Originally written circa 2022. Reposting because the food was then - and presumably remains -extraordinary. Some things deserve a second airing. This is one of them.
-- Rama
There is a particular kind of audacity required to open a restaurant in Central Hong Kong, seat only twenty people, insist your kitchen produces the finest cuisine of the Punjab - and then, with a straight face and a beautifully typeset press release, tell journalists it is Pakistani food.
Reader, it is not Pakistani food. Not primarily. Not really. Not if you've eaten in Lahore or Karachi or been to a Pakistani home kitchen where the flavours lean leaner, the spicing more restrained, the meat preparations closer to Central Asian influences than the buttery, tandoor-fired abundance of the Indian subcontinent's northwestern breadbasket. But we will come back to this. We always do.
New Punjab Club opened in 2015, tucked into Wyndham Street, Central - that strip of Hong Kong real estate that seems permanently committed to housing restaurants for people who've already decided they're having a good evening before they've even sat down. The restaurant is the brainchild of founder Syed Asim Hussain, the man behind the Black Sheep Restaurants group, who also happens to have personal ties to the space: his father's restaurant, The Mughal Room, once occupied the same address. There is something poetically appropriate about that - history literally cooked into the walls.
The concept was ambitious, even a little mad. Punjabi cuisine - proper, unapologetically robust Punjabi cuisine - elevated to fine-dining standards in one of Asia's most competitive restaurant cities. Twenty seats. A tandoor as the beating heart of the kitchen. A wine cellar with serious intent. And a bar program that quietly became one of the best whisky lists in Hong Kong. (The whisky-with-spiced-food pairing is, it should be noted, not a gimmick. It works. Magnificently. Your cardiologist would disagree, but your cardiologist isn't at the table, and long may that last.)
The rave reviews came quickly, and they came loudly. Broadsheets and glossy magazines fell over themselves. Food writers who had spent years dismissing subcontinental cuisine as inherently "casual" found themselves reassessing. And then, in 2019, Michelin confirmed what the dinner queue already knew: New Punjab Club became the world's first Punjabi restaurant to receive a Michelin star. The first. In the world. Sitting in Hong Kong, which already has more Michelin stars per capita than almost anywhere on the planet, including France. A detail that never gets old. The star has been retained every year since. Four consecutive years, at the time of this writing.
The chefs responsible - and here is where the Pakistani branding gets genuinely, lovingly complicated - are Palash Mitra and Chhabil Sidhu. Two Indian chefs. From the subcontinent's Indian side of the partition line. Cooking food the PR team is at some pains to label Pakistani. Doing so brilliantly. Now look, I am not here to adjudicate the politics of partition at the dinner table. I am here to eat. But the identity question deserves more than a dismissive wave, because it illuminates something fascinating about what Punjab actually is.
The Punjab, land of five rivers, was, before 1947, a single region. Then the Radcliffe Line cut through it with the blunt efficiency of a man who had never been there and had six weeks to draw a border. Lahore went to Pakistan. Amritsar stayed in India. Families divided. Recipes did not. The tandoor techniques, the mustard-laced winter greens, the slow-cooked lamb of the Mughal court, the dairy excess (the butter, the ghee, the cream, always the cream) - these belonged to a geography, not a passport. So what is distinctively Pakistani food, as opposed to Indian food from the Punjab?
The honest answer involves nuance that marketing departments rarely survive. Pakistani cuisine, broadly, draws on the same Mughal inheritance but layers in Central Asian and Persian influences more heavily - the pilaus and pulaos lean toward Afghan-style rice preparations, the kebab traditions echo Turkish routes through the old Silk Road, the seasoning tends toward cardamom and dried fruits over fresh chilli heat, the meat often lamb or beef where the Indian side might reach for chicken. Pakistani Punjabi cooking specifically favours the spit and the slow braise; it is less enamored of the intense dry-heat tandoor than its Indian counterpart, and the butter chicken - that totemic dish the world associates with "Indian food" - is almost certainly a post-partition invention from the Indian side, specifically from a Punjabi refugee family in Delhi. You know, the capital of...
At New Punjab Club, the tandoor is everything. Which tells you something. What Chefs Mitra and Sidhu do - did, at the time of this meal - is not fraudulent. It is, if anything, more honest than the branding: they cook the food of an undivided Punjab, drawing on Mughal-era recipes and the deep agricultural tradition of one of the subcontinent's great grain-growing, dairy-producing, food-obsessed regions. If that food happens to geographically straddle the modern border and be claimed by both nations with equal ferocity, well. Cuisine does not stop at checkpoints.
The menu that greeted our party of self-appointed critics - assembled, as is the custom, with the express purpose of eating too much and arguing about it afterwards, was a document of serious intent. The tandoor section alone could sustain a review. The Malai Tikka arrives as something close to a revelation: the restaurant's preferred local three-yellow chicken, brined for a day, then marinated in soft cheese, yoghurt, green chilli and yellow chilli powder before the tandoor works its alchemy. The result is chicken that has surrendered all of its moisture to flavour and none of its flavour to the process. It is, to use the technical term, ridiculously good. The Matka Murghi, the same three-yellow chicken sealed into a clay pot with safri spices, root vegetables and shallots and then left overnight in the residual heat of a cooling tandoor - produces a stew of such gentle, fragrant depth that you begin to understand why the process has survived for centuries. This is not a chef showing off. This is a chef respecting what time and indirect heat can accomplish that nothing else can. Pre-book it. I say this with the urgency of someone who has watched a companion be turned away from this dish: just pre-book it.
The Nashta section (street food but seriously elevated!) deserves its own small ceremony. The Tamatar Ki Chaat, made famously without onion or garlic (a cooking constraint that is itself a kind of culinary discipline, like a painter restricting their palette), uses heirloom tomatoes blushed in the tandoor and Pink Fir potatoes cooked overnight in the slow ovens. The result is something that tastes both utterly familiar and completely refined. And the Makki Di Roti with Sarson Da Saag (griddle-cooked corn flatbread scooping up mustard greens and date jaggery), is a dish so embedded in Punjabi identity (specifically the Lohri festival, celebrated across the Punjab on both sides of the border in January, with bonfires and folk songs and the particular joyfulness of a people who have survived another winter) that eating it in this room, with these prices, in Hong Kong, feels like time travel.... with better lighting and aspirational art framed at every visible space.
Then, there's the room itself. Twenty seats, as promised. It harkens to the era of post-colonial Punjab with the nostalgic flair of someone who genuinely loves that aesthetic rather than someone who hired a production designer to fake it. Old world charm is an overused phrase. Here, it earns usage. We rolled out into the Hong Kong rain, into one of those soaked taxis that smell of upholstery, stale beer and ambition, collectively bloated and arguing the question we always argue: why doesn't subcontinental fine dining get the respect it deserves?
The answer involves decades of Western food media's class coding of "ethnic" cuisines, the assumption that complexity and refinement belong to European traditions, and a generalized failure of imagination that Michelin, to its credit, has begun to correct.
One star. Four years running. Twenty seats. The world's first. The branding may tell you it is Pakistani. The chefs are Indian. The food is Punjabi, which, if you know your history and your geography and have paid attention to the past several paragraphs, is simply: yes. All of the above. And then some. Go. Take someone you want to impress.
And perhaps, just perhaps, let the food be the thing that doesn't require a border.
New Punjab Club
34 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong.
Reservations via www.newpunjabclub.com.
Words and Images: P.Ramakrishnan
The images have been AI modified, enhanced, sharpened from original phone pics!
