Picture this: your overzealous foodie friend drags you to a tasting menu at ITC Grand Chola, Chennai. You’re a skeptic, someone who’d rather stick to no-fuss fare than sit through a parade of courses that look like science experiments. The first dish arrives, some Heston-esque concoction you aren’t quite sure how to eat. You roll your eyes, take a bite, and suddenly you’re in patti’s kitchen, with the exact tang, comfort, and warmth of the curd rice she used to make. That’s the magic of Avartana. It turns skeptics to believers by replicating that Ratatouille moment. Since opening in 2017, the restaurant has turned South Indian food into a tasting menu experience without stripping it of soul. Its name, Sanskrit for rhythm and repetition, shapes the structure of its seven, nine, 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 into a single bite with coconut chicken and butter toffee, fennel panna cotta with a yolk of mango-ginger coulis. The theatrics are sharp and deliberate, but never gimmicky, and the double-distilled rasam alone is enough to make diners wish they could bottle it up and take it home. 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 tradition without betraying it. That’s why Avartana isn’t just another progressive dining room. It’s theatre with logic, wizardry with roots, and one of the most exhilarating ways to taste South India today.
#9. NĀVU, Bengaluru
On a quiet bylane in Domlur, a yellow awning signals NĀVU, a small, chef-driven restaurant that feels more like a neighbourhood secret than a fine-dining spot. Inside, the space feels like an apartment dinner party combined with a restaurant: small, warm, minimalist, the kind of room where strangers lean in over plates and leave as friends. That intimacy is the canvas for chefs Pallavi Mithika Menon and Kanishka Sharma, whose menus are short, seasonal, and instinctive. The décor is minimalist, almost homey, but the food has made it one of India’s most whispered-about flexes. A platter of oysters on ice greets you on their Instagram page, an early clue that ingredients lead the way. Pallavi and Kanishka have mastered the classics so well they know exactly how to subvert them, pairing flavours that shouldn’t make sense, yet somehow do. A chicken liver pâté, served donburi-style over miso butter rice and lap cheong, shouldn’t work, but it sings. Recent menus have played with ideas like mustard ice cream with pickled cherry tomatoes, beef tartare with sunchoke purée and anchovy–caper vinaigrette, and confit parsnips served three ways, but the dish that has endured every iteration is the cauliflower crème brûlée, far more delicious than its name suggests. The energy is unfussy, the plating beautiful but still appetising, and the food both indulgent and deeply thoughtful. For Bengaluru’s diners, NĀVU has become shorthand for what chef-led dining in India can be: confident, creative, and cool without trying too hard.
#10. FarmLore, Bengaluru
