Grub Street: The Dhamaka team will go Filipino at Naks
Chintan Pandya and Roni Mazumdar — the duo behind Adda, Dhamaka, Semma, and more — became the city’s most prominent new restaurateurs by mastering a type of Indian cooking New York diners crave but without pandering or transmogrifying the food into some kind of American hybrid. One person who has been instrumental in their success is Eric Valdez, who for the past two years has served as Dhamaka’s chef de cuisine. Yet Valdez grew up in Manila, and with him at the helm of their next project, Naks, the group is moving beyond the subcontinent for the first time.
When the restaurant opens in September, it will take over an East Village space that was first intended to be an outpost of Adda. Four days before construction was set to begin, the group changed its mind. “I think the architect still hates me secretly,” Mazumdar says. They reworked the plans to make sure the space becomes an appropriate showcase for Valdez’s Filipino cooking.
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