Over the last decade, at least two dozen Indian snack shops have opened in the five boroughs. They often have a Bollywood theme to them, celebrating Indian pop culture. Located in Manhattan Valley, Bombay Frankie Roll is more bare-bones, with seating at counters. Reflecting the snacking style of Mumbai (the former Bombay), it proves you can wrap almost anything in a roti. Also available are masala french fries, calamari, and an Indian spin on fried chicken. 

With 101 restaurants in 19 countries, Saravanaa Bhavan is the Cheesecake Factory of southern India. The menu is fully vegetarian and offers a predictable list of dosas and idlis in a modern restaurant setting. In addition, it pulls rice dishes and less-familiar flatbreads from several locales in South India. Examples include adai aviyal (a pair of delightful red pancakes made with pulses, served with a coconut vegetable curry, from Kerala), and bagalabath (a nut-studded yogurt rice common to several South Indian states).

A luxury restaurant from New Delhi, Indian Accent plays fast and loose with Indian dining traditions, creating a new haute Indian cuisine. That doesn’t mean everything is great on the prix fixe menus, but even the failures are interesting. A flatbread called a phulka might come wrapped around chili pork or pulled jackfruit, while lamb is roasted in ghee, and root vegetables appear with mustard greens in a tart sauce. Dishes like potato sphere chaat veer into science chef territory.

This small spot in a mainly Chinese and Korean neighborhood makes biryani in the style of Hyderabad, a modern southern tech center where northern Indian dishes took root in the 18th century after the Mughal invasion. The biryani list is vast, including a hybrid chili chicken biryani and another that features boiled eggs, a favorite ingredient in the city’s cooking. But the restaurant also summons specialties from other parts of southern India, including a wonderful black peppercorn chicken from Kerala and a fiery chicken curry from Tamil Nadu. 

In the basement of the Ganesh Temple in Flushing is one of the city’s most remarkable restaurants. Serving South Indian vegetarian fare since 1993, its menu is aimed at worshippers, but everyone is made welcome (the entrance is around the corner on Holly Avenue). Consult the posted menu for specials, and order chaats, dosas, uttapams, idlis, and rice dishes at the counter. Saturday-only specials include a mini tiffin featuring small versions of signature dishes; red onion sambar vada (savory donuts), and mirchi bajji (deep fried chiles). 

Once there were tons of these modest Punjabi steam table restaurants scattered around town, dispensing hearty meat curries and sturdy vegetable dishes with rice, naans, chutney, dal, raita, and a perfunctory undressed salad. Now Swagat is one of the few remaining. Lamb and chicken curries are the mainstays, with tandoori kebabs another major focus. Ten or so main dishes per day are supplemented with apps like bhel poori (a crunchy chaat) and fish pakora (bright red fritters). Chicken or vegetarian lunch specials are a particularly good deal.  

When it was founded in 1982 just up the block in an old diner, retaining the original name, it marked the advent of Jackson Heights as an Indian shopping district. The diner was aimed at vegetarians and meat eaters alike, tendering South Indian vegetarian fare as well as lamb and chicken curries. Nowadays, the premises are more luxurious, with a menu composed mainly of North Indian standards, with the occasional Indo-Chinese dish and Mumbai-style chaat, though the South Indian fare is now missing from the menu.

Shrimp is perhaps the most common main ingredient in the curries of Goa — now a beach resort, but former Portuguese colony — on the southwest coast, and shrimp caldine is a great example. It’s made from a paste featuring coconut milk, tomatoes, and tamarind, powerfully flavored with cumin, garlic, turmeric, and ginger at Cardamom, a restaurant specializing in Goan fare, with additional dishes from other regional South Indian cuisines.

When it opened nearly 10 years ago named after a Bollywood movie, this comfortable corner restaurant ushered in a new era of pan-Indian menus with carefully chosen regional specialties. The dining room was jazzy, and the food a tad more elaborate than Curry Hill habitues had been used to. Find on the diverse bill of fare dum biryanis from Hyderabad, lamb in coconut milk from Chennai, shrimp curry from Mangalore, lamb kebabs from Lucknow, and mustardy chicken tikkas from West Bengal. 

One of the most intriguing restaurants in the city, long-running Vatan is made up to look like a village in Gujarat, on two levels decorated with Bollywood movie posters, with huts you can sit inside of and a spreading banyan tree that will put you in a good mood. The food consists of a single all-you-can-eat meal that comes in several courses, strictly vegetarian and delivered by waiters in festival costumes. Flatbreads and pulses abound, with snacks and chutneys galore. 

