Picture this: your overzealous foodie pal drags you to a tasting menu at ITC Grand Chola, Chennai. You’re a skeptic, somebody who’d moderately persist with no-fuss fare than sit by means of a parade of programs that appear to be science experiments. The first dish arrives, some Heston-esque concoction you aren’t fairly positive methods to eat. You roll your eyes, take a chunk, and out of the blue you’re in patti’s kitchen, with the precise tang, consolation, and heat of the curd rice she used to make. That’s the magic of Avartana. It turns skeptics to believers by replicating that Ratatouille second. Since opening in 2017, the restaurant has turned South Indian meals right into a tasting menu expertise with out stripping it of soul. Its identify, Sanskrit for rhythm and repetition, shapes the construction of its seven, 9, eleven, and thirteen-course menus; respectively named Maya, Bela, Jiaa, Anika, and Tara. Each plate is a distillation: bottle gourd spirals with plum chutney and rice crisps, parotta compressed right into a single chunk with coconut rooster and butter toffee, fennel panna cotta with a yolk of mango-ginger coulis. The theatrics are sharp and deliberate, however by no means gimmicky, and the double-distilled rasam alone is sufficient to make diners want they might bottle it up and take it dwelling. This wizardry is what landed Avartana the #1 rank at the Top Restaurant Awards in 2024. The restaurant’s brilliance lies in its sleight of hand: reimagining custom with out betraying it. That’s why Avartana isn’t simply one other progressive eating room. It’s theatre with logic, wizardry with roots, and considered one of the most exhilarating methods to style South India at this time.
#9. NĀVU, Bengaluru
On a quiet bylane in Domlur, a yellow awning indicators NĀVU, a small, chef-driven restaurant that feels extra like a neighbourhood secret than a fine-dining spot. Inside, the area seems like an residence banquet mixed with a restaurant: small, heat, minimalist, the sort of room the place strangers lean in over plates and depart as associates. That intimacy is the canvas for cooks Pallavi Mithika Menon and Kanishka Sharma, whose menus are quick, seasonal, and instinctive. The décor is minimalist, virtually homey, however the meals has made it considered one of India’s most whispered-about flexes. A platter of oysters on ice greets you on their Instagram web page, an early clue that components lead the approach. Pallavi and Kanishka have mastered the classics so effectively they know precisely methods to subvert them, pairing flavours that shouldn’t make sense, but someway do. A rooster liver pâté, served donburi-style over miso butter rice and lap cheong, shouldn’t work, nevertheless it sings. Recent menus have performed with concepts like mustard ice cream with pickled cherry tomatoes, beef tartare with sunchoke purée and anchovy–caper French dressing, and confit parsnips served 3 ways, however the dish that has endured each iteration is the cauliflower crème brûlée, way more scrumptious than its identify suggests. The vitality is unfussy, the plating lovely however nonetheless appetising, and the meals each indulgent and deeply considerate. For Bengaluru’s diners, NĀVU has develop into shorthand for what chef-led eating in India might be: assured, inventive, and funky with out making an attempt too laborious.
#10. FarmLore, Bengaluru
