Midnight Chicken and Rumination on Pakistani Cuisine

Written by Mahira Rivers

Photo courtesy of BK Jani restaurant.

One fall night in Brooklyn eight years ago, Sibte Hassan was tending to his chicken. A few friends were at his apartment in the neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, and he wanted to cook for them. It didn’t matter that it was already late, and the chicken, crusted with red pepper flakes and cracked whole coriander seeds, would be sizzling on the charcoal grill well into the night. It mattered that Hassan, a Pakistani expat living in New York, was taking care of his guests. The chicken, suffused with smoke, was done just as night passed into day, earning it the nickname “midnight chicken.”

 Today, Hassan’s midnight chicken is a best-seller at his Brooklyn restaurant BK Jani, where it is listed as chicken tikka, its more recognizable name. The restaurant, which opened in 2015, serves a menu of barbecued meats and halal burgers—things Hassan grew up eating. Born and raised in Lahore, Hassan is a proud Punjabi and a food fanatic to the core, the kind who hungrily thinks about lunch while still munching on breakfast. In Pakistan, nearly half of the population is Punjabi, according to the The World Factbook, making it the largest ethnic group in the country. In America, Hassan is in the minority—in more ways than one.

 A rudimentary online search finds that BK Jani is one of just 14 exclusively Pakistani restaurants in New York, where the Pew Research Center reports the Pakistani diaspora in America is concentrated. In descriptions of these restaurants, there is no hyphenated, Indian-and-Pakistani label in sight. In Washington, D.C., and Houston, cities with consecutively large populations, the results were six and 18, respectively. The data are similarly low in Chicago and Dallas. And yet, a canon of essential Pakistani foods—like tikkas, kebabs, biryani and countless curries—are on the menu at thousands of restaurants across America.

 How does a country—the fifth most populous in the world—exist as such a marginal cuisine in American public dining rooms and consequently its public discourse? Of course, if you expand the above search above to include “Indian and Pakistani” or some combination of South Asian countries (Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, Bangladeshi and Nepali) the returns increase substantially, but this only seems to underscore the decentering effect.

 In his book The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016), Krishnendu Ray introduces the concept of “public edibility” to illustrate that the frequency of a topic, in this case a cuisine like Indian or Italian, in the public domain of restaurants and media is indicative of its prestige in society. In this context, the implications for Pakistani cuisine are clear: Intentional or not, the rare appearance of Pakistani foods or the constant association with Indian cuisine in both restaurants and the media signals an inferior status.

 By now, it is hopefully widely understood that Punjabi cuisine from the subcontinental north has played an integral part in defining (and inadequately summarizing) Indian food outside of India.

 As the historian Lizzie Collingham details in her book A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (2006), a handful of enterprising immigrants from northern India created a string of restaurants in London in the 1920s serving “a version of Anglo-Indian, Punjabi, and Mughlai cuisine.” This became the blueprint for inexpensive curry houses and higher priced Indian restaurants that spread across the UK and beyond for much of the mid-1900s. But Pakistan, the country that encompasses three quarters of the Punjabi state, has yet to see its cuisine make substantial inroads to commercial success relative to its Indian counterpart.

 Is this all tied up in the fraught oversimplification of colonial-era borders, which erase centuries of shared history? Is underrepresentation just a proxy for Islamophobia? Perhaps this simply means that restaurants—transactional establishments masquerading as beacons of culture—are inherently the wrong space to look for meaningful representation. Really, it’s all of the above.

Sibte Hassan is the owner of BK Jani restaurant in Brooklyn, and a proud Pakistani Punjabi. Photo by @whereubing

While he was studying at Parsons School of Design in New York, Hassan went in search of a taste of home. He explored the usual clusters of restaurants along Lexington Avenue in Manhattan and in Jackson Heights, Queens, with long menus serving vaguely familiar dishes, but he was severely disappointed.

 “It was bad. Really bad. I missed the quality and missed the flavors,” he said. That longing for foods that lived up to his memories of Pakistan pushed Hassan, a creative with no professional culinary experience, closer to opening BK Jani.

 The kebabs Hussain makes so well today are ubiquitous on the streets of Lahore and throughout Pakistan, but also across the border in Delhi and beyond. So what makes them Pakistani? Or what makes them Indian? Modern politics has shaped this debate around religion, which prescribes what Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs should and should not eat. But even these sweeping generalizations are being challenged as some Hindus do, in fact, eat beef, and India is home to more than 150 million non-Hindus who are permitted to eat beef.

 Attribution is the trickier part and it has everything to do with one fateful night 73 years ago. 

