, similar truthful galore caller high-profile openings, is portion of the genuinely thrilling question of South Asian restaurants arguing for determination precision, pushing backmost against decades of commodity Indian cuisine, the culture- and geography-flattening tikka masalas and ail naans. Still, it was chiefly immigrants from Punjab, and the restaurants they opened successful neighborhoods similar the East Village, oregon Richmond Hill, successful Queens, who acceptable the modular for what are present New York City’s Indian-restaurant clichés. The effect is that overmuch of the paper astatine Ambassadors Clubhouse is acquainted successful description, if not ever successful execution. The edifice is peculiarly arrogant of its tandoor, a coal-burning oven that is, it turns out, the lone 1 of its benignant successful the metropolis (most tandoors ’round these parts tally connected gas). The oven lends an exquisite extent to everything that passes done it—a roundness and tang, a buss of smolder. It’s determination successful the tiles of paneer, house-made from buffalo beverage and springy-soft, bathed successful a tomato-and-cashew sauce. It chars the shells of prawns, somewhat husky with the scent of carom seeds and truthful spectacularly monolithic that, arsenic they were acceptable connected the table, I briefly, disorientingly thought they were boneless chickenhearted breasts.

The room extends the room’s theatricality to the plate: each dish, astir without exception, is presented arsenic an event. A tangy kachori chaat, agleam with beetroot yogurt, arrives wrong a semolina puffball the size of a regularisation slow-pitch softball, which cracks unfastened astatine the lightest spoon whack; a deftly spiced paan patta chaat with fried betel leaves and tender achromatic chickpeas is piled precocious arsenic a haystack and glimmers with sauces. Even the breads—various naans and rotis, a flaky whole-wheat lachcha paratha—are gorgeous, chewy and yeasty, galore of them slick with clarified butter, presented, astir sculpturally, successful oval baskets. A “seafood tower” involves seafood, and is surely a tower, but, dissimilar the chilled-shellfish subtlety of the American steak-house staple, present it’s much of a vertical sampler of dramatic, snacky appetizers: shrimp kofta pressed astir soft-boiled quail eggs; a crab-and-egg scramble folded successful a savory lentil pancake; mildly cooked scallops served successful their shells, nether herbaceous lashings of parsnip chutney. None of your standard-issue tetrahedral samosas here: they’ve been reimagined arsenic “seven layered” things—the layers are wings of crisp pastry, which radiate retired from a pouch of spiced aloo-and-pea filling similar sunbeams, oregon the ruffled pages of a book.