COTE Vegas Steak Omakase. Credit: Gary He

The Rise of Diasporic Fine Dining in America

10 Minute read

26 Feb 2026

Sheila Yasmin Marikar

Journalist

Copy link

As restaurants like Gymkhana and COTE redefine luxury through memory and migration, a new generation of chefs is transforming diasporic cuisine into fine dining’s most compelling movement.

It’s the scent that hits you first. Walking into Gymkhana, you’re enveloped in an aroma of oud, equal parts woody, smoky, and sweet. At least, I think it’s oud. Karam Sethi, the “K” in JKS Restaurants, the group that grew Gymkhana from a wild idea into a Michelin-lauded fine dining institution, won’t divulge exactly what’s piped through the vents and diffused into the room. “It’s bespoke,” he tells me the first time I meet him at Gymkhana Las Vegas, two weeks after it opened on the ground floor of ARIA Resort & Casino. “I use the scent in pretty much all of my Indian restaurants.”

Let me state plainly why this matters. Many Indian restaurants smell of roasted cumin and coriander, nose-prickling fennel, ajwain, and mustard seed, with an undercurrent of rich clarified butter (ghee) and piquant notes of ginger, garlic, and chilis, the holy trinity that powers much of the cuisine of the subcontinent, though not all of it. Some might call this smell curry. Some might be put off by it, avoiding Indian restaurants because they fear the scent will cling to their hair, breath, and clothes, and what that might signal to the outside world.

With all due respect, these people do not deserve Indian food. Certainly, they do not deserve Gymkhana, which is, in my estimation, the finest Indian restaurant in the world, one that has met its moment. Gymkhana Las Vegas, the second outpost of the London restaurant that opened in 2013, arrives as diasporic fine dining gains momentum in the Western world. A generation of “move fast, break things” disruptors raised on Facebook and the idea that they could be anything they wanted to be has met a class of monied millennials eager to consume the food they grew up with, but elevated. In restaurants that are hard to get into, where snagging a reservation carries bragging rights. Restaurants that demand dressing up, spending a little more, lingering over expertly shaken cocktails and decanted Burgundian Pinot Noirs. Restaurants that smell like designer boutiques rather than holes in the wall you want to wash off. Restaurants that leave you wanting more.

“You see it New York, with what Unapologetic is doing, with Musafer,” says Sethi. “It's a craze. It's huge. It's slowly going to become a local cuisine of America as it is in London.”

Should further proof be required, consider the Gymkhana Las Vegas waitlist. “On a nightly basis, there are hundreds of people,” says Sethi. “On a Friday or Saturday, it goes into the thousands.”

The Rise of Diasporic Fine Dining

Indian food is not the only beneficiary of the proverbial glow up. Pujol, Yang’s Kitchen, Night + Market, and Bangkok Supper Club are all examples of diasporic fine dining—on-trend, accolade-heavy halls that give a high-end treatment to cuisines traditionally regarded as cheap and second class. Just down the Strip from Gymkhana Las Vegas is another prime model: COTE Korean Steakhouse. It has breathed new life into The Venetian, a 1990s relic whose gondolas and frescoed ceilings are, like everything else from that decade, enjoying a resurgence in cool.

What strikes you first at COTE are the tabletop grills, a fixture of Korean barbecue restaurants worldwide. Unlike many traditional setups, COTE’s are gold-rimmed and smokeless, meaning diners headed to Las Vegas bottle-service booths need not worry about lingering smoke or scent. The aversion to Korean barbecue as something that might “make their hair smell” says more about perception than reality.

The steakhouse is the brainchild of Simon Kim, the Korean American son of a New York City restaurateur whose heyday was also in the 1990s. “My mom’s place was called Kori, which means link,” says Kim. “She wanted to link the two cultures. She was definitely ahead of her time. I was very concerned, as a 16-year-old bus boy, you know, how are we going to make it in TriBeCa?”

“But then Meryl Streep came in. And then Gwyneth Paltrow. And that’s when I knew—if you build something you believe in and you really take care of your customers, it’ll take off. A restaurant, ultimately, is not rocket science. You have to eat three times a day. And if you feel like the person running the restaurant cares, you’re going to go back. It’s that simple.”

Kim cares. A lot. Enough to write impassioned letters to landlords who doubted that COTE’s first location in New York’s Flatiron district would succeed. An excerpt: “If you give me an opportunity to occupy your space now, fast forward 10 years, you’ll be able to look back and give yourself credit that you made a real contribution to the success and flourishing of Korean cuisine.”

He was wrong about the timeline. COTE New York opened in 2017 and earned its first MICHELIN star that same year; COTE Miami received the same designation in 2022, within months of opening in the city’s Design District. COTE melds the flavors and staples of Korean barbecue, mouth puckering kimchi and banchan for days, with prime cuts of dry-aged beef, a martini menu that would make Don Draper call in sick, and a wine list worthy of a master sommelier. It is a restaurant concept that could only exist now, one that had to come of age in America in the twenty-first century and needed a first-generation kid like Kim to dream it and execute it.

Recreating What Was Missing

Growing up in London, Sethi and his siblings made frequent trips to Delhi to visit their grandparents. The meals they had in India eclipsed what they found in Britain. Sethi sought to recreate that experience, first by bringing the Mumbai institution Trishna to London, then by launching a private catering venture with a chef he hired. “We started doing dinner parties, cocktail parties, basically out of my mom's kitchen,” he says. “I was like, 22-years-old catering parties of 300 people.” “I managed to convince and brainwash my brother into backing me,” he says; their sister joined the group soon after graduating from university.

Gymkhana quietly opened in London’s Mayfair district in 2013. “In the early days, it was depressing,” says Sethi. “We were doing, like, two covers for lunch.” Within nine months, the restaurant earned a MICHELIN star, and reservations began to fill. “No one had had butter chicken made the way that make it in India—slow cooking the tomatoes for hours, creating that rich gravy,” he says. “What captured people was not just the familiarity of the menu but the imagination, the originality, the execution.”

In 2024, “the American influencers started coming,” Sethi says. Securing a reservation at Gymkhana London is now notoriously difficult. It is somewhat easier in Las Vegas, owing to the larger dining room, which is roughly twice the size of Mayfair and divided into sections that mirror the hierarchy of the original outpost. The clientele is not exclusively South Asian; on a recent Saturday night in January, roughly a third of diners appeared to be of South Asian descent. “What’s refreshing is how many people are coming to us for their first taste of Indian food,” says Sethi. That includes not only tourists in Las Vegas but also Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar at Gymkhana London. “Kendrick had Indian food for the first time in his life with us,” says Sethi.

Belonging Nowhere, Building Something New

“When you go back to your motherland, you’re not necessarily one of them, right?” (Right.) says Simon Kim. “We lived a life in the United States where we might’ve felt, especially during our adolescent years, that we didn’t belong. Maybe it gave us an identity crisis. But like crises, when we persevere, we crystallize a concept that’s beyond the best of both worlds. I think that’s what Gymkhana is. You can’t find Gymkhana in India, and you can’t find COTE in Korea.”

“It’s a mix and match and elevate,” he goes on. “The old concept of fusion was, like, let’s mix white and black and make gray. That’s not what we’re after, anymore. That’s not what people want. We're talking about zebra shapes, leopard shapes, polka dots. We’re talking about yin and yang, contrasting and emphasizing, creating something new.”

It is diasporic fine dining, whose time has finally come.