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Mumbai’s restaurant scene was largely hotel-driven when AD Singh opened Olive Bar & Kitchen in 2000, in a bylane in Bandra, Mumbai. Instead, he built a space that felt and looked like a Mediterranean home, encouraging laid-back lunches.
“It wasn’t a calculated decision. It was simply the instinct to create a place that felt warm and social. Fortunately, people responded to that spirit,” he recalls. They still do. Over 25 years and 15 restaurant brands, including Monkey Bar, SodaBottleOpenerWala, Toast and Tonic, and Guppy, Singh has shaped not just what Indians eat, but how they think about going out. He is credited with several firsts: India’s first gastropub, Mumbai’s first floating bar, one of the first restaurants that didn’t serve Indian food. His most significant contribution, however, is less tangible: the idea that a restaurant can have a soul. The philosophy underpins the question he returns to most often: what makes a place last? “Restaurants that endure are the ones that adapt to the times while staying true to their original spirit. Ultimately, restaurants that last become part of the city’s cultural fabric, not just places to eat.”
His view of luxury is similarly grounded. “What people value is sincerity. Spaces that feel real, warm, and personal rather than staged. Five years from now, luxury will mean restaurants that allow people to slow down, share a table, and feel a sense of belonging.” On the restlessness of the current moment, where novelty is chased and places open and close in the blink of an eye, he says, “The real goal should be to create spaces people return to for years, and not just places they visit once because they’re fashionable.” In an industry that often mistakes newness for ambition, Singh remains its most eloquent argument for the long game.
Aditi Dugar was working in private equity when she decided to start her own catering company out of her home kitchen in 2012. The instinct to build carefully and deliberately was first established at Sage & Saffron, one of Mumbai’s first boutique end-to-end catering companies. Masque arrived in 2016, after two years of travelling across India, building relationships with farmers and local producers, and working out what an ingredientled, tasting menu restaurant rooted entirely in Indian produce could look like. Co-founder and husband Aditya Dugar describes those early years not as a struggle, but as a long, patient education. “Fine dining isn’t something you declare, it’s something you grow into. You learn by watching how people move through the space; what stays with them; where energy drops; where it lifts.” Masque has since been recognised among Asia’s finest restaurants, a reflection of what happens when a clear vision is given the time and space to mature.
Urban Gourmet India today spans Sage & Saffron’s bespoke catering, TwentySeven Bakehouse, and most recently Paradox, their audacious cocktail bar at Shakti Mills Lane in Mumbai’s upscale neighbourhood of Mahalaxmi. On her take on women reshaping hospitality, Aditi says, “It’s less about control and more about connection. Less about hierarchy and more about collaboration. That shift is quietly but meaningfully redefining what leadership in hospitality can look like.”
Most luxury food stories begin in Europe. Chaitanya Muppala, however, decided that his would begin in the West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh in India.
The founder of Manam Chocolate and CEO of Distinct Origins Private Limited didn’t arrive at craft chocolate through passion alone; he arrived through a problem. In 2018, while searching for quality Indian chocolate and finding none that met his standards, he began pulling at a thread that would unravel and lead him to something far larger: the country’s first genuine attempt to position homegrown cacao as a luxury product on the world stage.
Before launching Manam in 2023, he spent years establishing a fine flavour cacao fermentary in Tadikalapudi, Andhra Pradesh, bringing over 150 farmers and 1,500 acres into a supply chain designed for transparency and quality from the ground up. One of India’s most ambitious fine flavour cacao operations, it was built with patience, care, and respect both to the produce and its producer.
“We didn’t start with a grand premonition,” he says. “We started with a philosophy of simply doing— building, learning, and [going from] one problem to the next.” Manam launched to considerable attention and has since collected international awards over two consecutive years at the Academy of Chocolate Awards in the U.K., among others. But Muppala is less interested in trophies than in the argument they help him make: that Indian cacao, when handled with rigour, needs no borrowed prestige.
