A well-traveled friend recently asked me if he should spend a week eating in Mumbai on his way back from Bali. “Are there enough good restaurants to keep me busy?” he wondered. “I very much want to try Masque.” Enough? You could spend a month in Mumbai just getting a handle on the bread. That said, a New Yorker spoiled for newness, excellence, and variety would most likely run out of high-end—or simply buzzy—Indian spots by the end of a week. That’s because most locals who can afford to go to good restaurants have a cook, and when they go out, they don’t want more Indian food.
As a result, many of the new restaurants tend to be Instagram replicas of Mexican, Italian, Japanese, and blurry fusion. And I did not incur the wrath of New York–to–Mumbai jet lag to eat pulled-jackfruit tacos.
Local Flavors
As home to India’s finance, entertainment, and fashion industries, Mumbai is sprawling and cosmopolitan. “The way I see it, there are broadly two kinds of restaurants and bars in the city,” says Smitha Menon, a Mumbai-based food journalist and 50 Best TasteHunter. “Since Mumbai is an expensive city to operate in, some restaurants choose to open with Instagram-friendly interiors and generic-ish dishes—think truffle fries and edamame dumplings. The other kind are exciting and inventive establishments that are embracing their own identity and bringing regional Indian cuisine and influences to the fore in fun, hip, and elegant ways.”
Masque put the city of 21 million on the international dining map. When it opened, in 2016, it was one of Mumbai’s first tasting-menu restaurants that explored India’s countless regional cuisines. The team hauled suitcases of sea buckthorn back from the mountains of Ladakh, harvested seaweed in Goa, and fermented peppers from Naga.
“Pride in India is new,” says owner Aditi Dugar, the energetic banker turned high-end caterer who opened the opulent restaurant in a former cotton-mill complex. She now also operates the Masque Lab test kitchen and a massive commissary-catering operation, along with TwentySeven Bakehouse, her bakery, located in the beachy Bandra district. “Interest in our ingredients is new,” she added. “Seven years ago, no one was doing this.”
After a rocky start, Masque is now a Relais & Châteaux property and ranks high on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list, which named it the Best Restaurant in India this year. Dugar and head chef Varun Totlani have shifted the focus at Mumbai’s high-end restaurants and re-framed Indian food in India itself. I recommend eating as much regional cuisine as possible before dining at Masque, to understand just how elevated their versions of it are.
So let’s get started. After arriving in Mumbai, take a power nap and enjoy a late breakfast at Café Madras. Open from 7:00 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. and from 4:00 until 10:30 (closed Monday), the Formica-boothed canteen is popular for its frothy kaapi (coffee) with chicory and jaggery sugar, dramatically poured tableside; lacy rava masala dosas (thin, tangy crêpes made from semolina and fermented-rice flour); addictively crisp medu vada (doughnuts made from black-lentil flour and curry leaves) with coconut sambal; spongy steamed-rice flour idli with rasam, or spicy tomato broth; and more. Afterward, join the queue outside to take home a bagful of crispy snacks and sticky sweets, such as banana halwa.
Also treasured and highly trafficked—and Mumbai is all about traffic!—is Swati Snacks, an excellent place at which to try as many Gujarati treats as possible. Among the families filling the perforated-metal booths in the snug, 60-year-old institution, you might find titans of industry such as Tim Cook (who enjoyed his vada pav alongside Bollywood star Madhuri Dixit). One can only hope he filled his table with favorites such as pani puri (crisp cups filled with spicy potatoes that are finished with spoonfuls of tamarind and chili chutneys just before being popped into the mouth), panki chutney (thin rice cakes steamed in banana leaves), and paneer lifafa, a rich wrap of cheese and mint. The saffron-pistachio ice cream is justifiably popular, not to mention a soothing balm for the tongue. Lines are longest from noon to one and between four and six.
I did not incur the wrath of New York–to–Mumbai jet lag to eat pulled-jackfruit tacos.
While your lips are still tingling, visit the Chavan Brothers spice stall, on Shri Ganesh Nagar street. The mixes—some of which include 300 spices—are ground to order, starting with the charring of garlic, shallots, and chilis in fiery woks. There are a few other spice vendors on the street, but this is the one favored by chefs such as Masque’s Totlani. Bring home mixes for chai, biryani, chicken masala, and more. (I’ll be ordering more of the garlic-peanut chutney, which is so good it counts as a snack.)
