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I'm at the point where I'm starting to wonder if anyone in this country still wants to run a place that does exactly one thing. The answer, fairly definitively, is no.
This June, almost nothing on the list is willing to commit to a single identity. Cafés flip into cocktail bars the second the sun clocks out. A bar in Bandra is built around a run club. A patisserie in Hyderabad spends its days as a sunlit café and its evenings as a "dessert theatre," which is exactly as dramatic as it sounds.
And then, in the middle of all this reinvention, Olive Garden — yes, that Olive Garden, the unlimited-soup-salad-and-breadsticks one has finally made its India debut in Aerocity, and the crowds have not let up since.
Elsewhere, the nostalgia is doing numbers too: Connaught Place institution Kwality has carried its chholey-bhature to Gurugram, Royal China is running a Cantonese omakase, and there are Vietnam-inspired pours going around Gurugram if you know where to look. As ever, it's a lot. As ever, it's fabulous.
Here are the hottest openings of the month!
Sri Lankan fine dining is still weirdly rare in India, which is exactly what makes Zetu feel like an event. Tucked into Mehrauli's 1AQ, the 175-seater is built around a 500-year-old banyan tree, with an indoor room designed with Sri Lankan art and textiles and a design language that nods to Geoffrey Bawa and the island's tropical modernism. Founders Sarah Nikahetiya, Anurag Dania and Abhishek Mathur spent years travelling and cooking across Sri Lanka, and it shows in a kitchen that swings from street-food hoppers to the gloriously labour-intensive lamprais, the stock-soaked rice dish the Dutch Burgher community left behind. Order the Air and Gold hoppers and the lamprais, and drink the Frangipani Martini or the clarified Ananasi. Coconut, curry leaf, smoke, gentle heat — it's a whole island on a plate.
It's a wellness café in Hauz Khas where you can order a genuinely good bowl and then spike your coffee with collagen, creatine or ashwagandha. Chefs Megha Kohli and Noah Barnes keep the food on the right side of indulgent — Brazilian açaí bowls, skyr Turkish eggs with hazelnut dukkah, sourdough focaccia sandwiches, protein-packed grain bowls, and a pistachio cinnamon roll worth the detour.
Chef Ruchira Hoon has turned one of her most-loved pandemic meal concepts into an actual restaurant, and it's as comforting as that sounds. The whole thing is build-your-own: pick a base (classic khow suey, spicy tomato mala, or a clear broth), pile on noodles and toppings, add dumplings — chicken, prawn, or broccoli and cheese — and finish with soft serve in flavours like pink guava and chilli or dark chocolate and pink salt.
Chef Shri Bala brings Southern Indian cooking to Gurugram with a menu rooted in region, memory and lineage rather than the usual dosa-idli shorthand. Warm and immersive, it's built on the idea that the food of the South deserves the same care and seriousness as anything calling itself fine dining.
The breadsticks are here. After years of Indians discovering Olive Garden exclusively through American sitcoms and family trips abroad, the chain has chosen Worldmark 4 in Aerocity for its India debut. You know the script — Chicken Alfredo, Lasagna Classico, Chicken Parmigiana, the Tour of Italy platter.
One of Mumbai's most enduring Chinese restaurants — it first opened at The Taj Mahal Palace back in 1973 — has finally made it to Delhi-NCR, via the Taj Surajkund Resort & Spa. Executive chef Anuj Mathur and Hong Kong's chef Tong Sing Wah keep the Sichuan and Cantonese classics intact: dim sum, Beijing duck, wok-tossed signatures, and the three-flavour noodles loyalists have been ordering for half a century.
Aditya Birla New Age Hospitality's entry into the café-as-community-hub arms race, and a well-built one. The coffee runs on single-estate, AA-grade Arabica from Chikkamagaluru, the 60-plus beverage list stretches to tahini coffees, hojicha and craft-chocolate hot chocolate, and the food covers everything from breakfast plates to fresh-baked breads. Singapore studio Parable designed the space around communal tables, cosy corners and a retail nook spotlighting local makers.
