Celebrate Independence Day With These 7

Indian Chefs

Putting India’s Regional Food In The Spotlight

Quick Summary

As India steps into its 80th year of Independence Day celebrations, it is worth celebrating local talent who have brought underrated regional cuisines, such as those from the northeast, to the rest of the country and, for some, to the world stage. Most of the chefs in this article have taken regional classics from something as delicious yet accessible as butter chicken to something more low-key like Assamese khar and made them unforgettable.

Deep Dive

Independence Day is a reminder that there is a world out there beyond just biryani, naan or even idli and dosa, and the beauty lies in the diverse food traditions of this very country and its people. Some chefs took these classics and put them on the global map with creative twists, while others hiked to the mountains and nestled their food haven close to the rugged peaks, for only those who want the taste of the finest foods and want to get away from the hustle and bustle of daily life. From Himachal to London, here’s a list of seven chefs who have been reinventing India's diverse culinary gems like no other.

1. Sombir Choudhary, Kalpaney, Bengaluru

An all-vegetarian restaurant in Bengaluru, Kalpaney, was conceptualised and co-founded by Avinash Kapoli and Chef Sombir Choudhary. The restaurant has picked regional and nostalgic Indian foods, from festive spreads to roadside snacks and childhood favourites, and applied its own refined technique. This shows up in dishes such as dal dhokli transformed into tagliatelle with a kokum dal, lotus stem turned into nadru seekh, and dahi bhalla paired with feta, chutneys and pomegranate. 

Kalpaney began in JP Nagar in 2025 and has since expanded to a second Bengaluru location in Indiranagar, near Domlur. The newer restaurant continues the brand's focus on familiar vegetarian flavours presented through a contemporary, global lens. So, this Independence Day, steeped in nostalgia at this Bengaluru restaurant that blends global influences with regional food.

2. Atul Kochhar, Kanishka, London

The first Indian chef to earn a Michelin star, Atul Kochhar, won the accolade in 2001 at Tamarind in London. Today, at Kanishka in Mayfair, he continues to explore the diversity of Indian regional cuisines through a modern lens. The restaurant serves pan-Indian cuisine, with a particular focus on lesser-known dishes from India's northeastern states. 

This restaurant’s regional focus is evident in dishes such as jalpari nilgiri, pairing Orkney scallops with Nilgiri herbs and curry leaf, alongside sea trout with a coconut-based moilee. More familiar favourites, including Old Delhi butter chicken, sit alongside these less expected regional references. The restaurant’s current offerings include à la carte dining, a seven-course tasting menu, a lunch tasting menu, and set menus, giving diners different ways to explore Kochhar’s take on Indian cuisine, perfect for Independence Day.

3. Prateek Sadhu, Naar, Himachal Pradesh

This genius behind Mumbai's celebrated modern-Indian restaurant Masque, Chef Prateek Sadhu, called it quits in 2022 and opened Naar, a destination restaurant with just 16-20 seats, tucked into the village of Darwa in Himachal Pradesh. Naar’s food focuses entirely on what its website calls Himalayan-forward cuisine. Ingredients and techniques from Jammu down to Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh find their place here: foraged greens, trout, Himachali yak cheese, Uttarakhand’s galgal lemons and more.

This restaurant made it to TIME’s World’s Greatest Places 2024, with a shot of their Makki Point Tujj. Because the restaurant is far from any city and offers a tasting menu rather than a typical menu, priced at roughly ₹6,900, reservations are essential and are usually made well in advance, often alongside a stay at the adjoining Amaya property. It is, in effect, destination dining built entirely around one under-represented regional cuisine, a fitting Independence Day reminder that some of India's most exciting food is found far from its metro restaurant districts.

4. Gitika Saikia, Gitika's Pakghor, Mumbai

Come closer to home and meet Gitika Saikia, a home chef—not a restaurant owner in the traditional sense—and that is what makes her work significant. Since 2014, she has run Gitika's Pakghor out of Mumbai, cooking Assamese tribal and mainland dishes from sojina paat maas'or khar (moringa-leaf fish curry), borali maas'or phisa patla jool (catfish in tomato-potato gravy) and chutney main dei (fermented bitter-gourd chutneys), using ingredients sourced directly from Assam. 

She is a force to be reckoned with, bringing Assamese cuisine to the fore to a city audience unfamiliar with it, at a time when regional North-Eastern food had little visibility in India's mainstream food conversation. Because Gitika's Pakghor operates as a pop-up and home-delivery kitchen rather than a fixed storefront, it is advisable to place orders and make reservations in advance through her social media pages for scheduled pop-ups and deliveries.

5. Hari Nayak, JHOL, Alchemy And Beyond

A Culinary Institute of America graduate, Hari Nayak is originally from the coastal town of Udupi and has spent much of his career building restaurants that showcase coastal Indian cooking to international audiences. JHOL, his restaurant in Bangkok's Sukhumvit district and Kuala Lumpur's Mont Kiara, draws specifically on the Konkan, Malabar, Chettinad and Bay of Bengal coastlines.

In Bengaluru, his rooftop restaurant Alchemy at The Chancery Pavilion applies the same lens to progressive Indian cooking, while Baraabaru, inside a Maldives resort, brings homestyle Indian dishes to a lagoon-top dining room named one of CNN Travel's finest tables in the Maldives in 2022. Given their fine-dining format, it is recommended that you make reservations through the resort itself.

6. Radhika Khandelwal, Fig & Maple (Now Trouble Trouble), Delhi And Goa

Delhi's Fig & Maple in Greater Kailash-II was launched by Chef Radhika Khandelwal in 2016, building the restaurant's entire identity around indigenous and foraged Indian ingredients. There’s black chakhao rice from Manipur, bok phool from West Bengal, and seasonal wild greens like the takla found around Sawantwadi in the Konkan region. 

Her sourcing business model works directly with farmers across India to bring rare regional produce onto a Delhi menu, and she has extended the same concept to a Goa outpost of Fig & Maple. After nearly nine years, the Delhi property was reworked into Trouble Trouble, a new restaurant that retains Khandelwal's focus on sustainability, seasonality and ingredient-led cooking. For an Independence Day feature, her work offers a look at the lesser-known ingredients and food traditions that make India's regional cuisine so diverse.

7. Ankur Chakraborty, The Crossing, LemonButter Group

Chef Ankur Chakraborty trained under Atul Kochhar before going on to build his own regional Indian food ventures across the Middle East and Europe. He co-founded LemonButter, the hospitality group behind The Crossing, an Indian bistro concept that launched in Dubai before expanding to Paris, Nice and Leeds, alongside the Streetery food hall. 

The Crossing's menus are built around GI-tagged Indian ingredients and family recipes gathered from across India's regions, an approach Chakraborty has described as bringing the country's lesser-known regional flavours to the forefront. The restaurant's Dubai menu, for instance, includes hand-foraged Kashmiri morels in its gucchi pulao alongside dishes such as Kalimpong dumplings.

How These Regional Indian Food Ventures Compare

Unity in Diversity With These Independence Day Food Pioneers

None of these ventures and their chefs describes themselves as simply ‘Indian restaurants’. Each one picks a specific region, community or ingredient story from the Himalayas, the north-east, the Konkan coast, indigenous produce, GI-tagged specialities, and builds a menu, and often an entire business, around it. This is the perfect reminder of what India stands for, this Independence Day: instead of treating India's food as a single national cuisine, these chefs treat it as dozens of regional cuisines that happen to share a flag.