Pop up in local luxury bars and unexpected places – with international places like Goa and Seattle and Monaco as favorites
From special dinners in offbeat venues to some big-ticket launches in overseas destinations like Seattle and Monaco, the Indian restaurant and food industry has plans for 2022 – if Covid doesn’t play the bad game again! “I hear there are 40-50 new restaurants opening in Goa itself,” says a top chef, as we discuss what to expect this year.
Most of the restaurants go to sunny conditions, even some of us are saddened by the fact that it has become a mini ‘Delhi-Mumbai-Bengaluru’! “It’s going to be like the Bangalore of a few years ago, with experimental and creative projects, but prices in restaurants and bars are lower than in Mumbai and Delhi,” says the chef, who is known for his forgings and farm-to-table experiments. are known to have taken.
Bar experts Pankaj Balachandran and Arijit Bose
First, Bar-Friendly Goa
India’s most creative bartenders, distillers and the bar community in general have shifted collectively For Goa, not only because of an easygoing lifestyle but also because of its easy bar and bottling policies. 2021 saw Bar Tesoro in Colva, which is very international, but also has its roots in the South Goa community. By two of India’s leading bar experts – Pankaj Balachandran and Arijit Bose – it quickly zipped up the world’s 50 Best Bars list at No. 65. Now “Bose”, as he is popularly called, and “I Se Negroni” (his Instagram handle) Balachandran plan to set up another bar in Goa in 2022. But not Tesoro “because we don’t want to dilute it”, Balachandran says. “Despite being a local bar it will be very international. You can call it a five-star local bar,” he laughs.
Known for his chic bar-meets-dining concepts like The Wine Company (Delhi) and Antares (Goa), restaurant owner Ashish Kapoor now spends half a year in Goa. He is set to open Morjim, a beach club-restaurant, in 2022, as well as a boutique hotel in Assagao. Meanwhile, Mumbai-based successful Izumi is looking to open a second outlet in Goa. While many people are eagerly waiting, local Goan bar and tapas brand Antonio Fontainehas is opening a “Japanese small bite after April,” according to an old Goan settler.
Pop Up and Supper Club
If Goa is the OG destination, the OG trend for 2022 is luxury pop-ups in non-restaurant locations. Musk’s chef Prateek Sadhu, who has just come up with a concept called “pravas” (or “journey”), is set to travel to different regions of India, starting with the northeast. He plans to research local ingredients and traditions, develop dishes around them, and then return to these places with full pop-up dinners. “I recently had two dinners with Gwalior inspired food at Jai Vilas Palace in Gwalior. We sold tickets and diners took off from Delhi, Mumbai and elsewhere,” he says. He aspires to make a “bespoke journey” and pop up in other parts of the country every few months – around ₹10,000 per person.
Storytelling around India’s lesser-known culinary cultures will also begin in London, with chef and restaurateur Asma Khan focusing on her supper clubs. Her restaurant Darjeeling Express (now in Covent Garden) did relatively well through the pandemic biryani And Plate Luncheon – Actor Paul Rudd aka Marvel’s Ant-Man posted pictures on Instagram last year. “During the pandemic, I realized I wanted to tell more stories about women cooking in Indian homes, so I wanted to do supper club work,” says Khan.
Two years later in Kolkata with his family, Khan himself got to hear some stories over the New Year’s meal with the Zamindari family of Malda. Oyendrila Ray Kapoor, who hails from Harishchandrapur in Malda, serves ancestral delicacies at her central Kolkata home near Ballygunge as a specially curated offering. We will see more such experiences coming into their own now.
Kitchen & Bar at Glass – Holiday Inn, Race Course Road, Bangalore
Bangalore for the Global Young Indian
In Bengaluru, one of the hottest under-the-radar ‘non-restaurants’ of 2021 has been Farmlord. Michelin-starred and run by three chefs with work experience at 50 of the world’s best restaurants, it’s located within a 37-acre ranch, offers freestyle, empty-only menus to 18 diners three times a week, and Tells stories about local produce and custom.
This uniqueness of marrying farm-to-table gastronomy will be in demand once the market opens, says Nirupa Shankar of Brigade Group, who spends New Year’s Eve there. Shankar, whose company owns several hotels in Bengaluru, is in the process of revamping his own restaurant to cater to a younger, more global clientele. His Glass – Kitchen and Bar at the Holiday Inn on Race Course Road, recently opened in collaboration with Chef Abhijit Saha. As Shankar says, offering modern Indian regional food, with many offbeat dishes like hemp protein-enhanced idli and ajwain leaf fritters, it uses clean ingredients, and is all Instagrammable. This could be a way forward for young diners looking to marry international trends with local flavor.
When Brands Like Avertana Travel
Avartana, a trendy South Indian restaurant brand at ITC Grand Chola, is set to go national with a branch in Kolkata. There is talk that Indian Accent is set to open in Mumbai, while Olive Group restaurant Eddie Singh is bringing a new brand to Gurugram towards the end of the year. “It’s something I’ve seen internationally but not in India,” he says mysteriously.
Zoravar Kalra is opening its first restaurant in the US in Seattle – Furzy Café, North America’s analogy – “in an epic location” (he is still silent about it) by mid-year, while among India’s largest and most profitable One of the restaurant companies, Amit Burman-Rohit Agarwal promoted Light Bite Food, will focus on UAE (apart from smaller Indian cities like Pune, Kochi, Lucknow and Bhubaneshwar) with Punjab Grill restaurants. This market is being touted as the modern-day Casablanca for those wanting to escape the hardships of the pandemic. Finally, in one of the most unusual places, Ashish Kapoor of The Wine Company is zeroing in on Monaco for an entirely Indian experiment.
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