“Oh, Ambassador, you’re spoiling us!” a Londoner I know likes to quip. In the U.K., it’s a semi-famous line, a quote (a slight misquote, actually) from a ’90s advert for Ferrero Rocher called “The Ambassador’s Reception.” A glamorous, international do is being held in a London mansion with Champagne and chitchat, a fantasy of flute-clinking polyglot harmony. The catchphrase was coined to sing the praises of gold-foiled bonbons, but it works in so many off-piste circumstances.
Oh, Ambassador, you’re spoiling us! I thought on a recent visit to Ambassadors Clubhouse, a stage-set and managed U.K. import that opened in February. Ambassadors Clubhouse, both its popular Mayfair incarnation and this new outpost, takes its inspiration from a real house and a real ambassador, whose portrait hangs above the staircase in these fabricated digs. He is the grandfather of its owners, the Sethi siblings, and his summer home in Dalhousie, then part of Punjab, was a meeting place for the jet set and his three grandchildren. With Ambassadors Clubhouse, the Sethis, whose London restaurants include the upscale Gymkhana and the more casual Sri Lankan chainlet Hoppers, sought to re-create not only his “party mansion,” as they call it, but the entire period before the British Empire divided the region into India and Pakistan at the end of the Raj. “Many people dining at Ambassadors will not know that Punjab straddles a border,” the Anglo-Punjabi writer Ciaran Thapar wrote last year, nor know about its partition and attendant forced migration, “let alone the remote British devil in its details.” The Sethis certainly must, but they aren’t inclined to spoil the party. This Clubhouse is a historical fiction, not a history lesson. The Ambassador is joined on the wall by framed portraits of Punjabi rajas; one is depicted in diplomatic confab with Ryu from Street Fighter.
The Sethis have worked this kind of high-gloss magic to good effect in London, where their restaurants, including the original Clubhouse, are starry and starred destinations. So it is destined to be in New York. A month or so after touching down, Ambassadors Clubhouse has been unbookable, at least through official channels. Those with the in keep the place busy; luck and persistence take care of the rest. On a recent Friday night, people were getting turned away in groups, and the only stroke of luck fell to a young woman who’d come to plead a case for her boyfriend’s birthday celebration. She prevailed with a reservation for the next night. I watched her throw her arms around two hosts — and were those tears? Overhead, bhangra remixes of ’90s hip-hop played.
The no-peeking restaurant entrance on Broadway; Instagram-friendly raj kachori chaat; kheer, a creamy dessert pudding with bananas, dark chocolate, and peanuts; the lower-level dining room, where the action is. Photo: Hugo Yu.
The no-peeking restaurant entrance on Broadway; Instagram-friendly raj kachori chaat; kheer, a creamy dessert pudding with bananas, dark chocolate, an…
The no-peeking restaurant entrance on Broadway; Instagram-friendly raj kachori chaat; kheer, a creamy dessert pudding with bananas, dark chocolate, and peanuts; the lower-level dining room, where the action is. Photo: Hugo Yu.
The restaurant has two levels with a large bar and small tables on the ground floor and a small bar and large tables down below. The action is downstairs, where whole areas of the dining room can be sectioned off for private parties. The dividing curtains are tiger print, the walls are black, and the bar is copper-colored thanks to an elaborate stained-glass display, or maybe that was just the light refracting through a bottle of Johnnie Walker the size of a healthy baby brought out for a birthday party taking place to our left one night. “Very Indian,” a Bengali friend at my table said.
The modular menu — split into hors d’oeuvre papads (sometimes called papadams) and chaat, appetizer-size “bitings,” full sections devoted to tandoori dishes (cooked in a charcoal-fueled clay oven), grilled dishes, dishes cooked in cast-iron tawa skillets or clay matka pots or iron karahi woks, and biryanis, breads, dals, and condiments — leads to endless combinations, though they add up. We made quick work of a basket of five types of papads, crisp, frilled, lentil-flour crackers served with a trio of chutneys and raita that were far better and craggier than the paper-thin freebies of cheaper restaurants around town; at $18 a basket, they’re a case of getting what you pay for.
Much of Ambassadors Clubhouse feels engineered to impress at least as much as delight. Gold leaf crowns lobster, and while the lamb Beliram — an “osso buco” variation on a Punjabi mutton dish — was very tasty, its innovation is in branding rather than form. The London restaurant’s well-known butter-chicken chops reimagine the often oversweet curry as a cashew paste spackled onto thigh-meat lollipops to gobble-able ends, and a new–for–New York creation, aloo mattar satpura, alchemizes the components of vegetable samosas, the crisp wrapper and curried-potato interior, into seven-layer accordions, like deep-fried books, onto which diners ladle potato ki launji. Buffalo-milk paneer was sold out on both of my visits, so we settled for braised-goat sliders, whose sunny-side-up quail-egg toppings seem a bid for Instagram stardom. If you’re in the market for content, skip them in favor of the raj kachori chaat, a globe of semolina ringed in yogurt whose interior hides a bounty of tandoori beets. The prices across the board ($60 wild prawns from the tandoor, $48 lamb biryani) are distinctly Brahmin.
It’s hardly Ambassadors’ fault that the menu feels like the highest-end extension of some familiar dishes. Much of what Americans think of as Indian food derives from Punjabi cooking owing to the influx of immigrants from the region at the beginning of the 20th century. That it’s done well here is to the restaurant’s credit; that it’s done expensively is the restaurant’s right. But cooking from across the subcontinent is enjoying a boom in this city, and Ambassadors Clubhouse arrives to face some compelling new competitors: Kashi in Downtown Brooklyn, Kidilum in Flatiron, and the Michelin-starred Houston import Musaafer in Tribeca, which caters to diners looking specifically for ultrahigh-end, perennially booked Indian cuisine.
The Sethis must compete with their own success as well. One South Asian couple whispered conspiratorially that they weren’t overly impressed with their meal. “London is much better,” the woman said. “But try the dal.” To confidently discourse on international lentils is its own reward. But New York offers plenty as well. Oh, Ambassador. Here, we’re spoiled for choice.
See All
