Junoon

Gordon Ramsay’s first foray into US television brought Kitchen Nightmares to this side of the Atlantic in 2007. The most memorable episode in the first series featured Dillon’s, a restaurant serving Indian and American food on 54th Street, a few minutes stroll from Ramsay’s own restaurant at the London hotel. The restaurant’s issues revolved around an out of touch owner and multiple managers unsure of what their role should be apart from blaming everyone else for the problems. The show featured the usual parade of filth, rotting food in storage, lousy food on the plates, rat droppings and cockroaches making themselves at home. The solution was to give the place a thorough clean, accuse a manager of exploiting the owner so he was fired (prompting a lawsuit), change the name to Purnima and bring in Vikas Khanna to act as a consultant on the menu and in the kitchen.

Mr. Khanna was born in Punjab and started his own catering business aged 17 before gaining experience in a number of hotel groups in India. He emigrated to the US to study at Cornell University and New York University while getting used to the American restaurant industry, becoming Executive Chef at Salaam Bombay in Tribeca.

Long after Ramsay and the cameras had departed, Vikas Khanna took over the restaurant completely and the two remaining managers had moved on but on my occasional visits it never seemed particularly popular. Purnima closed for good in 2010. The website can still be found here. The Himalayan scallops served with apricot-tamarind chutney had been a favourite of mine.

Moving on from Purnima, he opened Junoon on West 24th Street in 2010. The menu is designed to incorporate influences from all over India while putting a modern slant on traditional dishes. Junoon has held one Michelin star since 2012. The restaurant space is vast with a large bar at the front of the property but that is dwarfed by the restaurant space to the rear. Weekend lunch choices range from set Thali platters (featuring three courses served with dal, rice raita and roti), à la carte options to a five course tasting menu with a corresponding 5-course vegetarian option. Having enjoyed Mr Khanna’s food in the past, the tasting seemed a good option. Drink choice was a Burning Desire, Junoon’s take on a Bloody Mary with vodka, tomato juice, citrus, chilli and spices. This took a bit of getting used to but overall was a nicely satisfying drink.

The first course was a chilled Spring pea soup with cardamom and basil. From my perspective this did not work well. The cardamom dominated throughout such that the pea flavour struggled to emerge at all. The thin soup did have a very pleasant subtle spicy heat but this wasn’t enough to compensate for the unbalanced flavours.

The lotus root served three ways was much better. Thin slices of lotus root were deep fried or pickled and served with puréed lotus root combined with hibiscus ghee. This was accompanied by a side salad with a light citrus vinaigrette. The deep fried roots were delightfully crisp with no hint of grease. The pickled slices had a light vinegary flavour and the purée had a gentle taste akin to hummus. I liked this dish a lot.

This was followed by Kerala lobster curry. The gentle curry combined lobster with coconut milk, curry leaves, mustard seeds, green chillies and smoked kodampuli (Malabar tamarind) served over pilau rice. The curry sauce had a lovely smoky flavour where the coconut milk shone through to work as an excellent accompaniment for the sweet lobster flesh. The inclusion of the tail fan from the lobster seemed odd adding nothing to the presentation of the dish or the flavours. Apart from that this was a very pleasant plate of food.

The last of the savoury courses was Masaledar lamb chops described as tandoori marinated lamb chops, curry confit potatoes and anardana-brown butter sauce.  It was accompanied by wonderfully light naan bread. The lamb had a delightful flavour and I would have loved to have had more because there wasn’t much meat on the chops. The confit potatoes were cold so didn’t combine particularly well with the lamb. Even though the meat and the bread were really good this seemed an odd way to round things off before the sweet course.

Dessert was falooda, combining rose semifreddo, lime and cilantro granite, bloomed basil seeds and strawberries. A vanilla sauce was poured onto the dish at the table and although it tasted good I’m not sure that the dish needed it. The tart granita was the start of the show giving a freshness in the mouth that helped cut through the other components. The semifreddo resembled intense Turkish delight so the portion of semifreddo on the plate was just about right. 

I’m a bit non-plussed by the whole experience. For me, control of the dish choice means that a tasting menu is an opportunity for a restaurant to show what they are capable of. Junoon’s version suffered on two fronts. The overall meal was just nice, no more, no less and nothing here is going to trouble a best of list at the end of the year. There were no dishes that when you look back you wish you could immediately eat again. Also, I seldom focus on cost but this meal was poor value compared to other meals I had over the weekend. For example, Gwynnett St’s much more imaginative tasting menu of 9 courses was only $10 more.

But there’s still a conundrum. The seeming lack of good Indian restaurants in the United States means that I’m still going to go back to Junoon in the hope that this was a one-off blip. However, my take is if you want a good example of a 1-Michelin star Indian meal you’re better served going to Trishna in London than Junoon in New York.

Overall Rating - 3/5