Chef Vikas Khanna Returns To New York With Bungalow His Flagship Restaurant
Chef Vikas Khanna Returns To New York With Bungalow His Flagship Restaurant
VIKAS KHANNA, A MICHELIN STAR CHEF, AUTHOR, AND FILMMAKER, SPENDS TIME AND MONEY HELPING THOSE IN NEED
February 20, 2024
Last week, Vikas Khanna visited Mrs. Sabharwal in Queens, New York, “for blessings for BUNGALOW NEW YORK,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter, where he has more than 2.2 million followers.
Bungalow opens next month in the East Village area of Manhattan. Set up jointly with the Bombay Hospitality Group, it will be the flagship restaurant of his Vikas Khanna Group.
When Khanna first came to the U.S. in 2000, he worked in small Indian restaurants and banquet halls as a dishwasher, delivery man and waiter. He also worked in various homes, cooking, cleaning, running errands and taking care of cats.
Khanna views Mrs. Sabharwal, one of those who hired him in 2000, as his first employer. After he cooked and worked in her home for the first time, “she gave me $101…and blessed me that ‘one day May you cook for the Presidents.’ This stayed with me forever… Since that day, I seek her blessing for every new project.” He waited for years to use the $101, until his admission to the Culinary Institute of America, near New York City. Khanna’s chef coat at Bungalow features 101, in Hindi.
Khanna, 52 years old, has cooked for the Pope, the Dalai Lama and President Barack Obama, among others. Earlier, while he was the executive chef at Junoon (passion) in New York., the restaurant received a Michelin star seven years in a row.
A Michelin star is a rarity for restaurants, especially Indian restaurants around the globe. In 2023, only three Indian restaurants in the U.S. were awarded a Michelin star: Semma, with chef Vijay Kumar, which serves South Indian food in New York; Rania, with chef Chetan Shetty, in Washington DC; and Indienne, with chef Sujan Sarkar who is trained in French cuisine, in Chicago.
Khanna’s MasterChef India, Twist of Taste, and Mega Kitchens have been featured on National Geographic India’s TV channel. The channel also showed his documentaries Holy Kitchens and Kitchens Series of Gratitude. He has 4 million followers on Instagram and 1.8 million on Facebook.
Several videos in English and Hindi, showing Khanna cooking various dishes, are on YouTube. One of them, where he prepares stuffed spinach and paneer (cheese) roll, has gotten 920,000 views. He is the author of more than 25 cookbooks, including Everyone Can Cook; Khanna Sutra; My Great Indian Cookbook; The Spice Story of India; and Daastan-e-Dastarkhan: Stories and Recipes from Muslim Kitchens, co-authored with Sadaf Hussain.
Khanna has produced several documentaries. One of them, Barefoot Empress, was shortlisted for an Oscar in 2022. It is about Karthyayani Amma, who at age 96, scored 98 out of 100 in an exam on reading, writing, and mathematics. The results of the exam, conducted by the literacy board in Kerala, India, enabled Amma to move up to the fourth grade.
Earlier, since the age of 39 following her husband’s death, Amma worked as a laborer, including sweeping the streets outside a temple, to support her family. Only two of her six children survived.
Khanna was inspired to make Barefoot Empress by his grandmother who did not have an opportunity to go to school.
A son of Davinder and Bindu Khanna, Vikas Khanna was teased as a child for his clubfoot. He could not run till he was 13. He has a scar on his face from being beaten by bullies in school.
Khanna never participated in any sports. “My shoes were very big and extremely heavy with the braces,” he told SplendidTable. “I’d just sit at the back of the class and not move until the end of school because when I walked, it gave everyone a chance to laugh.”
Learning to cook as his grandmother’s kitchen helper, he could laugh at the other boys since it “filled that gap of not being equal physically in some way.”
At 16, Khanna founded a catering company with his grandmother, serving food at weddings and events. In 1991, he graduated from the WelcomGroup School of Hotel Administration at Manipal Academy, South India. He then worked at the Taj, Oberoi, Welcome Group and Leela hotels in India. In 2018, he opened the Museum of Culinary Arts at the Manipal campus, dedicating it to his late father.
Khanna emigrated to New York, inspired by Richard Bach's 70-page book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, about a seagull who wants to fly higher. Like the bird, Khanna was eager to see if he could soar to success in New York.
Recently, the Asia Society in New York released a video interview with Khanna where he talks about his life journey. The video is part of the society’s new Asian Diaspora Project, which portrays major contributions by Asian Americans in various fields.
An earlier, 2017 Asia Society interview with Khanna is titled From Homeless Immigrant to Michelin-Star Chef. Khanna’s video interviews show he has an infectious laugh and a sense of humor, including an ability to make fun of his errors.
After he moved to New York, one Christmas in the early 2000s, with no job and only $3, he ate and slept at the New York City Rescue mission, a city-run shelter for the homeless. The staff said, "Welcome, and merry Christmas," offering him space to sit, rest and breathe. As a reminder, Khanna continues to celebrate Christmas at the Rescue Mission each year.
Khanna has used proceeds from the Barefoot Empress to fund the setting up of eleven classrooms for women in India. In April 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic’s rapid spread in India, Khanna, remotely from New York, helped establish kitchens in Delhi which offered free food to those in need. Soon, similar kitchens, under the name Feed India, were set up in 135 Indian cities and towns, with support from local volunteers, government agencies and donors.
Khanna was motivated by his mom who told him, “I don’t want to hear about new restaurants, books or shows. I just want my son” to help Indians because every part of his success is due to India. Khanna’s free pandemic kitchens got wide media attention in India, the U.S. and elsewhere.
A Hindu, Khanna got the idea for the kitchens from the free community kitchen at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. “I spent a lot of my childhood in that kitchen,” he says in a Williams Sonoma blog interview. His grandmother would take him to the temple, where they both prepared and served food as volunteers. “My understanding of the power of food came from there, where everybody helped as a community to feed the hungry.”
Khanna owns a townhouse in New York City, filled with thousands of cookbooks, and likes Mercedes cars. Last year, he launched a perfume Vikas Khanna by Zighrana; a 100 ml bottle is sold in India for Rs.7,080 ($90). He is a fan of Lata Mangeshkar, the late Bollywood singer, as well as Pink Floyd and Simon and Garfunkel.
Cooking for restaurants “is a job with long hours on your feet…chefs…are supposed to be energetic and hustling. Many of us have mental breakdowns all the time,” he told The Hindu.
Indian cuisine is not all about curries, notes Khanna. The blend of spices used in India differs by family, culture, or region. In the north of India, cooks like his mother know nothing about curry leaves and never use mustard seeds or coconut. But South Indian meals are cooked with curry leaves and mustard seeds and almost all dishes require coconut.
While learning to cook, as a kitchen helper for his grandmother, (in photo with Khanna), Khanna grasped an important lesson from her: simplicity. “The greatest cuisine or the greatest dishes you ever taste in your life are never the complicated dishes,” he says in a Williams Sonoma blog.
The opening date of Bungalow, March 23, 2024, marks the 50th birthday of his sister Radhika, who passed away in 2022 from multiple organ failures, following a bout of lupus.
In New York’s Times Square, at Broadway and 44th street, Khanna has set up a temporary display of a replica of a stone panel from the Konark Temple in Odisha, India. The art was created by contemporary artists in India. Khanna posted on X, “Please visit Times Square and fall in love with Odisha’s brilliant artists…(In late August the panel) will be installed in my flagship restaurant in New York City.”
“New York City gives you energy and also drains you,” Vikas said at the Asia Society. “Waking up every day is a gift.”
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