Nara Thai Wants You To Stop Eating Lunch Like It’s A Chore

Picture the average Gurugram lunch hour: laptop open at the next table, phone lighting up mid-bite, a sandwich eaten in roughly the time it takes to reread an email you've already read twice. You have to be back at your desk quickly, after all. Food, if it is to be the main attraction, can be better enjoyed at breakfast or dinner.

But hey, this doesn’t mean that you can give up on eating well in the afternoon. If you’re slogging off, you might as well have a lunch worth remembering. And this is where Nara Thai’s new lunch format comes in.

Taste of Thai is the restaurant's five-course lunch format, which made its way from Mumbai to Gurugram on 29 June. It borrows the long, layered rhythm of a traditional Thai meal and fits it into a smaller window that still respects everyone's afternoon time crunches. The idea is built around convenience: sit down, work through five proper courses, and get back to your day feeling like you actually had a hearty lunch.

Running Monday through Friday from 12:00 PM to 3:30 PM, the offerings start with a round of soup or salad, a round of small eats, a main course, a rice or noodle staple, followed by dessert. A beverage is included, with the option to upgrade to a cocktail if the afternoon calls for something a little more festive. Every course comes with choices built in, so nobody's stuck eating something they only ordered because the menu ran out of alternatives.

Speaking of the menu, a nice addition is that vegetarian and non-vegetarian guests, previously handed separate cards, now share one without the need to split the table into two different meals. 

The lineup includes dishes that built Nara's Michelin reputation in the first place: Tom Yum and Tom Kha soups, Raw Papaya Salad, Larb Gai, Crispy Betel Leaves with Chilli Lime Dip, Chicken Satay, Thai Red and Green Curry, Phad Thai and Tub Tim Grob. A few newer additions, shaped by what Gurugram diners have been ordering off the regular menu, round out a spread built to show off the kitchen at full range, simply recalibrated for a shorter afternoon window. The Tom Yum arrives sharp and citrusy, the satay is smoky and rich, the papaya salad cuts back through with heat and lime, and by the time dessert shows up, the meal has covered more flavour territory than most lunches manage in a week.

With this new format, Nara Thai looks into the weekday lunch, once treated as dead time between meetings, and invites it to mean a little more: a client pitch worth remembering, a catch-up that doesn't feel cut short, a working lunch that you think about even at the end of the week. 

Taste of Thai first proved itself to the Indian audience in Mumbai before making the trip to Gurugram, and the format comes with the confidence of something that's already found its footing in the country. Whether the occasion is professional or entirely personal, Taste of Thai is betting that Gurugram has room for all of it, plus dessert, and that the forty-five extra minutes you set aside for lunch actually become the highlight of your day.