At Adda in the East Village, the tables are crowded with Le Creuset pots of baby goat biryani, lamb parcha in saffron cream, and the famous butter chicken experience where guests choose the wood for smoking and watch the dish finished tableside. The walls are plastered with newsprint, the music swings from Bollywood classics to Punjabi hip hop, and the room feels more like a canteen than a polished Manhattan dining room.
For Shubham Sharma, now in the kitchen here, it is the perfect canvas. Adda’s ethos of “reimagined classics” mirrors his own path: a career built on honoring tradition while pushing it somewhere new.
That journey began in earnest at The Bombay Canteen, where he worked under Executive Chef Hussain Shahzad. The restaurant was not only a kitchen but also a philosophy that insisted India’s regional food deserved to be celebrated with the rigor of fine dining while remaining joyful and welcoming. Shubham rotated across stations such as tandoor, entrée, and garde manger, learning both speed and precision as he executed cover after cover night after night. The tandoor became his signature station.
There he coaxed a perfect crust onto Mysore-style mutton chops, managed the fire for mirchi parathas, and achieved the subtle blush and char of a ghee roast chicken seekh.
Each preparation demanded instinct as much as discipline, and Shubham showed a rare balance of control and intuition.
The Bombay Canteen also revealed to him how food could be a tool of community. He participated in food festivals, chef-led pop-ups, and the annual Independence Day Daawat where the team cooked for more than 600 underserved guests. These events carried no glamour but they taught him humility, focus, and the deeper purpose of hospitality. He absorbed the ethos that food is heritage and innovation at once, and that every plate can tell a story.
During this period he also worked closely with Masque, one of India’s most ambitious fine dining restaurants. Masque became known not only for its tasting menus but for its collaborations, and Shubham was in the thick of them. When Manila’s Toyo Eatery joined forces with Masque in 2023, he helped execute a two-day menu that stitched together Indian and Filipino flavors. Kinilaw made with Bombay tadgola, siomai reimagined with fermented black rice and Kashmiri chili oil—each dish tasted like a conversation between two countries. Guests leaned in as servers explained the parallels: garlic and vinegar in one culture echoing pickles in another. The air was alive with the smell of coconut vinegar, charred chilies, and wood smoke, and with the energy of two culinary traditions finding common ground.
At Masque Lab, Shubham also played an important role in the Bombay Chop Suey dinner, an evening that swapped fine dining formality for playful irreverence. Alongside chefs Varun Totlani, Lakhan Jethani, and Harsh Dixit, he sent out plates that winked at India’s Indo-Chinese nostalgia. Chop suey layered with kala khatta syrup, parottas dripping with Manchurian sauce, fried noodles that snapped and melted on the tongue.
The room was loud with laughter and recognition as diners rediscovered the food of their youth dressed up in restaurant whites.
Another milestone came with the Indian Cheese Six Hands Dinner, where Shubham helped elevate paneer, dahi, and indigenous cheeses to the fine dining stage. Working with Aditya Raghavan and Thomas Zacharias, he helped present dishes that revealed the depth of India’s dairy traditions. Aged curds appeared like French fromage, fresh cheese was paired with mango and wild herbs, and diners found themselves surprised at how something so familiar could feel so new. The evening carried the scent of ghee and toasted spices, but also the quieter satisfaction of reclaiming ingredients that had long been overlooked.
These two kitchens shaped him in complementary ways. The Bombay Canteen gave him an appreciation of how heritage, memory, and community can live on a plate.
Masque pushed him to think about collaboration, experimentation, and dialogue between cuisines. Together they prepared him for the next step.
At Eleven Madison Park in New York he joined one of the most exacting kitchens in the world, working on the garde manger station. There, precision and silence replaced the chaos and warmth of Mumbai. Shubham worked on menus where every course was a meditation, and he was part of extraordinary collaborations like the Humm x Ducasse dinners, when Daniel Humm’s plant-forward philosophy met Alain Ducasse’s French mastery. The plates arrived like choreography: vegetables treated with the reverence of foie gras, consommés that shimmered with restraint, sauces whispered onto porcelain.
For Shubham, being part of that historic dialogue meant bringing his own sense of collaboration into one of the most exacting dining rooms in the world.
Now, at Adda, those worlds come together. The room may be casual, but the cooking carries the lessons of Mumbai’s collaborations and Eleven Madison Park’s precision.
The butter chicken experience has the theater of a Masque pop-up, the goat biryani the warmth of a family table, the bheja fry the unapologetic boldness of a kitchen unafraid of offal. From The Bombay Canteen he brings a grounding in heritage and community, the understanding that every dish can carry memory and story while still feeling fresh. Shubham thrives in that balance: playful yet serious, rooted yet restless. His career has always been about making food a language, whether spoken in the irreverent tone of Chop Suey, the reverent whisper of an aged cheese dinner, or the hushed dialogue of a Humm x Ducasse collaboration.
At Adda, that language feels fully his. Guests may not know the path that brought him here—the late nights in Mumbai, the quiet precision of Eleven Madison Park, the charged energy of collaboration dinners—but they taste it in every plate. Shubham’s food reminds them that eating is never just about sustenance. It is about memory, culture, and connection, told one dish at a time.
