HYDERABADI ZAIQA — Restaurant in New York

I am on year two of my quest to find the best biriyani this side of the Atlantic.

Will preface this review by saying that biriyani is my favorite dish. Having said that, wanted to see what all the hype about this small -tucked on a side street -underground restaurant/ kitchen was all about. Be patient with me while I break down my experience for you.

be prepared to wait! They do not have a lot of seating inside and it is very likely you will share your table with a complete stranger/strangers.

-got the dum hyd paneer biriyani because what better way to test their culinary prowess but by going for a non standard biriyani. The rice was lackluster, dry and flavorless. Spice was clearly lacking. Not warm enough. Clearly cooked earlier in the day which is common for biriyani just because it is labor intensive and is not made to order like other dishes. (This is not biriyani by kilo- iykyk) There was no salan on offer but they did have a miniature version of a lamp(nice touch) to serve raita in. To be fair, the cubes of paneer were excellent. Soft, rich and juicy. Couldn’t save the dish tho. Overall the Biriyani scored a 1.5/5 in my book.

-next dish gobi 65. Not traditional in the slightest. It was coated with overpowered sauce and underfried gobi. Much better than the biriyani but clearly more like gobi Manchurian than gobi 65. Score - 3/5.

at this point, I had had enough to make up my mind. This place came highly rated but disappointed me.

all is not lost. I feel like they have tremendous scope for improvement and a healthy clientele. This could have been an off day but excellence should be a daily target.

happy to be proven wrong and give them a second chance if they are up for it. -decent service/budget ambiance. No restroom on site.

Suffice to say, I am still on my quest. Thanks...

Hyderabadi Zaiqa makes an amazing, affordable biriyani. Everything else about them is sub par.

The restaurant is very small, with about three tables and six counter stools. There is one path through the restaurant. There is no bathroom. The restaurant is in the basement down a half flight of stairs and inaccessible to wheelchairs. Seating is designed to get you to eat and leave as fast as you can. Things are clean, but its loud and cramped and not date worthy.

Service is bad, but they have an exceptionally bad set of circumstances. It's crowded and loud and impossible to move. The two front of house people are in charge of seating people, remembering who is in queue, taking table orders, cleaning tables, managing delivery people, taking pick up orders, minding the kitchen flow, and customer management. They do not segregate tasks, and there is no space in the front to manage the overflow traffic on to the sidewalk. On a Thursday evening at 6:30pm, the restaurant was packed. Many people stood outside without rhyme or reason, delivery people were going in and out. I placed a pick up order that got lost in the shuffle and ended up waiting over twenty minutes past my pick up time because the staff couldn't manage the workload and the communications. (They also tried to blame me for the wait somehow?) Staff workflow needs work, the poor guys were very stressed out.

I would ask for a refund, but the biriyani...

Admittedly, I'm not a biryani fan. But as this is "the" new place to get it from, I was really hoping it would convince me. Ultimately, I don't think it did but I'm still super glad I tried it.

I walked in but could easily see it being too busy to do so, as the place is fairly small. I was on the fence about which app to get but settled upon the chicken 65. This was by far the dish I enjoyed the most and it is NO joke in terms of spice. Perfectly crispy but also tender, a really generous portion. It was fiery in a way that wasn't annoying/unbearable but really tough to eat more than one piece at a time. For biryani, I went with the recommendation of the goat. This was just okay. I actually felt like the meat:bone ratio was not so thrilling and found that it was hard to eat without a knife (which I wasn't given). Sure, I could have ripped it apart with my hands but that's not really how I want to eat things. The flavoring was fine-pretty standard for biryani.

To be fair, almost everyone around me had different dishes and so many of the other dishes looked delicious. So would I recommend coming to try something else? Probably. Will I be back for more biryani, probably not. Am I still recovering from the spice of...