Semma

Vijay Kumar cooks the food of Tamil Nadu, where he is from, and he has never once made it easier for anybody.That is the entire proposition of Semma and the reason it matters. Indian restaurants in America have spent seventy years sanding down their own cooking — moderating heat, standardising menus into the same twenty northern dishes, and quietly deciding which regions were legible enough to sell. Semma refuses all of it. The food is hyper-regional south Indian, largely Tamil, aggressively…