Punjabi Chaap Corner opens in Hicksville

For years, whenever Amritpal Singh Sachdeva visited family in Canada, he made one stop before arriving at the airport for his flight home: Punjabi Chaap Corner. The quick-serve vegetarian restaurant was founded in India in 2012 (where it operates more than 50 shops) and has more than a dozen Canadian franchises.

“I loved the food and I loved the consistency. I used to eat there in India and every time, every location, I was impressed by the taste and the freshness of the food,” he said.

So impressed, in fact, that he contacted the company about opening a New York outlet. In late December, Sachdeva opened this neat little shop in the same Hicksville shopping center as Kababjees and La Candela.

There’s no shortage of vegetarian Indian restaurants in Hicksville, but the draw here is the eponymous chaap, a mock meat made from soybeans that is wrapped around a wooden stick and grilled or roasted like a kebab. It appears in many guises familiar to the kebab aficionado. From the tandoor oven comes chaap Amritsari (in a creamy, medium-spicy sauce), malai (creamy and mild), peri peri (spicy from South African chilies), achari (tart, from pickles) and more. You can have your chaap rolled in flatbread, folded like a burrito.

While the chaap is not going to fool anyone into thinking they are eating meat, it has a pleasantly chewy consistency and soaks up flavors in a meatlike way.

Punjabi Chaap Corner’s menu also features such traditional Indian vegetarian dishes as paneer (cheese), potatoes, chickpeas and other pulses, plus Afghan-style momos (dumplings) and the great Indian street food, pani puri, wherein delicate, hollow, golf-ball-sized orbs are stuffed with a spiced potato mixture and moistened with flavored waters (mango, lemon, garlic and more). Nothing on the menu costs more than $14 and there are many options less than $10.

Sachdeva, a first-time restaurateur who also has retail and real estate interests, thought that opening a franchise would be easier than establishing his own brand since he’d just be replicating a concept. It turned out to be more complicated than he imagined. The Punjabi Chaap Corner mother ship in Delhi supplies the chaap and spice mixtures, but there are other ingredients that cannot be imported, per federal regulations.

Along with a “trainer” from Delhi, he had to find domestic U.S. sources for all his dairy — paneer, cream, butter, yogurt — and the products needed to behave the way the Indian (and Canadian) paneer, cream, butter and yogurt did. “We went through 20 different creams,” he recalled. “And we had to taste each one again and again because we had to make sure that the cream was consistent every time.”

The restaurant’s color scheme, layout and signage are all mandated by Delhi. And, as the team there comes up with new dishes, they will show up in Hicksville. Sachdeva hopes to open a second location in the next few months and a half dozen in the next three years.

Punjabi Chaap Corner, 495 S. Broadway, Hicksville, 516-584-3369, punjabichaapcorner.us. Open noon to 11 p.m. Monday to Sunday.