“Premium doesn’t have to mean imported. Indian origins, done with integrity, will absolutely be part of the luxury conversation.” That conviction is being borne out in the market. What Muppala expected to be a slow category build accelerated sharply. Chocolate and gifting, projected at 20 per cent of early revenue, surged to 70 per cent within two and a half years. The consumer, it turned out, was readier than the industry assumed.
He is also India’s first Level-3 Certified Chocolate Taster, credentialed by the International Institute of Chocolate and Cacao Tasting, a testament to how seriously he takes the craft. “Technology doesn’t replace craftsmanship,” he says of his process-led approach. “It refines it.” In a category still finding its footing in India, Muppala isn’t waiting for the world to discover Indian cacao. He’s building the case, one carefully fermented bean at a time.
Gaggan Anand was a drummer before he was a chef, which explains how he thinks—about rhythm, about performance, about the relationship between artist and audience. It also explains why his restaurant feels less like a meal and more like a concert. The Kolkata-born chef spent the better part of two decades in Bangkok, building his extraordinary career. His original restaurant, Gaggan, was named the best in Asia for four consecutive years, a record at the time. When he rebuilt, he did it without the safety net of an established brand and climbed back again to the very top. In 2025, his restaurant was named the best in Asia for a fifth time.
After training with the Taj Group, he became the first chef of Indian descent to intern with Ferran Adrià’s research team at elBulli, an experience that shaped his relationship with food as playful, experimental, and emotionally charged. The restaurant that emerged from all of this is unlike any operating under the banner of fine dining: Diners are sometimes invited to eat with their hands. Aside from his Bangkok restaurant, his portfolio includes the Indian-Mexican Ms. Maria and Mr. Singh, and a collaboration with Louis Vuitton that brought his cooking into one of the world’s most recognisable luxury contexts.
Garima Arora began her career in journalism, but the kitchen had other plans. A move to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris followed by years of rigorous training in some of the world’s most demanding kitchens later, she opened Gaa in Bangkok in 2017, launching one of the most significant careers in Indian cuisine. In 2018, Gaa earned a Michelin star, making Arora the first Indian woman to helm a Michelin-starred restaurant. A year later, she was named Asia’s Best Female Chef. Today, Gaa has two Michelin stars and a place on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list. These milestones broadened what the world believed Indian cuisine could be, yet the decision to open in Bangkok rather than India was, at the time, the one that surprised people most.
“The connection between Indian and Thai culture runs extraordinarily close: the mythology, the language, the ingredients, the way both cuisines understand spice and soul. There’s something about discovering your own roots from a different geography that deepens your relationship with them entirely,” shares Arora.
Her homecoming to India took shape with Banng, a Thai-dining concept first launched in Gurugram, Delhi NCR, in 2024, and now in Mumbai, bringing her story full circle to the city she grew up in. Alongside this, Food Forward India, her notfor-profit initiative, works to explore and document the diversity of Indian cuisines, the less visible work of a chef who thinks in decades, not seasons.
Her leadership philosophy is as considered as her cooking. “When I accepted the second star, it [was] for all 35 members of team Gaa. To me, that is what the top of this industry can and should look like: a room full of people who believe in what they’re creating together.” On luxury, she cuts to something essential: “That quality of presence, of genuine surprise, when not just your palate, but all of you wakes up—that is the new luxury.”
There are restaurateurs who build restaurants, and then there are those who build worlds. Gauri Devidayal belongs firmly in the second camp. The co-founder and director of Food Matters Group came to hospitality not through culinary school but through the corridors of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where she spent eight years as a tax consultant. The pivot was improbable. The results were not.
The Table, which Devidayal launched in Colaba in 2011 alongside her husband Jay Yousuf, has become one of the most decorated restaurants in the country, multiple award-winning, consistently ranked among Asia’s finest, and arguably the restaurant that shifted what Mumbai believed fine dining could be. But it’s the decisions that followed The Table that reveal the fuller picture. In 2016, she opened Magazine St. Kitchen in Reay Road, an industrial pocket of Mumbai that her clientele had little reason to visit. Bold, some said. Reckless, others whispered. “That was the most unconventional business decision we made— launching in a neighbourhood most of our clientele would have never ventured to,” she reflects. The gamble paid off.