This New York cocktail bar wants you to have your butter chicken and drink it too

A butter-chicken-inspired cocktail is the kind of thing that makes me immediately sceptical, maybe because it sounds like too much of a good thing to be plausible. On a balmy Tuesday night at Manhattan’s newest Indian eatery, INDN, Butterface arrives at my table to prove my scepticism is misplaced: smoky mezcal mimics a coal-fired tandoor, a clarified silkiness envelops the palate, and a faint but essential fenugreek backbone creates perfect savoury harmony. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

Savoury cocktails aren’t exactly novel; bars have flirted with the idea for years. What’s different at bars around the world now is how they are serving food-flavoured drinks, giving us cocktails that taste like pepperoni pizza, rasam, and everything in between. The appetite for umami and texture across menus is evident in bars like New York’s Double Chicken Please, whose cocktail programme includes drinks inspired by cold pizza and Thai curry, or LA’s Pijja Palace, which has a ghee- and mole-bitters-infused Chana Dal cocktail in its repertoire. (In India too, at Papa’s, Papa’s Hut is a clarified cocktail with marinara, basil, and chilli oil served with a bite-size pizza box holding a Monaco biscuit with marinara sauce and cheese.)

At INDN, what underpins the success of savoury cocktails, like the Butterface and the palak-paneer-inspired Paneer Panic, is their ability to be inspired by the architecture of a dish without resorting to a literal take. They borrow from the Indian kitchen while still crafting something that is fresh and complex.

It isn’t by accident that NoMad-based INDN bills itself as New York’s first Indian cocktail bar. The project is the brainchild of Simran Bakshi and Kanika Vij Bakshi, who recognised a gap in Manhattan’s Indian food scene. “Indian restaurants [in New York] usually cater towards doing a full three-course meal, the kind where you walk out feeling 20 pounds heavier. It gives you no room to actually enjoy cocktails,” says Simran, who found himself on the hunt for a late-night Indian spot in the city. Kanika, a second-generation NYC restaurateur whose family ran New York’s Bukhara Grill for two decades, isn’t new to hospitality. Together, their aim was to create a space that recalled the energy and spirit of the roadside liquor shops and chakna vendors that are a nightlife staple in Simran’s native place, Delhi.

That intention is apparent in a wall sign that reads: Saleem ghode pe, duniya lode pe. It’s bawdy humour that captures the essence of the city. It also signals the room’s intended clientele—21-plus and not kid-friendly—a deliberate departure from the family-style Indian restaurants that have become the norm across America. For Hindi speakers, it’s a wink to an inside joke. For enquiring minds that don’t get it, it’s the perfect invitation to start a conversation.

The space plays into the brief: Oversized garage doors are flung open to welcome in an unseasonably warm New York night when I visit, and the room’s grey lime-washed walls and rattan-accented chairs are lit by the candle-like glow of the twin-arch bar whose stools invite you to linger. The room feels like a late-night parlour that wants you to sit at the bar and order twice.

INDN’s big bet on savoury cocktails is apparent from the first glance at its drinks menu, which includes elements like spiced ghee, garam masala, and saag. “We didn’t just want to add tamarind to a margarita and call it a day,” explains Simran, who reveals that the bar’s drinks programme is the result of months-long R&D. Each of the drinks I try, from the infamous Butterface to the tequila-spiked Who The Chaat Are You? and the cardamom-inflected Yuzual Suspect, is characterised by its insistence on balance rather than a desire to ride a trend.

Crucially, the food goes round-for-round with the bar. INDN’s food menu is small plates-focused and draws from Delhi’s drinking nosh traditions: The keema pao is unctuous and saucy and made perfect with the addition of pillowy pao. The seekh kebab is robustly spiced and authentic enough to feel at home on a Delhi dining table. The lachcha paratha that accompanies the anda bhurji is buttery and imparts the kind of domestic comfort that steadies a meal. A small but memorable pleasure was the fried arbi, which takes a stodgy North Indian kitchen staple and transforms it into a dish that is light, crunchy and perfectly constructed to pair with a stiff drink. INDN’s palak chaat is the underdog that comes out on top, a real textural triumph that layers thin shards of fried spinach and lashings of mint and tamarind chutney with cooling, creamy yoghurt and a liberal sprinkling of sev to create a chaat dish that puts Delhi on the plate of a New York diner.

All this isn’t to say there aren’t oversights. There’s a conspicuous lack of mocktails on the menu (although Kanika assures me that a nimbu pani is always available should the need arise), preventing the sober generation from experiencing the savoury delights of the cocktail lineup. With the chakna menu ranging from $18 for the least expensive dish (the masala arbi), and $38 each for the most expensive (the barrah kebab and lamb chops), the pricing feels high, even for New York.

Perhaps those are the costs associated with taking a risk on a concept that hasn’t been tried and tested and creating a menu that requires constant calibration. It would be easy for a programme this finetuned to feel fiddly if it weren’t for the fact that the team behind the bar is driven to innovate.

There are several moments of ingenuity that make the risk worthwhile, like the brunch-only Bloody Mary spinoff I previewed, whose tomato gastrique—paired cleverly with mustard seed and curry leaves—gets an Amul butter wash for a velvety, rounded mouthfeel that both pays homage to the original and feels like a natural extension of the bar’s drink philosophy.

My advice? Sit at the bar and start with the Butterface or the Who The Chaat Are You?, pair with either seekh kebabs or keema pao, insist on the palak chaat, and finish with either the shahi tukda or the dessert of the day. And then be prepared to leave impressed and to be lured back for more visits that will make you fluent in the vocabulary of INDN’s cocktail menu.

Address: INDN, 30 W 30th Street, New York

Price: $200-plus for 2 (approx)

Timings: Sunday to Wednesday, 5 pm to 12 am

Thursday to Saturday, 5 pm to 1:30 am

Reservations: Via Resy