Open now: This new Fresno Indian restaurant serves recipes from a celebrity chef
The beer taps are hidden away. The pizza and burgers on the menu are gone.
Instead, the building that was once home to Blast & Brew and Piazza Del Pane near Palm and Herndon avenues in Fresno has a completely different vibe inside.
Now it’s The Yellow Chilli, a gourmet Indian restaurant with gold cutlery, international flavors and purple napkins rolled into rosettes. It’s a locally owned franchise of a restaurant created by a celebrity chef who’s more famous than Rachel Ray or Gordon Ramsay in India.
The restaurant is gourmet, but not high-end, with prices for main courses ranging from $16.99 to $29.99.
The Yellow Chilli won The Fresno Bee’s poll of the best new locally owned restaurant of 2025, opening in late December. Fresno-based Kamal Kaur and her husband Satvinder Ghotra own the restaurant.
“We got tremendous response and it’s not only Indian people,” Kaur said. “We’ve got people coming to us from Manteca and Tracy.”
Kaur and Ghotra are a pair of immigrants who came to the United States on their honeymoon 28 years ago and ended up staying. She and Smit Shah also run Bubble Bee — which serves boba drinks and food in Fresno and Clovis — along with four food trucks.
The Yellow Chilli caused a stir back in September when a bright yellow sign reading “a masterchef coming here soon!!” was posted out front.
Today, it’s in its soft opening. Reservations made via The Yellow Chilli’s website are strongly encouraged, though you may be able to nab a table by walking in.
It’s not serving alcohol yet, though the restaurant has a robust mocktail menu with virgin mojitos and several variations on the traditional mango lassi, the yogurt-based drink.
“You won’t find a mango lassi here,” Kaur said. “We can offer something more than that. We’ve got better options, like the berry lassi and the piña colada lassi.”
The liquor license is expected to be approved in the next week or so and the restaurant will start serving its full cocktail menu.
The food and the man behind it
The recipes here were created by Sanjeev Kapoor, the most famous chef in India. You’ll see his face as you walk in, and an explanation of the name The Yellow Chilli. It’s not as common as the red and green peppers in India, but the yellow pepper gives flavor and color to many of the dishes.
“It’s his baby,” Shah said of the restaurant.
Kapoor plans to come to Fresno this spring in a ticketed event that is yet to be scheduled (though the staff is already fielding daily visits from people leaving their phone numbers and begging to be notified when the event is scheduled).
Fandom aside, this restaurant is geared toward people of all backgrounds, with international flavors on the menu. There’s even a chicken pesto soup.
“It’s more flavor rather than spice,” she said. “People don’t need to worry about, ‘Oh, it’s too spicy,’ or ‘Oh, it’s too heavy on my stomach.’”
What really shines? The appetizers, or chaat (Indian street food), are top sellers.
The Raj Kachori is popular, a ball made from garbanzo beans, potatoes, sprouts, tomatoes and more with plenty of yogurt.
The menu has both vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes.
For vegetarians, the mixed veg platter is popular. It contains a variety of starters, including paneer (Indian cheese) marinated and cooked in a green sauce. And the Dahi Bhalla with crackling spinach topped with pomegranate seeds is a standout.
For meat eaters, the Kaur recommends the tandoor lamb chops.
“They’re very, very soft,” she said. “It’s like eating ice cream.”
Partner Shah gets excited in the kitchen talking about the importance of quality ingredients. He has a reporter smell the difference between a $20 container of bright red saffron threads and $100 saffron threads.
“Once you try the real authentic thing, you enjoy the real quality,” he said.
The restaurant has two patios — one enclosed and one open that will be used for wine tasting.
This is the second location of The Yellow Chilli for Kaur. She and her husband opened the first one in the U.S. in Buena Park in Southern California before moving to Fresno five years ago. The New York Times did a story about the restaurant, in a former Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.
They were in the process of moving it to a new location when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and it never reopened.
Today there are eight of the restaurants in the U.S. and nearly 30 worldwide.
Details: The Yellow Chilli is at 799 Palmdon Drive, Fresno. Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. (with the last orders taken at 9 p.m.) Tuesdays through Sundays. Reservations recommended.
This story was originally published January 13, 2026 at 11:10 AM.
