Lair and Aabbcc, Jairaj Singh Solanki’s two Delhi bars, are not easy to categorise. That, largely, is the point. Lair, currently ranked among Asia’s top bars, is built around a modern speakeasy sensibility. Aabbcc, Solanki’s more recent and ambitious project, is spread across three floors in New Delhi’s Vasant Vihar: an ingredient museum on the first, a 21-foot omakase cocktail counter on the second, and a higher-frequency social space on the third. “Once you create your own trends and your own concepts, people follow you more than you follow them,” shares Solanki when questioned about the thought process behind his concepts. He adds that his approach has always been about spotting a gap and filling it with something genuine.
He is broadly confident about the bar industry in India given that the past decade has been an inflection point of sorts with more young entrepreneurs investing in bartenders, more professionals travelling and exchanging notes with the global bar world, and more Indian bars appearing on lists that once felt out of reach. The momentum, he believes, is only going to build.
However, the new generation of drinkers is complicated. Many are still chasing Instagram trends over genuinely engaging with what’s in the glass. The more interesting shift is that aged spirits and rums are finding a serious audience, drinkers who want depth rather than novelty, Solanki shares, sounding hopeful. As a chef once told him, a successful restaurant serves what people want, not what you want to serve them. It is a line, he says, that has never left him.
“As long as the drink, when it comes to your palate, is balanced and tasty, you keep evolving, keep trying new recipes, trying different ingredients, different techniques,” he says signing off.
Years ago, Manish Mehrotra made a career-defining decision that was risky. He turned his attention from Pan-Asian cuisine to Indian. What followed was more than a successful restaurant; it was the start of a new era. Rather than reinventing dishes for global approval, he showed a generation of chefs and diners alike what elevated Indian food could look like when it retained its personal and collective history. Diners began to choose his food with pride—not just in India but on the world stage. What he did was not just about the plate; it was about identity.
“I chose to move away from rigid, traditional formats of presenting Indian food. I’ve always believed that Indian cuisine doesn’t need to be confined to labels; it is dynamic and constantly evolving. Today, diners are far more open and appreciative of this perspective, which reinforces that decision,” he shares
His philosophy of luxury has never been about opulence for its own sake. The future of dining, he believes, will be defined by something considerably more personal. “Luxury will be about how a guest feels: comfortable, understood, and connected to the experience. Honest cooking, intentional flavours, and a relaxed yet refined environment will define the future of luxury dining,” he says.
On the balance between spectacle and substance, he is nuanced rather than dogmatic. “There is a noticeable shift towards respecting ingredients and using them thoughtfully, not just relying on expensive components, but on how well they are executed. At the same time, experience still plays a crucial role,” Mehrotra explains.
The new generation of diner, he observes, brings a freshness that keeps pushing the kitchen forward. Their curiosity and unconventional expectations challenge conventional thinking in ways that are genuinely useful. Ultimately, what keeps a dining experience relevant has nothing to do with trends. “True luxury is about relevance, connection, and thoughtful execution,” says the chef. That connection has found a new home in Nisaba, his first independent restaurant that opened in early 2026 at the historic Humayun’s Tomb Museum Complex in New Delhi. For a chef who has always understood that food and cultural context are inseparable, it feels like exactly the right place to be.
Manu Chandra is a seeker. The founder-partner of Manu Chandra Enterprise, the Bengaluru-based hospitality company behind Lupa and bespoke catering outfit Single Thread, spent 17 years building some of India’s most influential restaurant brands before walking away from it all. The gastropub, the open-faced bao, the gin revival, the celebration of Indian biodiversity on the plate: many of the things that now feel like familiar concepts in Indian dining were his ideas first. And then, he left.
“Walking away from a wellestablished partnership, company and role, nearly empty-handed, to start afresh after roughly 17 years of building—it was the most unconventional thing I’ve done,” says the chef. The groundwork for that confidence was laid early. Chandra trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, graduating with top honours before apprenticing in some of New York’s most exacting kitchens, among them Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, and Gramercy Tavern. He then travelled to Norway to work with the renowned chef Eyvind Hellstrom at Bagatelle, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Oslo. What followed was Lupa, which opened on Bengaluru’s MG Road in 2023, a European restaurant rooted in classical techniques and built for a well-travelled city Chandra knows better than most. Serious cooking, worn lightly.
“Experiential dining will continue to rule the roost. It’s more about Bengaluru-based Manu Chandra is a classically trained European chef; Lupa in Bengaluru serves modern European and Mediterranean dishes; the restaurant features a creative bar programme with a seven-page drinks menu; Chandra’s food philosophy is rooted in freshness, provenance, and evolution. knowing you’re going to a certain kind of establishment and will be in for a fabulous time. That, coupled with a few surprise elements, is probably the overarching theme,” he says. Beyond the restaurant, Chandra has built an ecosystem that reflects the same instinct for quality at the edges. He is a founder-partner in Begum Victoria, Bengaluru’s urban artisanal cheese brand, and an investor in Chota Hazari Spirits, focused on small-batch provenance-led spirits.
