Rooh brings modern Indian cuisine to the city
San Francisco is in the midst of an Indian culinary renaissance, where chefs are fusing the exotic flavors of India with modern cooking techniques and peak-season ingredients.
You might say this started six years ago, when Srijith Gopinathan first earned a Michelin star for his inventive Cal-Indian cuisine at Campton Place. Last year brought Babu Ji and August 1 Five, which both earned buzz for their upscale interpretations of Indian street food.
Now there is Rooh, a 3,450-square-foot, swanky restaurant that opened earlier this year in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Rooh is part of the Good Times Restaurants group, which operates nine restaurants in India. This is its first U.S. project.
The dining room reflects modern India’s vibrancy, with opulent gold screen curtains separating large-party tables, indigo blue banquettes and turmeric yellow walls. Service, as expected, was top-notch.
The restaurant’s menu is equally vibrant. Executive chef Sujan Sarkar, who won 2016 Times chef of the year honors in India, has created delightfully artistic small plates ($10-$16), large plates ($20-$34) and accompaniments ($6-$8), using local and Indian ingredients — such as ice apples and tree tomatoes — to reimagine traditional favorites.
For instance, tuna bhel ($15) is a modern take on bhel puri, the savory Indian street snack made of puffed rice, vegetables and tamarind
sauce. Here, it is presented as Indian ahi poke, with puffed black rice, radish slivers, avocado and dollops of tamarind gel that cool the spicy togarashi.
Potato tikki ($12) is similarly on-trend and full of texture: Crispy kale and spinach tempura
cover thick potato slices doused with a refreshing sweet and sour yogurt mousse and bits of what taste like dried raspberries.
Half the small plates and a third of the entrees are meat-free — a plus for those of us who try to eat plant-based.
If you do venture into poultry and meat, know this: Rooh offers what may be the moistest butter chicken ($26) you’ll ever have. Elsewhere, Indian butter chicken often arrives dry on the inside and slathered in creamy, oil-slicked gravy. Not here. Sarkar dehydrates butter into powder and swirls that into the fenugreek-and-red-chile curry, achieving sauce that is rich without being heavy and that allows the integrity of the heat to come through.
We longed for that level of heat in another entree, beef short ribs curry ($32). While the short ribs were falling-apart tender, they had an overly fatty quality, akin to pork belly, and lacked those hot flavors. That said, we loved the accompanying bone marrow kofta and baby turnips.
Even standard items, like bread, are elevated at Rooh. Get the chutney sampler ($12), which comes with garlic naan and fresh chutneys that range from sweet to creamy and savory. The sampler comes with three half-slices of naan, but you’ll need more, so order extra for $5. Better yet, try one of the other fresh-baked flatbreads, like masala taftan or lentil kulcha.
Every element of Rooh is creative, and that extends to the cocktail program. Drinks are listed on a wheel showcasing ancient ayurveda’s six rasas or tastes: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent and bitter. What a clever and straightforward way of explaining cocktails.
We started with the vodkabased, pungent mango mule ($13), which was loaded with fresh and preserved shreds of green mango — enough to eat with a spoon (and, yes, I did).
After the meal, we lingered over the British tea set that held our ever-so-bitter chai punch ($13) made with Monkey Shoulder scotch, grapefruit shrub and Assam tea, happy to witness this culinary renaissance.