BADMAASH Venice. Credit: Joseph Duarte

How BADMAASH Changed Indian Food in America

10 Minute read

25 Mar 2026

Paul Feinstein

Journalist

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What started as a rule-breaking restaurant in Los Angeles grew into a broader shift, reshaping how a new generation approaches Indian food and identity.

When BADMAASH opens its Venice location, it won’t just mark the restaurant’s third outpost. It will mark the latest evolution of a concept that, more than a decade ago, set out to change how Indian food was seen, served, and experienced in America.

Because when brothers Nakul and Arjun Mahendro opened BADMAASH in downtown Los Angeles in 2013, they weren’t trying to refine Indian dining. They were trying to break it.

For Nakul, the story starts long before Los Angeles. His family has been in the food business for generations, beginning with his great-grandfather’s preserves shop in Amritsar and evolving through his grandfather’s hospitality ventures and his father’s formal culinary training in India and Canada. Growing up, restaurants were not an aspiration, they were simply part of daily life, shaped by a father who remains deeply involved in every aspect of the business, from developing recipes to pushing the next iteration forward.

Some of his earliest memories are of sitting on a steel countertop in his father’s kitchen, wearing a paper chef’s toque, watching the rhythm of service unfold around him. It was chaotic, fast, and, to him, completely magnetic. “I caught the bug very early,” he says. “I didn’t even know it was something I loved. It just always felt magical.”

By the time Nakul reached his early twenties, he had already worked nearly every position in a restaurant, from bussing tables to opening new concepts for one of Canada’s largest hospitality groups. New York felt like the natural next step. He was interviewing with major restaurants, ready to continue building his career inside someone else’s system.

Then his father offered a different path.

“You can go to New York and help someone else build their empire,” Nakul recalls him saying. “Or you can come here and build your own. You’ll be in the driver’s seat.”

That idea shifted everything. Within weeks, Nakul changed his plans and flew to Los Angeles. Stepping out onto the top level of a Santa Monica parking garage, he was met with a clear view of the ocean, palm trees cutting into a cloudless sky. “It just felt good,” he says. Within hours, he had made his decision. New York was out. Los Angeles was home.

Nakul, Pawan, and Arjun Mahendro. Credit: Diego Andrade

Breaking the Mold of Indian Dining

What Nakul found in Los Angeles wasn’t just opportunity. It was a gap.

Indian food, as it existed in the city at the time, felt stuck. The restaurants he encountered were functional, often built around takeout, buffets, or familiar dishes executed without much attention to hospitality or design. Even in cities with strong Indian communities, the experience rarely extended beyond the food itself.

“I was embarrassed to take people to Indian restaurants,” he says.

It wasn’t the cuisine. It was everything around it. Menus felt dated. Dining rooms lacked energy. Service often fell short of the level he had experienced in other restaurants. For Nakul, the issue wasn’t that Indian food didn’t belong in that space. It was that no one had approached it with the same ambition.

The answer wasn’t to open a better Indian restaurant. It was to rethink what an Indian restaurant could be.

When Nakul and his brother Arjun opened BADMAASH in downtown Los Angeles in 2013, they built it less like a traditional restaurant and more like the places they actually wanted to spend time in. A second location in Fairfax followed in 2018, expanding the concept while staying true to its core identity. The menu pulled from Indian flavors but wasn’t bound by them. Hip hop played in the dining room. Butter chicken sat alongside a lamb burger. The rules, both cultural and culinary, were deliberately rewritten.

“We’re not an Indian restaurant,” Nakul says. “We’re a good restaurant that serves Indian food.”

That distinction shaped everything, from the menu to the service to the way guests experienced the space. It was intentional, and, at the time, it was unfamiliar.

The response was immediate, and it extended beyond the dining room. BADMAASH didn’t just resonate with diners. It resonated with a generation. Artists, creatives, and second-generation voices began to see the restaurant as something more than a place to eat. It was a space that reflected a version of their culture they hadn’t seen presented that way before.

Nakul had always envisioned it that way. Early on, he mocked up an image of Gandhi in pink wayfarers, a visual shorthand for what BADMAASH stood for. Familiar, but reframed. Rooted, but unapologetically modern.

“We were the ones that came with the needle and popped that balloon,” he says.

The balloon had been building for years, the sense that Indian food, like many other cuisines, was ready to evolve but hadn’t yet found its moment. BADMAASH didn’t wait for that moment. It forced it.

In the years that followed, that approach began to echo across the industry. Restaurants rooted in other cultural traditions started to push beyond the formats that had long defined them, rethinking not just menus, but atmosphere, service, and identity. What had once been considered niche or traditional began to take on new forms, shaped by chefs who, like Nakul and Arjun, grew up inside those cultures but weren’t bound by them.

Nakul sees that shift as part of a larger moment. “We hit this point where all ethnic cuisines needed to be pushed forward,” he says. “The balloon had grown. It just hadn’t popped.”

He points to restaurants like Lasa in Los Angeles, which reimagined Filipino food through a similar lens, as well as a growing wave of Indian restaurants in New York and London that are redefining the category in their own way.

BADMAASH didn’t create that pressure. But it helped release it.

The Next Evolution of BADMAASH

More than a decade after opening in downtown Los Angeles, BADMAASH is returning to the place where that shift first took hold.

Venice was one of the first neighborhoods Nakul explored when he arrived in Los Angeles, the same stretch of coastline that convinced him to stay. Now, with the opening of its Abbot Kinney location, the restaurant comes full circle.

But this iteration isn’t about repeating what worked before.

“If we opened BADMAASH today, this is what it would look like,” Nakul says.

The Venice location reflects how much has changed in the years since. The food is more focused, balancing longtime staples with new dishes that push further into seasonality and technique. For the first time, BADMAASH introduces a fully realized beverage program, from natural wines to cocktails designed to stand alongside the food rather than simply accompany it.

The space itself marks a shift as well, more immersive, more deliberate, blending references to Indian heritage with the ease of coastal California. It is not a reinvention, but a refinement of everything they set out to change.

The Chef

Nakul Mahendro is the co-founder of BADMAASH, the Los Angeles restaurant that redefined modern Indian dining through a culture-driven approach shaped by family legacy, hospitality experience, and creative evolution.

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