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In her review last year of the chic new Indian restaurant Bungalow in Manhattan, interim New York Times food critic Priya Krishna hopefully asked, “Are we done with the butter-chicken era of Indian restaurants?” It is the opening sentence, the seam from which the rest of the review drapes. Bungalow earned three stars for what it is (beautiful, playful, technically dazzling) but also for what it isn’t, which is a restaurant that serves butter chicken. The lack of butter chicken means it is “by South Asians, for South Asians.” Butter chicken is the symbol, the synecdoche, of everything wrong with Indian food.

It has seemed lately that to be a successful Indian r

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