Chef Vijay Kumar, NYC's best chef, on how snails became his badge of honour

Indian Express

12 hours ago

There was a time when a young boy growing up in Natham village, in Dindigul district of Tamil Nadu, would hide his school tiffin. He loved the stir-fried snail curry and the slivers of coconut to go with it, but the rich boys would make fun of him for eating something dug out from the soil, from under a rock or the giant coconut palm leaf squelched by the rain. 'Despite being the school topper, they judged me, belittled me because snails were considered no man's food, they shamed me… for years I carried that shame, fear and anxiety. Now that shame is my badge of honour. Look where the snails got me,' says a teary-eyed chef Vijay Kumar, who has just won the James Beard award for being the best chef in New York.
Needless to say, much of the honour, regarded as the food Nobel of sorts, had to do with the chef's signature dish, Nathai PirattalI, the spicy, peppery snail curry from his childhood — humble, grounded, unabashed and unapologetic. The Michelin-starred restaurant, Semma, which he helms, means fantastic in Tamil. It keeps to the tiffin-house look with wooden tables and chairs, wicker lamps and ceilings. 'That's my truth and truth has no colour, it is bare, it will stand strong anywhere… provided you stick to it,' says the 43-year-old, who refuses to be invisibilised and has redefined the contours of the subaltern, upturning it even. 'The food I grew up on, the food made with care, with fire, with soul is now taking the main stage. There is no such thing as a poor person's food or a rich person's food. It's food. It's powerful. And the real luxury is to be able to connect with each other around the dinner table,' he said in his winning speech, proudly wearing a veshti.
Vijay's story came under the arclights after The New York Times named Semma as the best restaurant in its annual list of 100 best restaurants for 2025. This is the first time an Indian restaurant has topped the list. This is a metaphor at many levels. He is the quintessential immigrant, who has seized the American dream with his warm, toothy smile, turned the tide of scepticism with his flavours and tossed in his bit of history in a salad bowl. Eleven other immigrant chefs have also won the 'best chef' crown in their zones but Vijay has the heart of NYC. He may have been a societal castaway but has stormed Greenwich Village as its cultural stakeholder. He is the self-made Indian who couldn't afford Ivy League but has been on the grind to raise resources for himself and save up for his family back home. 'I have not been home for the last five years. My parents still live at Natham, my mother still doesn't know what this award means. All she understands is that her son is famous because neighbours and local TV channels have been visiting her. My sister and brother, both state government employees, try explaining but she never understands how the dishes she cooked at home would be such an asset for me,' says Vijay over a Zoom call.
His office seems spartan and functional as he pores over the menu. On a typical night, about 1,000 people wait in queue for hours to get a table at the 65-seater restaurant. Reservations open at 7 am every 15 days but are booked by 12 noon. That doesn't stop the walk-ins. Vijay has an easy way of meeting the pressure of expectation, going out for a short drive in the woods hugging New York and listening to Ilaiyaraaja's songs from the '80s. These sensory experiences are from his childhood of which he doesn't have many photographs. 'Making ends meet, we did not have cameras to record our childhood except when we got photographed for IDs,' he says.
Vijay grew up in a farmer's family. 'We didn't have big tracts of land, just enough to sustain ourselves. Our parents worked hard to give us an education. Like any kid from our time, I wanted to become an engineer or a doctor,' he says. He was a consistent topper at the Government Higher Secondary School. But scores were not enough to pursue the civil engineering course he wanted. 'In 1998, the course cost between Rs 1 and 2 lakh, which my parents could not afford. I ticked off my second-best skill — cooking. So, I went to the State Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology at Tiruchirapalli, where I graduated in 2001,' he says.
For Vijay, cooking wasn't so much of a passion; instead it was a life skill. 'I have three other siblings and since my mother worked on a farm, all of us helped her in cooking and chores. But the way my mother rustled up a quick meal for us fascinated me,' he says. So strong is the memory that his mother's after-school snack, sprouted moong with spices (Mulaikattiya Thaniyam) and stir-fried seasonal vegetables (Uzhavar Santhai Poriyal) that grew on their farm are now part of Semma's menu. As are goat intestines or Kudal Varuval, something that the village butcher gave away for free and his mother made into a delicacy for her children. 'Offals were the best protein in our growing up years. A throwaway food is now New York's most wanted,' he says as he serves them with caramelised onions and coconut milk gravy, accompanied by a toddy-fermented dosa. So he never regrets the scarcity that he fought all his life. 'That was a blessing. It taught me not only to survive but think of life's possibilities.'