 At the stroke of midnight on August 14, 1947, the dominion of Pakistan was born, and along with it, the concept of a Pakistani cuisine. Over a century of British interference in the Indian subcontinent was reaching its messy end. The WWII-depleted Raj was itching to get out of India, and the rift between Hindus and Muslims was growing. As the story goes, Sir Cyril John Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never set foot in India, carved two portions of land from the contiguous whole to become the Islamic states of West and East Pakistan—irrevocably split from a newly independent Hindu-majority India, but inextricably linked.

 Unfortunately, Radcliffe’s margin of error was significant. As he sliced shoddily through the states of Punjab and Bengal to form West and East Pakistan respectively, tens of millions were instantly displaced. Communities with a millennium of shared history were effectively pitted against each other in the name of religion. The tragedy that ensued would become a historical exchange of people known bitterly as Partition.

 Muslim families picked up their lives and embarked on the treacherous journey to a new home. Hindu and Sikh families suffered the same fate, in reverse. Millions died in the months that followed Partition, and a volatile political climate has destabilized the region to this day. The princely states of Jammu and Kashmir were not formally controlled by the British Raj and were supposedly left to self-determine their allegiance after Partition. Immediately, in 1947, and later in 1965, Pakistan and India waged war over the disputed lands, which was followed by years of violent conflict in the region. In 1971, following decades of oppressive and violent governance, the Bangladeshi Liberation War split Pakistan further into Pakistan in the West and Bangladesh in the East.

 The trauma of Partition imprinted a generation of survivors and informed countless works of art. Among the most famous is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), a fantastical novel about children born at the stroke of midnight on the day of India’s independence who come to find themselves with enigmatic powers. (The name, fortuitously and unintentionally, sounds a lot like Hassan’s midnight chicken.)

 I should note here that using Partition to justify today’s ills might be construed as a crutch. Partition belongs to history; it is slipping away from our collective memories and in need of preserving. This is a post post-colonial world. But as nationalistic furor grips the subcontinent and the us-versus-them sentiment manifests violently in both Pakistan and India, I would insist that the seeds of discontent sown in the Raj’s twilight bears some responsibility and remains accountable.

 Perhaps in some way, the diaspora has moved on. Sonny Solomon is an Indian Punjabi restaurateur living in New York. He is behind the since-closed fine dining restaurants Devi and Tulsi, which he ran with Chef Hemant Mathur. (Against the current odds, Solomon and Mathur recently opened a casual Punjabi counter in New York’s East Village called Veeray da Dhaba.) Solomon’s grandmother and both his parents were born in Lahore, in modern-day Pakistan, but his family settled in India after the split.

 “We never knew much about Pakistan,” he says. “When I left India, I met a lot of Pakistanis. That's when you start learning from each other. Everything is similar.”

 It is, however, indisputable that the mass migration in the aftermath of the British Raj led to a grab-bag of confusion in the origins of so many traditions in both Punjab and Bengal.

One particularly famous example involves the Punjabi entrepreneur Kundan Lal Gujral, self-anointed inventor of tandoori chicken. Gujral claimed he was the first to cook chicken in the tandoor while working at a restaurant in Peshawar, modern-day Pakistan, in the years before Partition. After the split, Gujral left Peshawar for Delhi with a tandoor in tow, where he spun the chicken into a successful restaurant and eventually a global chain under the name Moti Mahal Delux. Today, the restaurants are synonymous with tandoori chicken and Indian ingenuity. But the tandoor, with roots in Central Asia and Afghanistan, is still an integral part of everyday life and cooking in Peshawar and Gujral’s claim to have invented the dish is contested.

In 1947, the British Raj ended its term in the subcontinent but not before dealing one final blow to the region in drawing the border that would split the states of Punjab and Bengal into West Pakistan and East Pakistan. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

If the matter of provenance is full of contradiction, then so are the establishments who deal in this ambiguity, to which consumers look for education, validation and pleasure. Restaurants are a prime example: In this case, they feed the public discourse over what South Asian food is or what it should be, despite the underlying tension between culture and commodity.

 From his discussion in The Ethnic Restaurateur, Ray explains that immigrant-owned restaurants often exist in the “domain of necessity,” where financial viability is more important than cultural accuracy. For early South Asian restaurateurs, selling a generic and inexpensive menu of grilled meats and vegetarian curries under the marquee of Indian cuisine was a necessary business strategy to attract the most customers. It’s fair to suppose that in these cases, and by catering to the guest palate, restaurants were shaped at least as much by the customers as the proprietors and chefs themselves.

 A stellar example of this, and a precursor to the American industry, was the proliferation of curry houses in the UK. In the 1940s and ’50s, immigrants largely from Punjab and the city of Sylhet in present-day Bangladesh built an industry of restaurants serving loosely Punjabi dishes under the umbrella of Indian cuisine. As Collingham details in her book, these curry houses were dually acting as immigrant community centers offering jobs, housing and a chance at a new life. They were a means to an end, and the end had little to do with educating the public about what curry was and what it wasn’t.