Organic juices, smoothy bowls, and chia pudding can be found at the on-brand, farm-to-fork café Sequel, in the stylish Kala Ghoda district. (The roselle kefir does wonders for the belly, especially a few days into one’s trip.)
The Grandest Dames
Kala Ghoda is home to Mumbai’s best boutiques and galleries, along with one of the city’s great seafood institutions, Trishna. It was opened as a “lunch home” in the 1930s; the owner’s son began serving live crab in the 90s, and the restaurant has been booked solid since. Think of its nondescript rooms as the River Cafe or Chez Georges of Mumbai, if either required stars and heads of state to tie on a black bib embroidered with a crab. But it’s worth it for the incredible tandoori crab claws, which come with two finger bowls. (The city’s entire supply of crab claws is said to be allocated to this single location.)
Trishna offers more than 20 types of preparation for king prawns, live crab, Bombay duck (a fish), pomfret, and ladyfish. The butter-garlic squid is light and perfect, and the fried prawns are brightened with tart chaat masala powder. The complex, stew-like crab chettinad served with steamed rice crêpes is a revelation. Sure, you can order butter chicken or biryani if you must, but remember that the former is a clichéd punch line among locals. Tip your hotel concierge whatever is required to get a reservation, or order delivery to your room. Just be sure to include a salty lime soda to cut the heat.
Lunch is a more tranquil time to experience the modern Indian food at Ekaa. The sunlight flowing into the atrium of the heritage neo-colonial building is cinematic, warming up the cool, minimalist design, which, like the food, takes some of its cues from Scandinavia. That’s because the talented young chef and partner Niyati Rao spent five months at Noma before being sent home during the coronavirus pandemic. Here, she prioritizes hyperlocal ingredients, from the jars of pickles lining one wall to the kombucha made with naga chilis harvested during their two-week season.
Lunch also allows you to opt out of the tasting menu and explore à la carte, sampling tapas, such as chewy batons of mochi made from potato rather than rice flour, crisped with garlicky panko crumbs and set afire with fermented chili paste. There’s also a playful take on spicy fried chicken that requires both hand towels, followed by a fruity barbecued lamb “chump” served with saffron chutney, spicy lamb broth, and a bracing fennel salad.
All of the dishes are finely assembled by the T-shirted young cooks; the chocolate dessert alone contains 10 individual components. The wickedly creative cocktails can be enjoyed in the evening, when Ekaa’s tapas lounge and wine bar opens.
When it comes to the vegetarian thalis of Mumbai, the lunchtime winner is clear. Once you get through the line snaking up the stairs and into the packed hallway, you find that the walls at Shree Thaker Bhojanalay are covered with photos of well-known diners over the family-run restaurant’s 76-year history. (Alice Waters allegedly had her favorite thali here.) It opened in 1945 and is still filled with priests from the Kalbadevi temple, for which this busy district is named.
The thali itself is generous: The six small bowls on the big steel tray are continuously re-filled (by barefoot servers) with vegetarian Gujarati and Rajasthani staples such as dal, curries, paneer, and sweets. (Gujaratis often start the meal with something sweet.) It’s all accompanied by chutneys, sambals, tamarind sauce, and spicy pastes.
But that’s just the beginning. A tray bearing multiple flatbreads and papadams soon arrives, each ladled with ghee, followed by fried nibbles, or farsan, such as pakora, then perhaps puffy steamed dhokla. If there’s any appetite left, they bring around the day’s fragrant rice pulao and a bowl of kitchari, the comforting porridge of rice and lentils that sends locals into such strong childhood reveries that they ask for thirds, no matter how full they might be. Thirds? That’s because a server arrives every few minutes to offer more of everything, sweets included. It’s a lot, and all of it is wonderful.
Street food–lovers will enjoy Vinay Health Home, which serves Maharashtrian varieties in a canteen-like, sit-down atmosphere. (Opt for the air-conditioned room, if that’s your thing.) Specialties include cooling mango piyush (thicker, sweeter lassi); soothing potato poha, a breakfast dish and snack made from wonderfully textured flattened rice stir-fried with potatoes, onions, spices, and lemon juice; and the popular misal pav, plump rolls filled with a spicy sprouted-moth-bean curry sprinkled with grated onion, coriander, and crispy rice flakes. I ordered extra pav bhaji, a spiced potato croquette crisped in chickpea batter and served on a bun, for the flight home. They were still delicious over Dubai.
