All That Glimmers at Ambassadors Clubhouse
The menu is vast, and somewhat conceptual—dishes are divided, at times, by type (a section for papads and chaat), but then also by size (“bitings,” or finger foods), or by cooking method (baked in the tandoor, grilled over charcoal, crisped up in cast-iron tawa skillets, and so on)—and the food is specifically, celebratorily Punjabi. This restaurant, like so many recent high-profile openings, is part of the genuinely thrilling wave of South Asian restaurants arguing for regional precision, pushing back against decades of commodity Indian cuisine, the culture- and geography-flattening tikka masalas and garlic naans. Still, it was primarily immigrants from Punjab, and the restaurants they opened in neighborhoods like the East Village, or Richmond Hill, in Queens, who set the standard for what are now New York City’s Indian-restaurant clichés. The result is that much of the menu at Ambassadors Clubhouse is familiar in description, if not always in execution. The restaurant is particularly proud of its tandoor, a coal-burning oven that is, it turns out, the only one of its kind in the city (most tandoors ’round these parts run on gas). The oven lends an exquisite depth to everything that passes through it—a roundness and tang, a kiss of smolder. It’s there in the tiles of paneer, house-made from buffalo milk and springy-soft, bathed in a tomato-and-cashew sauce. It chars the shells of prawns, slightly husky with the scent of carom seeds and so spectacularly massive that, as they were set on the table, I briefly, disorientingly thought they were boneless chicken breasts.
The kitchen extends the room’s theatricality to the plate: each dish, almost without exception, is presented as an event. A tangy kachori chaat, bright with beetroot yogurt, arrives inside a semolina puffball the size of a regulation slow-pitch softball, which cracks open at the lightest spoon whack; a deftly spiced paan patta chaat with fried betel leaves and tender black chickpeas is piled high as a haystack and glimmers with sauces. Even the breads—various naans and rotis, a flaky whole-wheat lachcha paratha—are gorgeous, chewy and yeasty, many of them slick with clarified butter, presented, almost sculpturally, in oval baskets. A “seafood tower” involves seafood, and is certainly a tower, but, unlike the chilled-shellfish subtlety of the American steak-house staple, here it’s more of a vertical sampler of dramatic, snacky appetizers: shrimp kofta pressed around soft-boiled quail eggs; a crab-and-egg scramble folded in a savory lentil pancake; gently cooked scallops served in their shells, under herbaceous lashings of parsnip chutney. None of your standard-issue tetrahedral samosas here: they’ve been reimagined as “seven layered” things—the layers are wings of crisp pastry, which radiate out from a pocket of spiced aloo-and-pea filling like sunbeams, or the ruffled pages of a book.
