On a recent Saturday night in Brooklyn, 31 strangers sat down to a six-course South Asian feast: saffron custard, jaggery popcorn syrup and stories about childhoods split between continents. By dessert, there were new group chats, new plans—and one couple left with a lamb-over-rice recipe borrowed from a Midtown halal cart. The hosts were Aditya Mishra and Akhil Upad, alumni of Junoon, Vikas Khanna’s temple to Indian fine dining in NoMad. But The Sewing Tin, their sell-out supper club, is deliberately lo-fi. It runs out of a sun-drenched Brooklyn loft, all mismatched candles, homemade playlists and a DJ set where flavor and sound build in tandem.
“I used to throw very casual dinner parties with friends, and they would always send me TikToks of supper clubs,” Upad tells Observer. “That’s when I realized there weren’t many South Asian ones.” The Sewing Tin’s name riffs on a familiar South Asian in-joke: the Royal Dansk cookie tin, inevitably filled with thread, needles, stray buttons—never cookies. “It reminds you of home,” Upad says. “That’s the environment we wanted to create—with food.”
While The Sewing Tin is rooted in South Asian tradition, its crowd is pure Brooklyn mosaic. First-gen Indian immigrants sit next to third-culture kids and food-curious New Yorkers from every borough. Past guests include Michelin-starred chefs like Joseph Rhee and even Trevor Noah. The non-Indian guests are often the most curious, Upad notes. “They ask questions and want to understand the ‘why’ behind each dish, which we love.” Tickets go for $195 per guest, and both Instagram and word-of-mouth have turned The Sewing Tin into a cult favorite. The waitlist typically fills within 24 hours of each month’s release.
The dinners run for four hours, though no one rushes to the door. Guests arrive in pairs or trios and leave in group chats. Sometimes the party continues elsewhere. “It happens a lot,” Upad shrugs. “We’ve seen friendships start.” Many return for future dinners, often bringing parents or partners along—a subtle stamp of South Asian approval. The ambiance shifts with the season: curated florals, moody candles, artistic dishware. The now-mythic Royal Dansk tins make regular cameos, a subtle nod to the nostalgia that inspired the concept. Opting for a supper club, versus a café or formal restaurant, offered Mishra and Upad something rare: creative control without investor interference. It also enabled experiments unlikely to survive a midtown lease, like DJ-driven dinners where courses shift the beat.
“Indian cuisine isn’t always taken seriously in fine dining,” Mir says. “But New York is changing that, and it’s exciting to be part of that shift, even outside a traditional restaurant format.” They never dilute anything for a Western palate. The whole point is to stay unapologetically themselves. Though Royal Dansk has sponsored a few collaboration dinners, most events are self-funded. Some nights break even, others turn a modest profit—money that’s reinvested in ingredients, equipment and the experience itself.
As for criticism from purists? Not much. Traditionalists haven’t really pushed back, because The Sewing Tin doesn’t claim that their food is traditional Indian or Nepali cuisine. “We aren’t trying to replicate it exactly, but to reimagine it with curiosity, respect and a sense of play,” explains Mishra. About half the menu is drawn from dishes their mothers made growing up, reworked with New York flair. (Curry leaves are sometimes mistaken for curry powder, and black salt can unsettle newcomers, but when used right, both are transformative.)
Balancing the supper club with their day jobs is another story. Upad is in medical school. Mishra is a full-time cook in Eric Ripert’s kitchen at Le Bernardin. Each dinner means building a restaurant from scratch and dismantling it again, often within a 15-hour window. There are permits to manage, storage to rent, teams to coordinate. And then there’s the occasional disaster. “Akhil once spent eight hours making a sauce, slow-cooked and layered,” Mishra says. “I walked into the kitchen, saw it in a pan, and thought it was scrap. I threw it out.” He grins. “We laugh about it now, but at the moment, it was bad.”
They’re open to scaling, but only if it doesn’t compromise the intimacy of the experience. “The magic is in the size,” Upad says. “We plate every dish ourselves. We speak to every guest.”
Across the East River, another supper club is rewriting the rules of Indian dining. The Salon, run out of a spacious Manhattan studio, is the work of Ananya Chopra and Kritika Manchanda—friends who started cooking for 20 guests and ended up with a waitlist longer than a Diwali shopping queue. Since their first dinner in December 2022, the project has blown up, buoyed by word-of-mouth and a Vogue India feature. Tickets now vanish in minutes.
Their menus lean historical: railway-themed dinners tracing the route from Lahore to Kolkata, Awadhi feasts based on royal kitchens. Their signature dish is a slow-cooked and theatrically layered Lucknow biryani. “We cook what we grew up eating,” Chopra tells Observer, not what Western restaurants call ‘Indian.’ They don’t dial down the heat. They don’t do fusion. “Hosting is the culture,” Manchanda says. In South Asian homes, meals aren’t just about food—they’re how you show love, memory, even grief.
The Salon’s guest list, like The Sewing Tin’s, draws a mix of creatives, South Asian diaspora and culinary obsessives. Tickets are $190 per head. Past attendees include rapper Heems and Raw Mango founder Sanjay Garg. Despite a mailing list of over 5,000, Chopra and Manchanda refuse to scale. “It would change the vibe,” Chopra says.
Intention is their lodestar. Every menu is rooted in heirloom recipes, historical research and the vintage charm of old Lucknavi mehfils (communal gatherings). Every element is designed to evoke feeling: tables, sweets, scent. “We’ve collected china for over ten years—Herend, Limoges, Hutschenreuther, Christofle platters,” says Chopra. “The visual language matters as much as the food.”
Running a supper club brings its fair share of rigor: finding the right space in a city with soaring rents and little room, meticulously sourcing and setting up, and coping with the unpredictable. “One night in June, it got so hot our AC gave up,” says Chopra. “That was the only time our guests weren’t fully comfortable.”
Brand partnerships happen, but profit isn’t the endgame. Manchanda says they want to share Indian food as they know and love it: unfiltered and unapologetic.
“When we started, we didn’t know of any other Indian supper clubs,” Chopra adds. “Now, there are so many. It’s exciting to see the scene expand.” What makes it work in New York? The city is starved for real intimacy, Manchanda says. Or as Chopra puts it: “It’s an inherently Indian concept—just without the cultural clichés. To us, it’s home.”
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