Kerala lies near the southernmost tip of India. The cuisine features seafood and coconut, often richly spiced with curry leaves, black mustard seeds, and black peppercorns. Beef is a mainstay, making Taste of Cochin one of the few Indian places offering beef curries. Menu highlights include fish moillee, Malabar paratha, beef ularthiyathu, goat masala, and avial, a vegetarian delight of chayote and long beans in coconut milk. The place fills with celebratory banquets on the weekends. 

Bawarchi specializes in two iconic types of southern Indian dum biryani. The Hyderabadi style is the more austere of the two — meat, poultry, or fish lightly marinated and then cooked with basmati rice in a sealed container to preserve the flavors. The Vijayawada style mixes in gravy and pickles at the last moment, making the rice darker and more pungently flavored. Multiple vegetarian and meat-bearing regional dishes, especially from the southern states, fill out the menu, including a half dozen fascinating variations on chicken curry.

Though several spots with Chennai in the name have laid claim to serving the food of the former Madras, they more often provide a general South Indian menu. Masala Cafe takes a deeper dive into the regional cuisine of the city. Offered as an appetizer, poondu kuzhambu is a spicy red vegetarian gravy to be eaten with lacha paratha, a flaky flatbread. Other recommendations include kozhi milagu varuval (black pepper chicken) and egg murtaba (a crisp stuffed pancake).

Kati rolls are said to have been invented in Kolkata, the former Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal. These rolls wrap a flaky paratha around a choice of fillings, often including chicken, lamb patties, chana, mixed vegetables, shrimp, paneer, and an egg, which may arrive annealed to the interior surface of the paratha. Two great places serving them duke it out on Macdougal Street: Thelewala (where they’re called nizami rolls) and Kati Roll Co, which boasts several other branches around town. A favorite is the achari paneer roll at the latter, supplementing the fresh cheese with a fragrant and acidic mixed pickle.

Kuttanadan is one of four restaurants from the far southwestern state of Kerala found in the borderlands of Queens and Long Island, where seafood and coconut milk hold sway, and beef is often eaten. Thrill to charcoal-grilled sardines in the Portuguese style, beef devil (featuring brisket with a spicy rub), and the quizzically named pork roast (it’s not really roasted], which features chunks of shoulder meat and shards of coconut stir fried.

It was a brilliant idea to jazz up the South Indian vegetarian dosa menu a bit, adding unexpected fillings like sweet potato, then adding other non-vegetarian fare from South India and North India to the mix. This Fort Greene restaurant also does a good job of reproducing such southern standards as Chennai fish, Chettinad chicken, and eggplant kulambu and lamb pepper fry, both from Kerala.

This budget chain started out near New Delhi in 1960, and eventually expanded to New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. The food is ramped-up Punjabi with other North Indian cuisines, name-checking Amritsar and often using cream in addition to milk. It offers some invented dishes like cream chicken, laced with herbs and tasting almost French. Apart from all the Mughal standards, Chinese-Indian food is part of the agenda, with an unforgettable gobi Manchurian. For vegetarians, the leathery okra known as kukuri bindi is the ticket. 

Jalsa Grill and Gravy in West Midwood is one of the few restaurants I know of in the city representing, at least partly, the food of West Bengal, the state in which Kolkata (the former Calcutta) is situated. In addition to a chaat or two (including a wonderful example featuring fried slices of Asian eggplant on a chickpea base), there’s an entire section of the menu devoted to West Bengali fare, including chingri malaikari, a gingery coconut curry laced with mustard oil and turmeric. All food is halal.  

Named after a beach in Mumbai and founded in 1990, Chowpatty is an Iselin, New Jersey restaurant specializing in food from Gujarat. The walls are lined with swaying palm trees, and the menu is strictly vegetarian. Highlights include pani poori (tiny crisp pastries to be filled by the diner with tamarind water), pav sandwiches made on Portuguese rolls, dosas, thali meals served on trays, a buttermilk soup called khadi, and kaju karela — a curry of cashews and bitter melon.

Among the half dozen places in the contiguous New Jersey towns of Iselin and Edison that specialize in South Indian dosas, this utilitarian place does them best. This is also a great place to try upma, the spice-shot farina porridge, as well as innovative uttapams filled with broccoli or tomato, in addition to the usual idli and vada snacks and a large array of dosas and rava dosas. Wash it all down with majjige, a masala buttermilk.