He has curated cocktail receptions at the World Economic Forum in Davos and cooked at Cannes. On whether India has found its own voice in luxury hospitality, he believes that the revivalist energy visible in Indian craft and textiles hasn’t yet arrived at the dining table, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It’s the refusal to dress things up that has always set Chandra apart.
Niyati Rao’s career traces an arc from Copenhagen to Mumbai, from one of the world’s most celebrated kitchens to multiple venues of her own making. Her formative years included a transformative stint at Noma, the kind of experience that recalibrates everything you think you know about ingredients and process. What she brought back to India was a conviction that restraint and rigour, rather than spectacle, led to the more interesting path. That conviction shaped Ekaa, her restaurant in Fort, Mumbai, built around fermentation, anti-ageing and indigenous ingredients, and research as a foundation. It also shaped KMC, her boundary-pushing bistro-bar concept, and Bombay Daak, a bar that takes India’s drinking food culture seriously as a subject of study in its own right. Three venues, each with its own distinct register, all undergirded by the same seriousness.
We didn’t design for virality, we designed for longevity. People understand it and find our storytelling full of feelings, almost childlike. We don’t ever want to lose that.” Her view of fine dining is unsentimental. Romance without operational clarity, she says, is fragile. Every creative risk at Ekaa is underwritten by financial discipline, team culture, consistency. “Fine dining is as much about systems as it is about artistry. These are not secondary to creativity; they protect it,” says the chef. The future of luxury, according to Rao is about intentionality, ingredient integrity, and emotional resonance. Diners, she says, are paying for the chef’s mind on a plate. “AI can analyse patterns, but it cannot taste memory. It cannot intuit emotion. For us, technology is infrastructure, not authorship.”
On leading a kitchen as a woman, she is matter-of-fact. “We aren’t women and men—we are chefs. The definition of authority in fine dining is shifting from dominance to stewardship. And that shift is long overdue.”
Panchali Mahendra has launched around 70 restaurants to date, and has no plans on stopping any time soon. These include Inja, a refined Indian-Japanese restaurant at The Manor in Delhi, SoBo 20, a Franco-American brasserie on Marine Drive, Mumbai, where French technique meets New Orleans ease, and 11 Woodfire, her wood-fire driven concept in a Jumeirah villa in Dubai, chosen not for footfall but for feeling.
As CEO of Atelier House Hospitality, the boutique group operating under the US-founded Altamarea Group, Mahendra has spent over two decades building restaurants that prioritise soul over convenience. The decision to place 11 Woodfire away from Dubai’s corporate dining corridor—unconventional by any commercial measure—is perhaps the clearest expression of how she thinks. “I wanted the restaurant to have soul, not just footfall. That choice shaped everything; the pace, the energy, the warmth and even the kind of team culture we built.” Her understanding of what fine dining demands came through experience rather than theory. Early in her career she believed that a strong concept and great food were sufficient. The lesson that followed gave clarity. She says, “Romance needs rigour. If you do not build the boring backbone properly, the beautiful front cannot survive.”
Her view of luxury is clear: “True luxury will be invisible. It will be ease, not theatre. A room that feels calm, a pace that feels natural, and a team that anticipates without hovering,” she says. The new generation of luxury diner, she observes, can tell immediately when a restaurant is trying too hard. On women reshaping hospitality leadership, she is direct. “Women are making luxury feel more human. Luxury does not need fear behind it. The best restaurants in the future will be led by people who can hold high standards and still lead with care.”
Pankaj Balachandran has spent his career asking what India’s bar culture could look like if it started believing in itself. Considered one of the country’s most influential bar consultants, he has shaped programmes across some of the most talked about venues in the country. Boilermaker in Goa, ranked among Asia’s 50 Best Bars, and Quinta Cantina in Panjim, a bar built around feni and agave, are where that belief takes physical form.
His philosophy of building is as distinctive as the bars themselves. As his company’s reputation grew and high-volume projects came calling, he walked away from the ones that didn’t fit. “The most unconventional decision I’ve made is to deliberately refuse scale when it compromises alignment. Without philosophical alignment or a degree of control over execution, even the strongest concepts can erode quickly.” It is a position that extends to how he thinks about menus, teams, and the role of the consultant itself. Menus are kept concise because clarity creates confidence. Training is invested in heavily because culture sustains a programme long after the consultant has stepped away.
When asked where cocktail culture is headed, he is characteristically direct. “Rarity creates hierarchy. Ritual creates belonging. I would always choose ritual. The future of luxury in cocktail culture will belong to those who design meaningful journeys, not just exclusive ones.” The new generation of drinker, he observes, is already ahead of the industry on this. They drink less but better. They ask about provenance, sustainability, and cultural context. They are, as he puts it, not chasing access in the traditional sense. “They would rather wait for the right experience than leverage connections to force entry. The value lies in the moment itself, not in signalling proximity to it.”
On the changing face of leadership behind the bar, he is measured but clear. The industry is becoming more inclusive and emotionally intelligent, and that is unambiguously good he notes. What he will not trade is professionalism. “Empathy must expand. But standards, discipline, and ownership of craft must remain uncompromised. You can create your own persona in service, but professionalism should still reign.” In a bar world increasingly shaped by trend cycles and social media validation, Balachandran remains one of its most grounded voices.