From the Barbet & Pals team comes a 55-seater in Bandra Reclamation built entirely around the punch bowl — fitting, given the drink traces its origins to India and the word paanch. The bartenders breakdance, sing along to a playlist that lurches from Boney M to Backstreet Boys, and ladle cocktails tableside, so the drinks stay serious even when the room absolutely isn't. Jeet Rana and Chirag Pal run the bar with cheekily named pours — Pop The Cherry (mahua, sour cherry), Peeling Good (spiced rum, banana ice cream, coconut foam) — while chef Amninder Sandhu handles a tight food menu of crispy arbi with tender coconut, prawns in a spicy Malvani crumble and charcoal-dunked steak.
The Hyderabad patisserie-and-café chain has made its Mumbai debut down a Colaba lane, inside a soaring Essajees Atelier space of exposed brick and charcoal hues. Desserts are the headline, but the all-day menu more than holds up: burrata panna cotta, jackfruit haleem with fluffy pita, tori karaage with curry-leaf furikake, plus the expected pizzas, pastas and sandos. Beverages run to cold brews, matcha and ube.
Find the lime-green façade with a coffee window in Khar's Chuim Village and you've found this tiny pot-pie specialist from the Phat Fillings crew (Vidit Aren, Xerxes Bhathena, Tejas Agrawal). The menu is short on purpose — sandwiches, pot pies, and small plates like miso garlic butter prawns, steak frites, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a summer gazpacho with garlic focaccia.
Bandra is getting its music-bar culture back, and this one was engineered for it — 2,000 sq ft in Bandra West wired with an L-Acoustics system designed by industry veteran Roger Drego and programmed around the golden decades of the '60s through the '90s. Think vinyl sessions and classic-rock nights in a room that behaves more like a house party than a bar. Chef Gracian's sharing plates — Lamb Chili Con Carne tacos, triple-cooked pork sausages with pineapple salsa, butter garlic prawns with pav — are built for long evenings, and Eluther Gomes's cocktails read like a record: try BackStage Pass (tequila, roasted corn, salted honey, cranberry tea) or the silky High Note No. 5 (saffron-infused gin and brandy, lemongrass). Opens to the public onJune 19 at 38 Waterfield Road.
A 60-seater that pulls the increasingly familiar café-by-day, cocktail-bar-by-night move — and pulls it off. First-time restaurateurs Ansh Kapoor and Aditya Wanwari built the drinks around house-made brines, foams and distillates, with cocktails (simply numbered No. 1 to 10) plus Aperol, Espresso Martini and Paloma all on tap. The food roams Latin, Mediterranean and pan-Asian: buff carpaccio with truffle, Sichuan paella, radiatori alla vodka, cheeseburger croquettes, sticky toffee tres leches.
Tucked away at HOMM in Khar, this 25-seater from Pratik Gaba does the most interesting thing a cocktail bar can do right now: instead of organising drinks by spirit or style, every cocktail begins with a single pantry ingredient. Pankaj Balachandran's menu of ten builds outward from enoki, ponzu, beeswax, yerba mate or brie — the cognac-and-beeswax number with fig and Campari and the brie-infused gin are the ones to call for. The food exists purely to keep you drinking: Kerala fried wings, grilled prawns with spicy mayo, a Malabar seafood bowl.
The new Bandra flagship from Usman and Farhaz Bhadelia is a café with a run club attached — Running Late by Brevé, which they're billing as Mumbai's first café-led run club — so mornings begin with a run and unspool over coffee. The signature move is the Build Your Own Breakfast Board (choose three or five components from sourdough, eggs, avocado, smoked salmon, halloumi and the rest), and the all-day menu leans active without being joyless: Middle Eastern halloumi bowl, miso prawns with soba, the grilled miso tenderloin sandwich. Coffee's the backbone — get the pistachio cold foam cold brew or the coconut coffee.
