Given that Tamba is among the valley’s excitement-generating new restaurants, given that the flavors practically vibrate off the plate (and given that those plates themselves are delightful moments of dinnerware art), and given that the service consistently hits a note of briskly attentive, intuitively well-timed solicitude, reflecting serious fine-dining discipline — given all that, it might seem odd to start off by talking about the restaurant’s décor.
Or, rather, the absence of décor. Notice Tamba’s commanding tonal immensity of beige. Even the flourishes on the doorways resist colorizing; they look like they’re cast in sand. The whole normcore Amer Fort vibe is certainly an intentional design choice, but this isn’t mere pretentious monochrome minimalism at play.
“I’m very against art and stuff on the walls, unless it makes very clear sense,” owner Sunny Dhillon explains. “And, yeah, we’ve had mixed reviews about it. It’s funny because the artistic people are like, ‘Oh my God, incredible!’ And the other side is basically, ‘You guys need artwork!’ But I love the simplicity of it.”
The purpose of that simplicity is to zoom your attention in on the plate. Whether it’s the piquantly savory kimchi butter oysters or plump, smoky octopus straight from the Josper charcoal oven — or even the classic butter chicken — the dishes at Tamba are confident, dynamic exclamations of spice, subtlety, and playful innovation. It doesn’t feel quite fair to label anything going on here as “fusion” (that overbroad category of culinary blurring), unless we’re talking about the almost scientific approach Dhillon took when he was assembling the Tamba team, fusing disparate talents with an impressive collective global pedigree. “It’s a lot of seasoned personalities, but absolutely no egos.”
Executive chef Anand Singh himself brings about half of that pedigree. From Mumbai to the Maldives to the Seychelles to Mexico (where Dhillon recruited him from the acclaimed Arbol in Cabo San Lucas), Singh boasts a résumé that’s less a list of bullet points than a narrative arc of accumulated tools and techniques from international kitchens. At Tamba, he presides over the fiery side of things with wok, tandoor, Josper charcoal oven, and mangal grill.
“If you go to a very traditional restaurant in India, they usually only use a tandoor,” Singh says. “When you take those spices and marination that you’d use in the tandoor, and cook them in a Josper or mangal grill, you get a different, smoky flavor that is very unique.” Case in point: the mangal-grilled potatoes and cauliflower in Tamba’s roasted aloo gobi masala, which bold-face the dish’s earthy richness.
That spirit of cross-over experimentation spans the menu. In charge of Tamba’s raw program is chef Sung Park, formerly of Sushi Samba, where he’d struck up a friendship with Dhillon after regularly wowing him with his late-night omakase wizardry. If Singh’s experience is broad and cosmopolitan, Park’s is focused and deep. He’s a sushi master whose studied expertise is now finding fresh inspiration in new flavor profiles.
“With Japanese cuisine, the spices are very limited,” Park says. “I mean, they use a lot of togarashi, but that’s about it. They can’t handle a lot of spice. But playing around with chef Anand’s homemade spice mixtures is like a whole new library opening up. Like, our tamarind-spiced hamachi, with a curry emulsion and ponzu, is one of those unique combinations that melds really well together.”
Again, sure, you can call it fusion, but their talents and techniques aren’t so much fused as choreographically intertwined — or, as Singh says, “You can create magic if you have two minds sharing all their experience.” It also helps that Singh and Park share a practical creative philosophy that aims not to invent new dishes as triumphant conceptual conceits, but rather craft them to be combinatorially delicious — which is to say they want them to be popular. When you see “kimchi butter oysters” on the menu, it might initially strike you as a fanciful flight of kitchen-lab ambition that, hmm, may not be for you. When you taste it, though, you’ll be wondering why this isn’t standard treatment anywhere oysters are served. (Expanding the scope of flavor combos into the liquid realm is an intriguing sake program that general manager Olivier Morowati is building out.)
Also working in Tamba’s favor, counterintuitively, is the valley’s abundance of neighborhood Indian eateries, which hew to a safe bandwidth of “authenticity” that entails a standard regimen of samosas, naan, tandoori chicken, curries, masalas, and the good old ladle-it-yourself lunch buffet. In other words, no one’s doing what Tamba’s doing, but clearly there’s an appetite for it.
The question of how popular an upscale contemporary Indian restaurant can become in Town Square — jostling with staid and standard chain eateries such as Lazy Dog, P.F. Chang’s, and California Pizza Kitchen – is anyone’s guess. But Dhillon, whose father was a successful restaurateur (shout out to the original Gandhi on Flamingo and Paradise), chose Town Square for the long, strategic game.
“We signed three years ago, and even we didn’t know Town Square was going to go through such a boom,” Dhillon says. “Guest House and PopStroke announced after. Two hotels are coming there. The (Brightline West) train will be a mile and a half away. There’s a massive play for it becoming the central core of transport. So, we placed it on the hardest hitting corner in the city.”
Hmm, this idea of Town Square as an exciting place of arrivals and departures — rather than a mere lifestyle shopping complex — suggests that Tamba is happily cooking well ahead of schedule.
Tamba, 6671 Las Vegas Blvd. South., #A-117, tambalasvegas.com
