East Village Icon Punjabi Deli Remains Bustling, Beloved, Perfect

In 1993, when Kulwinder Singh opened Punjabi Deli in the East Village, I was in my final year of going hard in downtown dives and random after-hours places, before two daughters and sobriety entered the picture and changed my life. That last long binge, though, was messy and fun, and more than occasionally sustained by overflowing platters of Indian food from Singh's 24-hour spot at the end of East First Street.

I don't remember how much anything cost at Punjabi Deli in '93. But, given my distaste for spending money on anything other than alcohol and drugs back then, it had to have been cheap as hell.  

Fast forward to the summer of 2020, that weird, scary, empowering season of refrigerated morgue trucks, nightly fireworks, massive protests, and boarded-up storefronts: Punjabi Deli, like so many small businesses, was in trouble. The rise of rideshare apps and literal years of construction on Houston Street had already played havoc with Singh's core clientele, the city's cabbies, and COVID-19 forced him to shut down his narrow storefront for nearly four months. When I wrote in Gothamist about Punjabi Deli that August, the future seemed uncertain.