But the real introduction to cooking was when his parents sent him over to his grandparents' during school holidays. 'They lived in a tiny village called Arasampatti near Madurai. We would be sent there to help them. This village had no electricity, no bus service and no roads till about 30 years ago. We had to walk at least 3-4 km on muddy tracks to reach their home. We woke up with the sun and went with our grandparents foraging for snails, hunting deer or fishing. Remember there was no market, no refrigeration, no store. My grandmother would cook fresh vegetables with home-ground spices and aromatics in a mud pot on an open fire pit in the middle of a paddy farm; you could feel the soil breathe. Then she would ladle out the snail curry in tamarind sauce and coconut on banana leaves. The seared venison meat was the perfect example of slow cooking,' he says. Assisting his mother and grandparents, Vijay developed a photographic memory of each stage of cooking. The culinary school just helped him understand the science of food.
It was at culinary school that he was first taught about the French delicacy escargot, snails cooked in garlic butter. 'I was pleasantly surprised that a poor man's food in India was a delicacy in France,' says Vijay. That helped him shed his inhibitions about owning his kind of food. That confidence saw him work at Taj Connemara in Chennai, followed by a cruise ship, where he hated the monotony of an assembly line job that seldom allowed any creativity. 'But I had a family to take care of. Then my dad passed away and I came back to be with my family. That's when a friend offered me an opportunity to work in the US,' says Vijay. He worked at Dosa in San Francisco and then at Rasa in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he got his first Michelin star in 2016. Semma now has three. 'These were high volume restaurants, offering South Indian staples in a contemporary manner. But I was not happy cooking with artichokes, asparagus and California vegetables. I just wanted to cook like my mother and grandmother, have a kitchen where I could thrive and not debone the meat but let it melt and glide off the bone instead,' says Vijay, almost recreating his childhood kitchen with animated gestures. He had two choices: do his job, make money and help his family back home or follow his passion, risk his everything and stir up a revolution.
It was at this juncture that he was introduced to Roni Mazumdar, CEO of Unapologetic Foods and his partner chef Chintan Pandya, himself a James Beard winner for best chef (2022). For the last few years, the two have been consistently changing the curry-house narrative of Indian cuisine, confined to chicken tikka masala, samosa chaats, saag paneer, gobhi masala and lassi. Nor are they pushing nouvelle cuisine. They are picking up Michelin stars simply because their Indian restaurants present regional cuisine at their purest. 'It is unfair to reduce the food democracy of India into 10-odd recognisable dishes, when we have tens and thousands of recipes to offer to the world. Even South Indian food itself is stereotyped by idli, dosa and sambar. We aren't the cult phenomenon that Italian, Chinese or Japanese cuisine has achieved,' says Vijay, whose underdog story convinced Mazumdar and Pandya that the simple farmer's food from the heart deserved an equal place at the high table.
Vijay was hesitant at first. That old fear of being judged, derided and lampooned chipped away at his confidence in the run-up to Semma, which was started in 2021. But once New Yorkers sampled the robust flavours of the hearth, it jogged everybody's memory of where they had come from and the food they grew up with. 'Some guests cried, some blessed me, one of them gave me a little Ganesha statue for good luck. At that moment Semma was not just about food or my story, it became the pot of stories that had never been told by millions,' says Vijay.
A confident New Yorker now, Vijay doesn't want to pander to Western sensibilities and taste. 'For far too long, we have bowed down to the preferences of others, tweaked our food to feel accepted and been ashamed to cook the food we would like to eat. Why do we shy away from our spices? They give our food character. Do you see any other cuisine humouring our palate? Will the Italians add more paprika for an Indian? Why then are we expected to do that?,' asks Vijay. He believes being real will always be appreciated and rewarded though he was once told that people might not be willing to pay for his kind of food. 'This is the biggest misconception Indians have. Authentic food will always be prized. Indian food has been overlooked for such a long time only because we are not being who we are. Even the hyperlocal can be global provided it tastes good,' says the chef who is now hoping to present the street food of Chennai and Hyderabad.
Before that, there are some speed breakers he has to negotiate, particularly when the immigrant experience is being tested all across the US. Vijay, too, had a turbulent ride in between when two social influencers questioned the Michelin star for Semma, trolling its indigenous food, misspelling dishes and making culturally insensitive remarks. However, Vijay was unperturbed. 'People showed love, voted for me, hugged me and were ready to wait in 100°F (38 °C) heat. No troll can understand this. I choose to be positive and a few people cannot change the multi-cultural matrix that is New York,' he says.
Fully aware of the constituency he has carefully built, Vijay never lets the ball drop, beginning his work day at 9.30 am and finishing it at 2 am. 'That's why I am only married to my restaurant,' he says, laughing out loud. While he refuses to divulge anything more about his personal life, he lets us in on one secret. 'I use kalpasi or black stone flower, a very underappreciated spice. Once you cook with it, there's so much flavour and smokiness,' says Vijay. There are many more secrets to be unearthed. But Vijay believes in the Tamil proverb, 'Kadamai sei, palanai etharparathey (Do your duty, don't worry about the result).'