Singh didn’t grow up wanting to cook. In Old Delhi, where his father owned a tire shop, professional kitchens weren’t seen as a practical career path. When Singh moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 2006 to study accounting, people often mistook him for being Arab because of his appearance.

He dropped out and began working as a dishwasher and then a breakfast cook before chef Ian Southgate pulled him aside and said, “If you want to do this seriously, you have to cook at the highest level because it’s not a lucrative career for a lot of people.” Singh promptly enrolled in culinary school, eventually landing roles in Melbourne kitchens like Maze by Gordon Ramsay.

Growing up, Singh never saw cooking as a serious career, let alone one where someone like him could lead. He credits the late chef Floyd Cardoz, who worked under Gray Kunz at Lespinasse, as an early influence. “There was this self-imposed narrative that if you were Indian, you could only make Indian food. For me, Floyd changed that.”

In 2014, Singh moved to New York to work as a sous chef for Kent at The NoMad. And he’s stayed alongside Kent ever since, joining Crown Shy as its chef de cuisine in 2019 before becoming its culinary director in 2021. Within six months of opening Crown Shy, the restaurant was awarded a Michelin star, which it has maintained every year since.

From the start, the plan was clear: Crown Shy, located on the ground floor of 70 Pine Street, would be a neighborhood destination, while Saga, which screamed luxury, would be at the top. “If you go up to Saga, the views are just so beautiful and you’re in awe of New York City,” Singh says.

Crown Shy has become a much-loved and critically acclaimed restaurant in the city. Saga followed in 2021, earning two Michelin stars by the next year. Both restaurants have shaped the city’s fine-dining scene in lasting ways, effortlessly combining multiple cuisines into a single dish without a wink too many.

Now, in Crown Shy’s sixth year, the menu possesses even more of an international sensibility. Gruyère fritters are seasoned with chile and lime. Smoky jerk octopus is served with a tangle of chorizo and ramps. Pork katsu gets swaddled in curry béarnaise and gooseberries.

Singh, for his part, brings his own heritage to the menu with dishes like char siu lamb shoulder that arrives with nasi goreng made with poha, the flattened Indian rice, a subtle textural riff with personal roots. A spicy tuna starter draws from bhelpuri, the chaat mainstay, and bhatura, the puffed, deep-fried North Indian bread accompanies a creamy white bean hummus and ’nduja in place of the traditional chole.

Then there’s the butter chicken, which was on Crown Shy’s menu in the summer of 2022.

“I think at one point it became a stigma, that if you do butter chicken it means you’re not doing something right, you know?” Singh, who has never worked in an Indian restaurant, explains. “But I’m proud of my culture.” The chicken was among the earliest dishes he developed for the restaurant, and it set the tone for the kind of cooking he would continue to reference. Crown Shy’s version nodded not to Moti Mahal, the Delhi restaurant often credited with inventing the dish, but to Khyber, a lesser-known spot from the Delhi of Singh’s youth. He adds, “If you go to an old-school Italian restaurant like Stefano’s or Rao’s, they still do red sauce, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s delicious.”

In May 2024, when the group visited India for a pop-up with Masque in Mumbai, Singh took Kent and the team to his hometown of Delhi to show them the magic of Indian barbecue. This included live-fire cooking at the roadside Rajinder Da Dhaba, and the storied Bukhara Grill, known for its smoky, charcoal-cooked daal makhani, and the iconic bibs worn by guests.

“I told James I wanted to do something like this,” Singh recalls. Less than three weeks later, Kent died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 45.

That vision is now materializing with the installation of tandoors at Crown Shy, as Singh develops a tandoori-Peking duck hybrid for late summer. “The entire team is really excited about the tandoors,” he says. He’s also planning to experiment with other dishes, like the restaurant’s famous short rib with ras el hanout, by leaving it overnight in a heated, turned-off tandoor. He’s quick to note, however, that Crown Shy’s menu won’t sway toward one cuisine over another.

“[The menu] won’t become more Indian-inspired, because our whole team gives input in whatever we do,” he says. Singh is committed to following Kent’s example by involving the whole team. “I think James was always fascinated by other cultures and tried to honor them through our menus. We always pull from our team.”

That team once included Jooho Song, then a Crown Shy sous chef, who once came up with Korean-inspired hot pockets, a dish that became an unexpected Crown Shy signature. Song has since gone on to become the executive chef of Oiji Mi.

Over at Saga, Singh sees himself more as an advisor and sounding board, or quarterback coach, for its new executive chef Charlie Mitchell, who won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: New York for his work at Clover Hill in Brooklyn.

Singh still finds himself reminiscing about his time with Kent, his mentor. “We didn’t have a CDC [chef de cuisine] or even a head chef when we opened Saga. It was just James and I,” he says. Now, Singh says that his task is to empower chefs to successfully run kitchens of their own. “I could only [take on both kitchens] because James trusted me so much,” he says. “That’s the same trust I have in my team.”

Singh’s appointment comes at a moment of ambitious growth for the group. Last year saw the opening of Time and Tide, a seafood-focused Midtown restaurant self-styled as a fish house instead of yet another steakhouse, led by one of Kent’s protégés, “Top Chef” winner Danny Garcia. This April, they debuted hotly anticipated Birdee, a bakery from former Crown Shy pastry chef Renata Ameni. The group also launched five new food and drink venues inside Manhattan’s newly opened Printemps department store, in partnership with chef Gregory Gourdet.

Later this year, the group is plotting a new opening with Red Hook Tavern’s Bill Durney: Hōp, an upcoming Cambodian restaurant in Red Hook.

Further down the line, the group is also searching for a space to eventually open an Indian-inspired restaurant; it’s not yet clear if Singh would be the one to lead it.

For now, though, he and the team are channeling their momentum into what’s already on the table. Singh is working on Crown Shy’s evolving menu, mentoring young cooks, and building new restaurants with care rather than flash. There’s ambition, but it’s quiet, steady. Being a Sikh chef in a Michelin-starred kitchen is part of the story, but what drives him is the pursuit of thoughtful, exacting food.

When he’s not in service or at his desk, you’ll find Singh slurping hotpot at Chongqing Lao Zao or nursing a drink at Old Mates. But his center of gravity remains in the kitchens that shaped him.

“I will remember that I worked at Crown Shy for the rest of my life because of James,” he says. “I can never forget this. It’s such a big part of my life.”

Crown Shy is open Sunday through Wednesday from 5 to 9:30 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m.

Mehr Singh is a New York-based food writer with bylines in the New York Times, T Magazine, Eater, Bon Appétit, and Food52. Follow her on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.