A vinyl-and-slow-coffee nook in Andheri where you're meant to fold yourself into a corner with a pour-over and an old record. The slow bar does dirty lattes and matchas alongside an iced black sesame latte and a lychee-watermelon cold brew, and the food stretches from tiramisu French toast to kataifi prawns, Peruvian chicken pot pie and bajra tacos.
An all-day Bandra bar built on the easy overlap between street food and drinking culture in cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Barcelona and New York — so it slides from coffee meetings to late drinks without ever changing gears. Order the Khau Galli Chaat Stack and the Eleven Roll (salmon, tuna, avocado), and drink a Midtown Truffle Old Fashioned or a Golden Hour while you're at it.
Off the crowded side of Anjuna, behind a deliberately unassuming entrance, Backroom is a cocktail-forward bar that lets the crowd set the mood — which here means karaoke, game nights and a generally easy hang. The drinks lean regional, with Goan urrak and feni meeting jackfruit and Ratnagiri mangoes, and the bar bites (prawn potli balchao, truffle pâté naan, XO fried rice) are better than they have any need to be.
Perched above Gnome at Embassy Tech Square with a single house rule — leave work at the door — this cocktail bar from Nikhil Wahi, Kapil Dua and Raja Mukherjee lives up to the name. The Countertop India drinks programme explores ingredients in their original and transformed states: grape and pomace, coffee and cascara, coconut water and coconut oil, cheese and ricotta. The food stays familiar — truffle burrata tart, Goan cutlet sliders, kimchi smash burger, Aslam-style butter chicken — and built to graze over a few unhurried rounds.
Envisioned as a botanist's residence — a nod to Bengaluru's Garden City billing — with tables scattered across a living room, glasshouse, lab and orchard, this is one of the prettier rooms to open in the city all year. Chef Zafar's menu runs Peruvian and Nikkei: ceviches, tiraditos, grilled chicken with ají de gallina, halloumi asado, chargrilled octopus, cauliflower steak with goat cheese and walnut crumble. The bar holds one of the deepest agave lists in town.
Inside the Sheraton Grand at Brigade Gateway, Project Grain takes its cues from Japanese highball culture and jazz listening rooms without cosplaying either. Arijit Bose and bar manager Pawan Singh Rawat keep the drinks balanced, chef Jason Hudanish keeps the food tight — grilled dishes, raw bites, Japanese- and Korean-leaning small plates — and live jazz and blues fill several nights a week.
A sunlit café by day that converts into an intimate "dessert theatre" after dark — a big claim that it somehow earns. For chef Anuhya Reddy (ex-Sketch in London, and Ladurée) it's a homecoming of sorts. Daytime is croissants and coffee; evenings dim the lights for plated desserts with a flair for drama, like the butterfly cocoon — delicate meringue shells that crack open onto mascarpone mousse and roasted strawberries — or an elegant s'mores of meringue, honeycomb and ice cream.
After Mumbai and Goa, chef-owner Nooresha Kably has opened her third Izumi on a lakeside spot overlooking Durgam Cheruvu — a full-circle moment, given she briefly lived in Hyderabad as a student. The Minnie Bhatt-designed room carries over the live sushi counter and Japan-sourced crockery of its siblings, while adding Hyderabad-specific touches like mutton on the robata. Expect sushi, sashimi and nigiri, comforting ramen broths, charred Napa cabbage with mustard miso mayo, and Asian-leaning cocktails built just for this outpost.
A restobar that shifts with the day: light and airy for unhurried lunches and coffee, then a palette of deep reds, blacks and dim lighting once evening hits. The menu is happily all over the map — edamame curry podi, crispy fried stuffed olives, gunpowder baby potatoes, donne biryani, and fusion plates pulling from the Mediterranean and Europe.