New York City is home to almost 50,000 restaurants. But a block from Madison Square Park and the concrete sidewalks of the Flatiron District, there is a warmly lit, richly appointed and shining jewel of a restaurant that’s redefining Indian cuisine: Junoon. And Executive Chef Akshay Bhardwaj calls it home. 

Chef Akshay has skyrocketed into the culinary stratosphere in a relatively short amount of time (we’re talking Junoon receiving a total of three Michelin Stars under his leadership, plus he was named on the Forbes Under 30 List) - and there’s no stopping the bold new flavor and dish innovations on his horizon. 

We sat down with Chef Akshay Bhardwaj to talk North India cuisine, his plating technique, how he approaches using spices, advice for new chefs, and a lot more. 

People around you, music, books, travel, research - where do you find inspiration when you create new dishes?

“Inspiration - it's kind of all around you, right? It's the environment that you're in and the people you surround yourself with. We live in such a digital world, so content is all around us, and the world is pretty much in our pocket with our phones. 

Still, what I definitely first and foremost try to do, especially with us being an Indian restaurant, is focus on traditional and authentic Indian dishes because there's such a vast database of Indian dishes; I feel as though we've barely scratched the cuisine’s surface. 

And also being in New York, as best as possible, we do seasonal dishes. We see what's in and around us from the local farms, and pair both the traditional aspect of India with the New York City produce and markets and that creates the foundation starting point for us on dishes.”

Do you consider plating an art form?

“Definitely, when you're plating it is an art form. If I’m feeling minimalistic, I’ll take a couple of ingredients and just focus on those, and make it gorgeous, and just do one or two components on a plate. Or you can do six or seven or eight components on a plate. But lately I feel like I’ve been more in a minimalistic part of my career where it's more of just a couple of components and really elevate them.

I'll also work with the team and ask them if they have any ideas for dishes and give them the opportunity to give input and ideas. The dish will get a lot of testing and trials with a version 1.0 versus 2.0 versus 3.0. 

There are ebbs and flows of the creative process while plating, and we also look at the flow of service around plating. When we have 150 guests on a Saturday night we don’t have 20 minutes to plate a dish; we need to make sure that we can do create a photo-worthy dish in two minutes on a busy night. Then finally, once we get comfortable and feel like, okay, this is good - we are as close to perfect as we can possibly do, and we're all happy - THEN the dish will get on the menu. 

I definitely have a good group of core people that have been with me for a while. When I was starting in the first few years, it was definitely a lot of just me doing most of the brainstorming and plating and everything. And now we’ve brought up some cooks into sous positions where they know my style, and they know the core mantra of the kitchen, the menu and our dishes.”

What advice would you give to a chef just starting out?

“This is one of the few industries that if you have a passion for it, and if you have a good work ethic - you can choose who your mentors are. When you do pick those mentors, choose wisely and pick different cuisines. Don’t be tempted by the quick road or money - slow down and try and learn as much as possible; spend your 20s to get as much knowledge from a variety of chefs and cuisines. You want to learn and absorb as much as you can because your brain is worth the value just as much as your hands.”

When did you first find a love of cooking?

“I first found a love of eating, before I had a love of cooking. I grew up within my family’s North Indian culture and was born and brought up in the New York area. But in Indian culture, food is such an important part of the day, the community, and the culture. Whenever I would go back to India as a kid I'd have to go and visit ALL of my relatives. My mom and my father live in the United States, but everybody else is in India and we have a hundred cousins, aunts, uncles - it's just crazy. 

With that being the case, we'd have to visit six different cousin’s houses in a day, and when you go from house to house, they literally expect you to eat a full meal that they prepare for you. And they will literally get so offended if you don't eat everything - and they'll offer you dessert and this and that. Food is such an important aspect of Indian life.  

My family works in the restaurant industry, with my father being the founder of Junoon. I grew up with restaurants around me and so it's always been such an important part of my life.

I got lucky because I was in business school, and it was my freshman year in college. And of course, like many freshmen in college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was just in business school for the sake of it, and I was doing accounting and handling the books for an accounting firm that does restaurants - including Junoon - and the office was right next to Junoon. So I would spend a lot of my days in the back offices of the restaurant. I quickly knew accounting, finance or macroeconomics really was not my thing. These are not things that I was very excited about. 

And I got very lucky by being connected to the restaurant. The chef at the time pitched me the idea that I should probably learn the ins and outs and all aspects of the business. I ended up working my 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in accounting and then dinner service at Junoon, working at the front desk for a couple weeks, then at the bar as a bar back for a couple weeks. Then I entered the kitchen.

At first I was not very good (laughs) - I was just doing prep on the side, and I didn't know how to hold things properly, didn't know what a mandolin was. All the culinary kids were looking at me like what is with this guy…

That's the one thing I definitely loved about it, though, was that you got so many people from different walks of life. You have the team aspect of it during a dinner service - every station has to really produce, and if one station goes down it screws the whole team up. 

Junoon has an open kitchen, so I really felt like this was a performance that we're doing. Every night I'd go home, and I'd be thinking about the next day at work all night and about what I could do better. I really wanted to get better, so I found my love of cooking working in the kitchen among the team.”

Do you feel competitive with other chefs?

“No. Even though I am a competitive person, the reason I don't is, honestly, I have enough shit to deal with in my life (laughs). We, as a team, need to focus. And yes, I do want to be the best, it can irk me because of how much effort we put in and it can drive me nuts. But there’s more than enough recognition and success to go around, and I wish other chefs the best and just focus on my world and kitchen.”

Tell me about a visceral food memory. 

