Are India’s Hardest-to-Book F&B Spaces Creating Desire Or Simply Responding To A New Generation of Diners?

TUCKED AWAY BEHIND OLIVE BAR & Kitchen in Delhi is a cocktail bar that occupies what was once the group’s beverage experimentation space. At The Hidden Club (THC), there are no crowds jostling for drinks or music drowning out conversation. Every cocktail is built in front of you by the bartender, conversation flows easily and the space feels more like a living room than a bar. It also happens to be one of the city’s hardest reservations to secure.

That’s because it has just four seats.

Everyone is talking about how hard it is to get into the city’s hottest restaurants and bars today, but perhaps the more interesting story is what’s happening to the spaces themselves: many of the places generating the most buzz are getting smaller and smaller. There are chef's tables with fewer than 20 seats, tasting-menu restaurants that release slots months in advance, and cocktail bars with limited access.

On paper, it can look like hospitality has borrowed a page from the luxury playbook: create scarcity, generate curiosity and let limited access become part of the appeal.

Whether diners see it the same way is another matter. The anticipation, planning and difficulty of getting in have become increasingly familiar parts of India's dining scene.

“I had to set a reminder to book a table at Papa’s,” Mumbai-based marketing professional Rhea Mehta says of the 12-seater chef’s counter restaurant. “You almost have to treat it like booking concert tickets. It makes finally getting a table feel rewarding, but it also means dining out isn't as spontaneous as it used to be.”

WHY EVERYONE IS GOING SMALLER

“The access model was a consequence of the concept, not the starting point,” says Nitin Mathur, COO of EHV International, which operates Upstairs, the members-only cocktail bar above Indian Accent. “When you build a small cocktail bar centred around personalised service, every additional guest changes the character of the room.”

That sentiment comes up repeatedly across conversations with restaurateurs and chefs. They reject the idea that they are deliberately making themselves difficult to access. Instead, they point to practical realities like small kitchens, labour-intensive cocktail programmes, limited talent and a desire to spend more time with every guest.

For Kaushik Raju, founder of Farmlore—set on a farm outside Bengaluru—the restaurant's 18-seat format wasn't designed to make reservations harder to get. “Every restaurant has to find the scale at which it can deliver its vision with integrity,” he says.

After months of trials, Raju realised 18 seats were enough to let guests engage with the chefs, watch each plate being finished and experience the meal as intended.

The 24-seater Stoned Pig in Goa arrived at a similar conclusion, albeit from behind the bar. “A small bar is simply easier to run well,” says chief cocktail officer Sujan Shetty. “When the room is intimate, you have far greater control over the drinks, the pace of service and the experience each guest has.”

He is careful to distinguish intimacy from exclusivity. “Being small isn't the same as being exclusive,” he says. “Intimacy is the product, not the barrier.”

For Vicky Singh, founder at Koliwada Cocktail Club in Mumbai (within Slink & Bardot) that offers a six-course savoury cocktail tasting menu, the reasons are even more straightforward. “Mixology is an art and it's quite time-consuming,” he says. “The more experimental or process-driven the cocktails are, the fewer drinks you can produce in a given period of time.”

Finding the right people is another challenge. “It’s all well and good to have a large cocktail bar, but if you have only one mixologist, service becomes challenging,” he explains.

As a result, many of today's ambitious bars are not built around serving hundreds of people in an evening.

But the question remains: when does keeping things small start feeling like keeping people out?

Scarcity is not always intentional, but it does have an undeniable side effect: intrigue. Difficulty of access makes people want to know what they’re missing. “I think exclusivity naturally increases curiosity because people see your place as difficult to access,” says Singh. “But what really matters is word of mouth.”

Shetty agrees. “Some of it is FOMO, there’s no point pretending otherwise,” he says. “But FOMO might get someone through the door once. It won’t bring them back.”

Upstairs takes the idea a step further with the EHV Dining Club, a membership programme that offers access across the group's restaurants, including Comorin, Fireback, Indian Accent and, of course, Upstairs. “There is no waiting list. However, your membership needs to be approved once you fill up the membership form,” Mathur explains.

“In our business, loyalty is earned through consistency, through the quality of the drinks and the food, the warmth of the hospitality, and how a place makes you feel,” he adds. “Those are the reasons people come back, and they're far more important than whether a reservation is difficult to secure.”

For Chef Prateek Sadhu, the more interesting shift is happening on the other side of the table. “I don’t think restaurants are doing this,” he says. “Diners are evolving.”

His restaurant Naar, located in a small village near Kasauli, has become one of India’s most sought-after dining experiences. Yet Sadhu does not view advance planning as a sign of restaurants becoming less welcoming. “Today, the middle class is spending a lot of money to dine out,” he says. “When they’re spending that money, they want value for that money.”

The restaurants that deliver genuine experiences, he believes, will naturally find themselves in demand. He also the scale of the conversation needs perspective.

“In a country of 1.5 billion people, if you have four restaurants where you really have to plan a month in advance, I don’t see that as a problem at all,” he says. “I only see it as a very positive thing.”

Restaurateur AD Singh, whose Olive Group has also experimented with intimate bar formats through The Love Hotel and THC by Olive in Delhi, sees this as part of a wider change. “I don't think it is about seats that have to be earned,” he says. “The dining experience has changed anyway.”

People today, he says, are more interested in new cuisines, innovation, presentation and experiences that go beyond simply eating out. “There are many more options,” he says. “People are more focused on food rather than just relaxing.”

But not every diner sees this evolution as progress. For some, the effort required to secure a table has started to compete with the pleasure of dining out. “I don’t mind planning for a special meal,” says Bengaluru-based entrepreneur Arjun Rao. “But when every dinner starts feeling like a project, it takes away some of the spontaneity. Going out to eat was always supposed to be about unwinding, not managing another calendar invite.”

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