India's fine-dining scene has spent 2026 swapping out the predictable tasting-menu format to explore cuisines that are more regional and come with more specialised dining concepts. For instance, Gaggan Anand's Raga revisits Indian dishes through modern techniques, Zetu bringing contemporary Sri Lankan cuisine to the national capital. In Bengaluru, MoonJar has built its cocktail programme around the phases of the moon, with low-ABV drinks shaped by fermentation and reduced sugar. Goa's Bartender's Bunker focuses on regional and GI-tagged Indian ingredients, while Mumbai's Gong combines Japanese, Chinese and Italian influences across its menu. If you're looking for a dining space that offers more than food, here are five new openings to know.
Chef Gaggan Anand opened his first restaurant on Indian soil in sixteen years on August 26, at Janpath Road, Delhi. Built as a three-way partnership between Anand, his longtime co-chef Rydo Anton and Kalra, Raga runs a single 22-course tasting menu across two seatings a night, trading the theatrical spectacle of Anand's Bangkok restaurant for what he's described as simple, exceptionally pure Indian flavours built through modern technique. The menu moves through dishes like a stellar tabak maaz, a rich nihari, an eyebrow-raising bheja, and a generous morel curry, alongside reworked versions of Anand's own classics, including his signature Yogurt Explosion, reimagined here in a guava-chilli version and served under the name Pink Blossom. Never-before-seen kitchen equipment, including a high-end Carpigiani ice cream machine used for a saffron-and-pistachio soft serve, was imported specifically for the space.
The dining room itself is compact and unshowy by design, built around an open kitchen so guests can watch the courses being plated, with a plush curtain separating the pass from the room, and just 42 seats across two nightly sittings. With weeks-long waitlists since opening, it's already one of the hardest tables in the country to book.
Delhi's first restaurant dedicated to contemporary Sri Lankan cuisine opened inside the 1AQ complex in Mehrauli on June 4M, sharing the address with the Ojas Art Gallery. Co-founder and architect Anurag Dania built the 175-cover space around a 500-year-old banyan tree in the language of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa's tropical modernism, an open, indoor-outdoor layout with coastal tiles, more than 500 plants, a candlelit courtyard and a water body at the entrance, cooled discreetly enough that the space barely registers Delhi's heat. Furniture pulled from the Geoffrey Bawa collection, produced under licence by Bengaluru's Phantom Hands, reinforces the effect.
The kitchen, led by Sri Lankan chef Dush Ratnayake alongside chefs Mohit Kumar and Romil Malhotra, opens with a choon pan butter flight, flatbread served with three different butters, before moving through dishes like a deconstructed parippu, buffalo-milk burrata, achcharu-spiced fruits, and lamprais, all built around Kandyan family recipes co-founder Sarah Nikahetiya grew up on. The bar leans on coconut, curry leaf, tea and cinnamon, its signature pour a coconut espresso martini.
Chef Rahul Sharma opened this 28-seater cocktail bar on August 7, one floor above his tasting-menu restaurant Nila in Cambridge Layout, with Head of Bar Sibasish Palai, recently returned from a stint at Sketch in London's Mayfair. Designed by Prachi Joshi of Designworx, the space extends Nila's Japandi language into something moodier and more playful, rounded archways, textured walls, a cerulean-blue bar and a glass ceiling that opens straight onto the sky, with an open kitchen built into the dining area. The nine-cocktail menu is mapped to the eight phases of the moon plus Helios, a closing drink named for the sun, built on low-ABV bases like soju, vermouth and natural wine, with an emphasis on fermentation and reduced sugar over strict flavour pairing. Food leans into the same unserious sensibility: prawn wontons in peanut butter and cream cheese, an avocado pâté with burnt spring onion and preserved lemon, and a deliberately inauthentic chicken curry finished with crispy potato salsa, a nod to Sharma's own memories of cooking as a broke college student. It's open only Friday to Sunday.
Tucked upstairs inside The Second House in Saligao, Bartender's Bunker is an intimate cocktail lab seating just five to seven guests at a time, launched in January and now running as a full guest-facing experience. There's no printed menu; guests instead book a two-to-three-hour tasting flight built entirely around India's GI-tagged and regional ingredients, house-fermented Sunderban honey mead, the sweet starch of Goan bananas, rare Kashmiri saffron, and a boozy sorbet made from the peel of GI-tagged Garhwal Malta oranges, with bartenders constructing each drink around a guest's individual flavour preferences rather than pouring from a fixed list. Small bar bites are available, but deliberately kept out of the spotlight; the room itself is unhurried by design, built as a quieter, slower counterpoint to the main bar downstairs, where all the attention usually goes toward the crowd instead of the bartender.
Speciality Restaurants Limited's newest flagship opened on Linking Road in Bandra, officially launched on July 8, led by Chef Sahil Singh with interiors by Sumessh Menon Associates built around the idea of translating sound into space, an abstract brief the designers answered with brass and bronze accents, earthy textures, tactile wall art, banana-fibre lighting and curved, sound-inspired architectural forms across three distinct zones moving from a transitional lobby into intimate indoor seating and out into an open-air section.
Its sushi programme, seafood sourced directly from Japan, runs from classic nigiri and sashimi to inventive uramaki like the Avocado Truffle Roll, Hamachi Jalapeño Roll and Scallop Dynamite Roll, alongside Chuka and Itameshi sections, Japanese-inflected Chinese and Italian food respectively, a format the restaurant claims as a first for Pan-Asian dining in India. Standouts include a Chuka stone bowl of stir-fried noodles, a mapo tofu finished with miso butter rice, and an Itameshi wafu pizza topped with shichimi pepperoni in place of standard pepperoni.