Must-Try Chefs’ Tables in India Where Food is Served With a Side of Storytelling

In today's world of luxury, an amazing experience trumps all others. A spicy story, a sizzling conversation, and a soul-filling meal top that list. And if you are a seeker, these highly in-demand, exclusive chef’s tables should be on your radar.

Avinash Martins’ C’est L’Avi Table in the Hills

Goa’s Avinash Martins serves an eight-course meal at his great-grandfather’s land, which is more like a wild forest area, without mobile network, in South Goa. But there are birds, animals, and cashew, coconut, and mango trees—and a chef’s table for six.

Martin’s eight-course menu changes every season, with every dish, paired with feni-based cocktails, celebrating Goa. Since there is no refrigerator, everything is prepared fresh. “I want my guests to experience the same joy of food and fresh ingredients as I did as a child while plucking fruits with my granny from this farm,” says Martins.

One of the crowd favourites is an Italian-style carpaccio with tender coconut, paired with pink, yellow, and vermilion sauces. The pink is for sol kadhi, yellow for turmeric leche de tegre, and vermilion for aam ras. Every other dish is served with epic stories of Martins’ time at the farms of Goa, and its culture, people, and food. But this experience is not open to all. Martins only seats serious food connoisseurs who seek great experiences.

Chef Varun Totlani’s Masque Lab

Masque has been named the top restaurant in India by Asia's 50 Best Restaurants for 2025, for the third year consecutively. Reserved only for 14 diners, Masque Lab is an offshoot of the restaurant Masque. The lab is the restaurant's research and development space.

The 10-course chef’s tasting menu here marries traditional, local ingredients with modern, fine-dining techniques. One of their standout dishes is dosa, with a modern twist of koji, which is used for fermentation in the Japanese cuisine. Totlani grows koji on dosa rice, and lets the batter ferment slowly in cooler temperatures. This gives a benne dosa-like slightly sweet flavour, without using any sugar.

Although the restaurant is inclined towards using just Indian ingredients, Totlani is open to requests. “Guests have asked us for an Italian tasting menu or a caviar dish in the mix, and we have created them for the chef’s tables,” says Totlani. Masque Lab also does takeovers by international chefs and home cooks. A few weeks ago, chef Mythrayie Iyer took over the space to cook a meal inspired by her travels. “Inside the Masque Lab kitchen every day is different,” says Totlani.

Chef Johnson Ebenezer’s Farmlore

The farm-to-table restaurant, set inside a 37-acre farm at the edge of Bengaluru, seats 18 people. You have to book months in advance to get a seat at this restaurant which features large floor-to-ceiling glass windows offering views of the banana and bay trees around, coupled with swathes of lemongrass. The restaurant is also equipped with a solar-powered hydroponic system which produces vegetables and minimises the carbon footprint; another vertical farm helps maximise growing space. Depending on the season, up to 80 per cent of the produce comes from the farm for the weekly menus. Picture gourmet versions of bitter gourd, Malabar oysters dressed in roselle flower granitas with tart huli soppu (foraged wood sorrel) on a mound of sanketti salt, and a roll of rose leather with Mandya butter, nuts and rose petals, among other dishes.

Chef Hussain Shahzad’s Papa’s Bombay

The 12-seater intimate dining space serves a 13-course meal. The tasting menu blends traditional flavours, global techniques and great stories around chef Shahzad’s childhood, his mentors, and his cooking techniques. One noteworthy dish is Bugs Bunny. “It captures the spirit of what we are trying to do at Papa’s: unexpected, playful, and rooted in something personal,” he says.

The idea began with a bit of nostalgia. Shahzad grew up in Chennai where Rabbit 65 was a classic bar snack. It was bold, spicy, and ubiquitous. “But in Mumbai, rabbit is rarely seen on menus. I wanted to bring that sense of familiarity from home into something new,” he adds. The dish has rabbit sausage roll, tangy red ant relish, and pineapple.

Prateek Sadhu’s Naar

Naar means fire in Kashmiri. And if I had to Snapchat the dining experience here, I would fill the chat room with fire emojis!

Naar, helmed by chef Prateek Sadhu, is recognised as the country’s foremost destination dining venue. People from around the country fly down to this boutique restaurant perched on a cliff, amidst a pine forest in Kasauli. In return, Sadhu, who lives right next to the restaurant, regales them with stories of every dish, its making technique, ingredients, and where the ingredients are sourced from.

Dining only 16 guests at a time, where the chef personally caters to guests, you won’t know what to expect until the dish arrives at this surprise meal experience. The meal here includes 15 to 18 dishes made with ingredients sourced from the Himalayan belt. Sadhu serves a version of chilled kadhi, which is eaten in Uttarakhand, reduced with curd and eaten with tomato. Then there is a pineapple ragi cake, which celebrates the fruit’s season in the northeast, and babroo, a donut from Himachal Pradesh . “No one knows what they are going to be served. We want our guests to be excited about the experience,” says Sadhu. “We want to blow people’s minds. People, too, come here with that expectation. It’s obviously a high-pressure job,” he adds.