15 By the end of the year, the Indian restaurant had been added to the best restaurant lists, where Reddy had seen a gaping void. Reddy and Sarkar’s fashionable haunt was a harbinger of the wave of new restau- rants highlighting India’s cuisine around the Valley, echoing a trend sweeping the country. Since Feringhee debuted in 2022, a handful of elevated spots have joined the mix. Each eatery is a little different, but its chefs and owners share a reverence for their homeland’s cuisine and a dogged desire to introduce it to others around Phoenix. WAITING FOR THE RIGHT TIME Jiten Sibal opened Bahaara Indian Kitchen in Tempe in May 2025. The Indian restaurant scene in Phoenix today is a far cry from the Valley that welcomed Sibal in 1993. He’d built a culinary career in other parts of the world, starting at the revered Delhi resort restaurant Bukhara, then opening eateries around India and Saudi Arabia before moving to the U.S. When he arrived in Phoenix, Sibal drove down Bell Road, home to a cluster of Desi restaurants and markets offering South Asian food and products. He pulled up a seat at an Indian restaurant and struck up a conversation with the owner, eager to get feedback about opening his own spot. The owner’s response was less than inspiring. “Whoever comes over here tells me, ‘my wife cooks better than you,’” Sibal recalls him saying. Concerned by the tepid welcome and Americans’ general lack of knowledge about Indian food, Sibal turned his atten- tion elsewhere. He opened a Vietnamese restaurant, became a franchisee of several Filiberto’s restaurants and launched his own drive-thru chain, Riliberto’s Fresh Mexican Food. By 2016, the pickings were still slim: only two of the 125 new restaurant open- ings tracked that year served Indian fare. In the last several years, however, he and other chefs have noted a shift in diners and an explosion of new Indian restau- rants. He credits people learning more about food through international travel and the Desi diaspora. In the twilight of his career, Sibal returned to his plan to celebrate the historic Mughlai cuisine of northern India. “I wanted to wait for the right time to come to open the right Indian restaurant,” he says. In Tempe, the tall, gregarious chef calls his kitchen a laboratory. There, he and his chefs tinker with spices and herbs that infuse Bahaara’s traditional menu with bold flavor. The restaurant’s luscious dal is cooked overnight, just as he learned at Bukhara, with ginger, garlic and spices. Once the lid of the ceramic pot is removed from Bahaara’s biryani, the warm scent of cardamom, cinnamon and saffron perfumes the table. The restaurant’s modern design and warm, familiar service place it somewhere between the everyday and special occasion. “I want to give the last part of my life to Bahaara and my cuisine,” Sibal says, “so I can introduce it to anybody, everybody.” INDIAN CUISINE FINDS NEW INTEREST The restaurateur is far from alone in that sentiment in the Valley. Newcomers have jumped in while others have doubled down on a more refined format. Two longtime friends who grew up together in the deserts of Dubai launched the spirited Indibar in Scottsdale, while Sarkar and Reddy followed up Feringhee with Nadu in north Phoenix. When digging into the numbers, it was only a matter of time before Indian food rose to the fore in America. More people live in India than in any other country in the world. Divided into 28 states and eight territories, India is also the second-largest country by land area. With such geographic and cultural diversity, the cuisine is equally expansive and varied. The Asian population makes up just under 4% of the Valley’s residents, or about 184,000 people, but Asian Indians account for 27% of that group. That’s a larger concentration than in the greater U.S., where about 5.2 million people identify as Indian-American, accounting for about 21% of the country’s Asian population. Chef Pujan Sarkar, Sujan’s brother and collaborator, oversees the kitchen at Nadu in Phoenix. The sparkling new restaurant is the latest to join the Valley’s growing elevated Indian dining scene. Nadu got its start in Chicago, opening last year. The Sarkars and Reddy brought a second location of the pan-Indian restau- rant to Desert Ridge Marketplace on June 26. The name means land in the family of languages spoken in southern India. Nadu’s kitchen crafts traditional and unique regional dishes that the Sarkars learned from chefs during their travels around India. “We are talking about the land, and when you talk about the land, that’s our motherland,” Pujan says. “India is not itself a cuisine. India is a story. It’s a culture.” The country’s food is the third most popular worldwide, just after Italian and Japanese cuisines. Yet, in the U.S., Indian food has largely been reduced to a handful of well-known dishes like chicken tikka masala, biryani and vindaloo, served in neighborhood curry shops and casual buffets. >> p 16 Nadu’s chefs coat its pork spare ribs with a tamarind, ginger and jaggery glaze spiced with mustard seed and chiles. (Jason Luna) Nadu’s Phoenix location features kebabs, including Aslam Chicken Tikka. (Jason Luna) Jiten Sibal opened Bahaara in May 2025. (Provided by Bahaara Indian Kitchen) Chefs and brothers Sujan and Pujan Sarkar. (Provided by Tiya)