 In the 1970s, coinciding with an increase in South Asian immigration, the curry house took off in America. Though the presence of Indians and Indian restaurants in America dates back to the 1890s, it was the passing of The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that ended decades of racially driven quotas and opened America’s borders to significant migration from the subcontinent. The Bangladeshi Liberation War in 1971 sent a surge of Bangladeshi immigrants to New York City, where they would find work, and a springboard into American life, in Indian restaurants. According to Collingham, a stretch of Second Avenue on the Upper East Side once had 27 such restaurants, all run by Bangladeshis.

 These restaurateurs were unwittingly participating in an exchange that would determine how the public would view South Asian food for decades to come. Not only was it a misrepresentation of actual Indian food, but Pakistan and Bangladesh were largely written out of the narrative. The irony that the agents of erasure in this case were Pakistani and Bangladeshis themselves is not lost.

 Also around this time, a movement against the regionally nonspecific definition of Indian cuisine started to grow. Madhur Jaffrey’s iconic book An Invitation to Indian Cookery (1973) was an inflection point in the UK and, eventually, the U.S. as well. By the 1980s, professionally trained Indian chefs began to differentiate from standard curry house fare by selling “authenticity” via regional cuisines. The shift led to the more nuanced and modernized landscape of South Asian restaurants we have today, but is still largely confined to variations within Indian cuisine.

Soophia Hussain owns Cusbah restaurant in Washington, D.C., where she creatively uses her menu to educate customers on Pakistani culture. Photo by Mack Ordaya.

Soophia Hussain owns Cusbah restaurant on H Street in Washington, D.C. Her father and cousin started the restaurant as a passion project in 2012. Hussain was born in northern Virginia but her family traces its lineage to Rawalpindi in Pakistani Punjab and Jagadhri in India’s northern state of Haryana (her grandparents moved to Pakistan during Partition). Cusbah is a modern-day curry house with dishes like rogan josh, korma and vindaloo; in its initial descriptions, the cuisine was hyphenated as Indian-and-Pakistani. When Hussain gained ownership about five years ago, she started talking about Cusbah as a Pakistani-first restaurant. The change, though subtle, felt meaningful.

 “I've been in this industry for over eight years and I feel like our cuisine, the culture and general knowledge about Pakistan is frequently brushed under the rug and dominated by what is considered Indian cuisine,” Hussain said. “[I wanted] to say, ‘Wait a minute, that's not all this is. There's another level to this. There's another country involved.’”

 Hussain had confidence in this repositioning because the restaurant had an established clientele, ultimately serving as a reminder that restaurants are very much at the mercy of their market.

 Hassan and Hussain have the luxury of choosing how they position their restaurants; after all, they’re in the business as arbiters of taste and not just commerce. In their individual ways they are striving to define Pakistani food, to disentangle it from the slew of hyphenations. For Hassan, BK Jani is a vehicle of good quality food and respectability in the face of a cheap eats stigma.

 “I have taken that responsibility of representation,” he said.

 For Hussain, Cusbah offers an education in what it means to be a modern Pakistani-American.

 “A lot of Americans don't realize that Pakistan is part of South Asia,” she said. “They tend to put it in the Middle Eastern category.”

 It’s disappointing, but after 9/11 and with media coverage mired in religion, it’s not hard to see why. Pakistan never held the same cultural appeal as India and the association of a disproportionately small, nonrepresentative segment of Islam certainly didn’t help. But Islam alone doesn’t define Pakistan or Pakistani cuisine.

 At Cusbah, Hussain challenges this notion head-on with a menu of alcoholic cocktails alongside halal meats.

 “It’s recognizing that Pakistanis are not all the same,” she says. “It’s not completely homogenous. I think it's just acknowledging that there is not one way to do this.”

 Restaurants may set the agenda in our public discourse, but the media propagates it. To talk about food in a way that is untethered to its origins is a choice. On the other side, there’s acknowledgement that the idea of Indian food or Pakistani food or Bangladeshi food is complicated and full of contradiction. It’s okay to say that. In fact, we should say it more often.

 For a generation of American-born South Asians, both the outdated and the updated curry houses are self-referential; they define the diaspora while also shaping it. Going out for a pick-your-protein curry, ordering marrow-rich beef nihari with your saag paneer, enjoying a cocktail with halal grilled kebabs are all consumed under the inclusive but somewhat hazy label of “South Asian.” And while it might seem as though asserting Pakistan as separate and distinct from India or Bangladesh is only the way to achieve meaningful validation in our public spaces, it’s also a reminder of our shared story—we are all midnight’s children.