Vinay Health Home also makes kulfi (ice cream) and falooda (an over-the-top, Persian-style sundae with rose syrup, basil seeds, sweetened condensed milk, and vermicelli), but it’s more fun to have them brought to your car at New Kulfi Centre, located across from the Girgaon Chowpatty beach. Try the malai (sweetened condensed milk) or roasted-almond flavors.
Afternoon tea at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel is a portal to colonial-era India, at least if you sit in the room without air-conditioning. Here, under the ceiling fan, with a view of the Gateway of India and the Arabian Sea, sip chai and work your way through a plate of pani puri, followed by tiers of caviar sandwiches and sweet-and-savory tartlets and multiple trips to the Wonka-esque dessert buffet. If the colonial attitude feels, well, wrong, remember that the exquisite hotel is said to have been opened by Jamsetji Tata in 1903, after he was refused admission into Watson’s Hotel, which was reserved for Europeans. It remains the city’s best place to stay.
Speaking of Wonka, a more modern afternoon-sweets option awaits at the Cacao Mill, the spectacular chocolate factory opened by Subko coffee roasters. Hidden in a lane off the chaotic shopping street in Colaba, the mezzanine café is a fun place to have a third-wave coffee accompanied by dizzyingly good croissants, cookies, and sandwiches.
Dinner in Mumbai is about going big. Open since 2015, the sprawling Bombay Canteen rules this scene, and it still feels buzzy. (Literally: the playful cocktails keep the decibels high until the after-work crowd moves on.) Its original menus were created by the beloved New York chef Floyd Cardoz, who died during the pandemic. The current chef, Hussain Shahzad, spent a year at Eleven Madison Park, and it shows in his expert execution.
Here, the country’s incredible diversity is celebrated through vibrant updates of regional favorites. “B**f” tartare—buffalo, since beef is forbidden—with tamarind sauce and a smoked egg yolk is accompanied by a fried cracker sprinkled with dosa powder. Puri shells are filled with sea-bass tartare. Spinach and paneer are replaced by red-amaranth greens and burrata for a new take on saag. I was told that some regulars are so enamored of the appetizers that they never make it to the mains. Who can blame them?
After sampling a fraction of the diversity of Indian food that Mumbai offers, a dinner at Masque ties up the experience with a very snazzy bow. The soaring dining room feels much more lively than a typical 10-course temple. You might spot a Bollywood star at one table and an artist from the stylish 47-A Design Gallery at another. Everyone is clearly relishing the opportunity to dine at the city’s hardest-to-get tables—not to mention order from an extensive list of wines, which are hard to come by in India. (Duties of 160 percent make wine extremely expensive to import.)
I was told that some regulars are so enamored of the appetizers that they never make it to the mains.
Totlani’s menu ranges far afield. His coconut momos surrounding raw barramundi in an electrifying passion-fruit thukpa are a play on Ladakhi dumplings and soups tasted on foraging trips to the Himalayas. Kachumber, that classic Indian salad of tomatoes and cucumber, is reimagined with stracciatella and frozen tomato water that dramatically melts upon contact with cherry tomatoes stuffed with tomato chutney. Rich braised pork with sticky-sweet black-sesame sauce is Totalani’s love letter to the barbecue he had while attending the Culinary Institute of America in New York State. Today, his barbecue is served with monsoon greens.
Diners are invited into the kitchen to meet the cooks while enjoying the palate cleanser—in my case, puckery green-mango sorbet with coriander oil and pomelo pips. Is black-garlic pulao with braised lamb neck, scallions, and fiddlehead ferns Indian food if it looks and tastes like fancy fried rice? At this point, as Masque triumphantly proves, all borders are open in Mumbai.
As Menon tells me, Masque is one of the restaurants that has inspired a generation of chefs “to delve deeper into their roots and try and represent themselves and their stories on a plate.” By the time my globe-trotting friend makes it to Mumbai, he might need two weeks to experience the most compelling ones. Better yet, make it three.
Christine Muhlke, a former editor at The New York Times and Bon Appétit, is a co-author of Wine Simple, with Le Bernardin’s Aldo Sohm, and a co-author of Phaidon’s Signature Dishes That Matter. She is also the founder of culinary consultancy Bureau X and the creator of the Xtine newsletter