“I grew up in North Jersey and in my town there were only a couple of Indian families, so I didn't really have many Indian friends growing up. But I had a really multi-ethnic group of friends. My parents had a nice backyard where we could play soccer, baseball and football after school. My mom cooked six days a week - my mom always cooked for the family, it was a big thing in our house and we’d always have a roti and different vegetables every day - cauliflower one day and okra another day. 

Slowly my friends would actually come into the house to grab water or Gatorade after playing in the backyard and my mom would be cooking. She would offer them food and eventually get them to eat some. She made poori one day, it's just like a nice fried bread, right? It's the classic thing to snack on and once my friends tried it - they were like “holy shit - this is really good”. The next week my mom had chickpeas with the poori and so they're like, I'll try a little bit. So they took one spoon each. They ate it and they're like, this is really good. And it became a thing.

By the time eighth grade rolled around every Sunday we would get together and my mom would have our family friends come over, their kids would come over. So they'd be like 30 people - including 15 of my friends. My mom and her friends would all be cooking for all the kids while we played and then by dinnertime all of us would sit around and just eat, and we would sometimes do a prayer service, if it was a holiday. And all of my friends would be there for the prayer service, learning our Indian culture. 

My parents were always okay with hosting - the more the merrier - and food was always the thing that brought everyone together. I'm still friends with pretty much all of them, but now they just come to Junoon.”

What are some of the defining characteristics of North Indian food?

“North Indian cuisine really focuses on the ingredients that are local to the region. That means whole wheat roti and flour-based breads versus rice being more prevalent in the south. You'll also almost always have lentils and vegetables, and meats could be anything from chicken to mutton, and the spice blends are more cumin and coriander based with green chilies, ginger, garlic, then ghee and heavy cream and butter. Those are the main ingredient building blocks in North India. 

For breakfast you’re having cauliflower-stuffed whole wheat bread that’s cooked on a griddle and topped with ghee. Maybe a little pickle on the side and a bowl of yogurt. 

Then there’s the world of curries and classics like butter chicken. We’re talking about tomato and onion-based curries with heavy cream, fenugreek, red chile powder, black cardamom, green cardamom, turmeric, and coriander - those kinds of spices.”

What Indian dish would you recommend to newbies?  

“Eggplant chaat - it’s a staple of Indian cuisine when you go out to eat. You have crispy eggplant, chutneys, cilantro, raita, yogurt, chopped onion, cilantro, crispy chickpeas - this mix of crispy and soft textures. You have a full Indian flavor profile in the dish and then it’s all topped with spices, dehydrated mango and pomegranate. 

That’s the one starter a newbie should try to start to get an understanding of the cuisine. Eggplant chaat is an Indian umami flavor explosion.”

You’ve said curries can vary by region and religion - what’s your favorite curry and why?

“That's a tough one because there's just so many that are excellent. I don’t know if I can really choose one. 

… But let’s say a goat curry. And if I'm having a goat curry, I would do a golden korma, which is more of a nutty-based gravy, but there's like 40 different kinds of kormas. The gravy starts with onions that are really deeply cooked in butter so they caramelize and almost add a sweetness. I’ll typically add cashews, poppy seeds, almonds, and maybe walnuts, then spices and a yogurt to smooth out the sauce.”

Talk to me about your relationship with spices. 

“I always tell the cooks that enter the Junoon kitchen - we'll get a lot of students from CIA or Johnson & Wales doing their externships - that it's good that they enter an Indian kitchen at some point in their career because you work with so many spices right off the bat. 

I tell them: there will be 12 different spices that you'll be using, you'll be roasting them yourself, blending and then making different kinds of spice blends. And with a masala - there's a kebab masala, there's channa masala. There are so many different variations. 

Cardamom, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, star anise, fennel, white pepper - those are some of the spices that I'm constantly working with and feel very comfortable with because it's such an important part of marinating. 

And maintaining a balance between all of the spices is so important. You don’t want one to overpower the others but have them all work together. When we begin to make a curry we'll throw in whole spices into the pan so they release their aromatics. So maybe it will be two pods of black cardamom, three green cardamom, one star anise, one bay leaf, one cinnamon stick.

The spice blend is the building block of all of these dishes and gives each dish their subtle nuances. It’s these foundational lessons that cooks keep with them throughout their career.”

What’s a spice that you consider to be under-valued?

“Green Cardamom is one of the most under-valued spices. It's also one of the few spices you can add into every type of dish - it literally can go in everything and all courses of your menu."

What are your favorite aspects of Indian cuisine?

“My favorite aspect is the challenge of making something that’s been done for centuries and bringing into a modern dining room in middle NYC. This food I’m sending to you in that dining room, we’re breaking the stereotypes of what Indian food was 20 years ago. It’s not that greasy buffet food. 

The challenge is how to present these dishes in that way that’s interesting, still feels nostalgic, but it’s something you’ve never had anywhere else. 

A great example is our Smoked Vindaloo Pork Ribs; I personally love smoked ribs on the grill, so I did a lot of research and honed in on the Portuguese influence on North India colonies - they brought slabs of pork on their ships and marinated them with garlic and wine. Indian chefs then took that Portuguese technique and added in a variety of chiles and spices - basically creating a current day vindaloo. So we take those Portuguese ribs with a vindaloo twist and smoke them like southern bbq. We’re serving the unexpected and they’ve become a fan favorite at the restaurant.”  

What’s a technique or trick you learned along the way that even home cooks could use? 

“Take care of the tools you have and use all the time. Invest in a sharp knife - it’s a tool that will last you forever. Take care of it and it will take care of you in the kitchen. It’s worth the money and time and makes your life easier. 

Also, Indian dishes are great for weekly meal prep - they hold up really well and usually the recipes make it easy to eat a healthy and flavorful meal. Dahls, lentils, rice, chicken - these dishes are simple to make and nutritious.”