A New Crop of Unapologetic Sandwiches
I’ve been worried, a little, that Unapologetic Foods was going soft. Over the past decade or so, the restaurant group more or less detonated the New York dining scene with Adda, Dhamaka, and Semma, whose undiluted, unwhitewashed takes on Indian cuisine—brains, offal, flaming spice—were a jolt to the city’s sleepy South Asian culinary landscape. Today, the restaurants are still stellar, still brash, still pace-setting, but the past year or two have brought some small, subtle shifts—little concessions, maybe, to the normative American palate. Sure, Dhamaka still serves goat testicles and kidneys, but the once boldly presented brains at Adda are now tucked inside an obscuringly creamy egg custard. Most dismaying to me was the group’s seemingly endless tinkering with the menu at Rowdy Rooster, its fast-casual fried-chicken spot, including a downgrade in the chicken’s range of heat. Where, once, there was a one-to-five scale of spiciness, in which three was already deep in the red zone and five verged on biohazard, there’s now a chirpy scaled-down rubric whose upper limit offers, roughly, the soothing warmth of an electric heating pad.
The original Rowdy Rooster, a slim storefront on a scrappy East Village block, closed earlier this year, menu fiddling notwithstanding. (One location survives, on a charmless stretch near Penn Station.) In its place is Sanwits, the group’s latest, a sandwich shop overseen by Eric Valdez, who was the chef de cuisine of Dhamaka before becoming the chef-partner of the Filipino restaurant Naks, the group’s other non-Indian outpost. Sanwits is Filipino, too—the name is a Tagalog gloss on the word “sandwich”—despite the fact that, as Valdez told me on the phone recently, the Philippines, where he grew up, doesn’t really have a sandwich culture to speak of. This is, unapologetically, exciting: with no inherited form to honor or betray, Valdez has room to do, more or less, whatever he wants, and the menu is a glorious mashup of recognizable American sandwich silhouettes and frank, unhedged Filipino ingredients.
