When the New York City Indian restaurant Adda transformed from a casual Queens canteen to a swankier Manhattan hot spot, it ditched the butter chicken that diners at the original location knew and loved — its best-selling dish, at $23 per order. At the revamped Adda, there’s still butter chicken, but it’s no longer just a dish: It’s an “experience.”
The first thing to know about Adda’s Butter Chicken Experience is that you must reserve it ahead of time, and it’s offered to only six tables a night. For $42 per person — and the whole table must opt in — a chef wheels over a cart, smokes chicken over wood of your choosing, gives you tastes of three butters (smoked chile, fenugreek, and pickle tomato), then uses your selection to build the sauce to your liking. Opting into the experience opens up an exclusive butter chicken cocktail, too — a smoky, somewhat abstract creation topped with salted cream. The city of impossible-to-get tables now also has its impossible-to-get dishes.
Across the country, restaurateurs have been turning dishes into “experiences,” building on diners’ desire to have Instagrammable, immersive theatrics with a meal while also tugging at the seductive allure of exclusivity. The rise of the limited-availability burger, for example, shows the success of building anticipation around a single menu item. It’s not enough to just order a great burger; one must hunt it down.
As with Adda, some of these experiences come in the form of elaborate presentations from tableside carts, which have been having a moment; not all are quite so limited, either. While it shares a name with Adda’s offering, at Musaafer, with locations in Houston and New York, the “butter chicken experience” more simply means butter chicken served two ways, with a classic tomato-based sauce and another that uses tomatillos. At José Andrés’s new Bazaar Meat in NYC, the “jamón experience” involves $40-per-ounce hand-carved jamón ibérico, which is presented with pan de cristal and tomato. Momofuku, of course, helped popularize the idea of a dish as an experience years ago with its large-format bo ssam. At its Las Vegas location, the $268 multi-component Five Spice Rotisserie Duck must also be ordered ahead of time.
For Adda chef and owner Chintan Pandya, the butter chicken “experience” was motivated by a desire to do something different from the ubiquitous Indian restaurant offering. “Everybody who eats a butter chicken might end up eating a different butter chicken every day,” Pandya says. While some people get disappointed, missing the old Adda, “there’s a certain percentage of diners who love these experiences,” he says.
For some operators, the appeal of the experience is pragmatic. Every week, Little Walter’s, a Polish restaurant in Philadelphia, gets half a pig from a local farmer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The restaurant uses most of the meat for its popular kiełbasa and rotisserie pork, but is left with two shanks. The obvious choice for chef and owner Michael Brenfleck was to slow-cook them into the traditional preparation of golonka.
“Why don’t we do a whole tasting centered around this one dish?”
At first, the restaurant served it as a Saturday special. “Then that spawned the idea: Why don’t we do a whole tasting centered around this one dish?” Brenfleck says. Enter the “golonka dinner,” which features a silver platter of golonka with kiełbasa, gołąbki, and a chicken cutlet. It comes with six each of three kinds of pierogi; a selection of small plates, salads, and bread; six cans of Polish Żubr beer; and a bottle of vodka with fixings like beet juice and the accoutrements for a pickle martini — an entire feast. Only two dinners are available per week, only on Saturdays, and only by preorder and prepayment of a set $500 for up to six guests.
“Honestly, it sounded fun,” Brenfleck says. In a city full of restaurants (and especially Polish ones), the experience could give diners something new to talk about. And it could be fun for him too, Brenfleck adds: “It was something I could immerse myself into instead of the monotony of a la carte dinner over and over again.” Guests sit at a red velvet couch that overlooks the kitchen as a kind of chef’s table, letting Brenfleck put on a show. As with omakase, that diners don’t have to make any decisions beyond showing up is likely part of the appeal.
Another of Pandya’s restaurants, Dhamaka, has offered feasts of rabbit and lamb, with a capacity of one order per day, also ordered ahead of time. This is purely due to space constraints, Pandya explains. “If I had the infrastructure over there, I could have sold 10 rabbits,” he says. “It’s practically impossible for us to do multiple of them.” Requiring preorders for the experience helps the kitchen plan ahead.
While the butter chicken experience at the new Adda costs more, Pandya suspects that the previous iteration at the Queens location was more profitable by virtue of the canteen’s higher volume. “The numbers we were doing were crazy,” he says. “This one is very exclusive.” Plus, he adds, diners don’t usually need to order much else, since the experience includes paratha, rice, and dal. And in the new model, one person’s entire job every day is just to do butter chicken experiences.
But what makes these formats worthwhile for Pandya goes back to his goals with Unapologetic Foods, which he runs with Roni Mazumdar. “We want to push the boundaries of Indian cuisine,” he says. “The easier thing is to not do it, but what’s the fun of that? You also have to challenge yourself.”
For other chefs, the choice to offer an “experience” is similarly romantic. At Sanjh, the high-end Indian restaurant in Irving, Texas, executive chef Sarabjit Singh Assi serves the Punjabi dish of atta chicken. He marinates chicken for 24 hours in yogurt and spices, wraps it in a banana leaf followed by a whole wheat crust (to seal in the flavors), cooks it over charcoal in a tandoor, and then flambés it tableside and cuts the crust open to reveal the chicken.
Because many diners travel to Sanjh from Houston, Oklahoma, and Florida, there’s an element of needing to make the restaurant feel special and worthwhile, but for him, it’s primarily personal. “The specialty of that recipe is that I’m the one who does it from A to Z,” Assi says. “This is the only recipe which just belongs to me.”
Accordingly, Sanjh offers only three orders of atta chicken per day; they must be ordered 24 hours in advance and are spread out between services. Assi is happy with the limited availability of the experience. To keep certain recipes alive, he says, “you need to take responsibility to make [them] in the right way, not the commercial way.”
Diners, of course, are in an interesting position. When dining out costs more and more, how does one justify trying new places? For some, it’s clearly no longer enough to simply have a good meal or a vibey atmosphere, but to also have a unique experience — better yet if it’s a somewhat exclusive one. The importance of the experience has always been the case with a certain kind of restaurant; now some are just saying the quiet thing out loud and building it into the menu.
