In 2015 The Bombay Canteen opened in Mumbai's Kamala Mills, designed by Ayaz and Zameer Basrai of The Busride Design Studio. The defining gesture was a three-foot-tall colonial-bungalow ruin standing next to art-deco metal, glass and steel. It crowned the Condé Nast Top Restaurant Awards at number one in 2018. Ten years on, every Indian restaurant designer is still working some version of that idea: the recovery of place, on a contemporary plan, in materials that are unmistakably from this country.
What has changed in the last twenty-four months is the number of distinct languages being built around that idea, and the number of named studios building them. This is a field guide to the ten that matter.
01 — Vernacular Modernism
Brick. Lime. Jaali. Vault.
The defining movement of 2024 in Indian restaurant design is the recovery of place. Architects building in vaulted brick, exposed concrete and load-bearing masonry that does not try to look international.
The touchstone is Telugu Medium in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad — Sona Reddy Studio, 5,200 sq ft, opened late 2023. Brick domes, vaults, exposed walls, a double-height skylit atrium with a small pool. ArchDaily, designboom, Dezeen and Architectural Record all ran covers on it in 2024. Its sister project Terrai in Hitech City, Hyderabad (Sona Reddy, 8,500 sq ft, 2024) extends the language with Telangana ikat patterns underfoot and terracotta hues.
Studio Lotus (Delhi; founded 2002 by Ambrish Arora, Ankur Choksi and Sidhartha Talwar) works in a related register — "Conscious Design," local resources, adaptive reuse — across hotels and restaurants nationally. The studio's signature is its refusal to look at any project as a styling exercise; every Studio Lotus interior reads as a deliberate structural argument about climate, craft and place.
02 — Brutalist & Industrial
Exposed concrete, raw plaster, warehouse bones.
The brewpub aesthetic that defined the 2018-2020 era — Toit Bangalore (early Busride work), BYG Brewski, Doolally Mumbai, Sociedade Goa — matured into a full fine-dining language by 2024.
The canonical case is Hunger Inc's Bombay Sweet Shop (Byculla, Mumbai — designed by Studio LAB / Language Architecture Body, founded by Shonan Purie Trehan). An old Byculla warehouse rebuilt with concession-stall motifs from 1950s Bombay cinemas, cast-in-situ terrazzo, hand-poured mosaic with katli flowers and honey bees, Bombay-Deco-era glass art and ceramic relief.
The genre's discipline: industrial structure, treated with craft. Concrete that has been hand-worked. Walls that look raw because the craftsmanship of the rawness is precise.
03 — Modern Indian Maximalism
Pattern-on-pattern, jewel tones, retro Bombay.
The Bombay Canteen template — colonial-bungalow ruin meets art-deco steel — set this off in 2015. The Busride Design Studio (Ayaz and Zameer Basrai) has now designed more than 100 restaurants, including Toit, Café Zoe, Taj Mahal Tea House and Le15 Café. Their 2024 work continues the maximalist register, but with sharper editing — fewer set pieces, more decisive moves.
Veronica's (Bandra, Mumbai — Hunger Inc, 2024) is the recent benchmark. Old Bandra and East Indian bakery-tile language: glazed tiles with floral motifs, hand-painted graffiti, set inside the historic St Jude's Bakery. Landed at #36 on Culinary Culture's Top 50 in 2024.
Papa's (12-seater chef's counter, Bandra — Shonan Purie Trehan / Studio LAB for Hunger Inc) is the intimate end of the movement: 1980s Bombay home meets art-deco memorabilia, under Wes-Anderson lighting. Twelve seats. Reservations gone in three minutes.
04 — Biophilic & Botanical
Plant-heavy, vertical gardens, green-on-green.
The trend that crossed from Goa beach café into metro fine dining. Hosa in Assagao, Goa — designed by Rohini Kapur of EHV International, 2022 — is still the reference. A 1901 Portuguese bungalow with a 14-foot central bar, antique church pews on the balconies, hand-laid contrasting floor tiles and "foliage in every corner."
In Mumbai, Ishaara, Pleo, Cafe Panama and Amazonia represent the biophilic spread north (per Curly Tales' 2024 round-up). Telugu Medium's atrium pool sits in this register too.
The discipline: plants as architecture, not decoration. The biophilic restaurant doesn't add greenery to a finished room. It builds the room around the plants from day one.
05 — Wabi-sabi Japanese minimalism
Restraint, raw materials, deliberate silence.
The Japanese-minimalism Mumbai sub-genre that has become recognisable in its own right.
Takumi (Santacruz, Mumbai — Sumessh Menon Associates) leads with bamboo and minimal light fixtures. Yazu (Sumessh Menon) extends the language with deeper drama. Wakai and Otoyaa run the cleaner end. Sumessh Menon Associates is in India's "Top 10 Hospitality Designers" lists; the studio's other restaurant work includes Foo Bandra, Juliette Ristorante Bar (4,000 sq ft, monochromatic) and 145 Bar & Kitchen.
The discipline is harder than it looks. Wabi-sabi requires architectural confidence — a single misplaced sconce destroys the language. The restaurants that succeed in this register are the ones that have refused to add the "one more decorative element" the brief invariably suggests.
06 — Speakeasy & 1920s revival
Burgundy, woodwork, velvet, chesterfield.
ZLB23 at The Leela Palace Bengaluru — Maia Design Studio (Shruti Jaipuria, Roshni Ramnane, Archana Mangalore), opened February 2023 — is the genre-defining room of the decade. Best Bar in India at Asia's 50 Best Bars 2024. Sole Indian entry in Asia's top 50 in that year.
The brief was "Kyoto speakeasy" but the dominant register is 1920s — burgundy red, heavy woodwork, velvet, chesterfield, custom embroidery, chandeliers, tassels — with Kyoto used as a single subtle wallpaper layer (samurai-and-geisha graphic). Entry is through the hotel's Zen kitchen via a service elevator marked "Z". The address (23) is literal.
Lair in Delhi — Renesa Architecture Design Interiors Studio (Sanchit and Sanjay Arora) — is the same family of work. Speakeasy rebooted through raw materiality and oriental undertones. Renesa's other restaurant work includes Elgin Cafe (Punjab — Udaipur-green granite throughout), The Geometrication (Delhi), V-Spot Café (Chandigarh) and Social With Distancing.
07 — Destination Dining — the hill-station register
Intimacy, soft glamour, the long drive.
NAAR in Kasauli, Himachal — Chef Prateek Sadhu's 16-seater inside the Amaya boutique resort, opened 2023 — is the new template for "go-to-it" restaurants outside metros.
Design language: hill-home intimacy. A Salon room for cocktails lit by a soft-glam chandelier and floor lamps. An 80s-curated playlist. Six seasonal menus tied to the rhythm of the Himalayas.
The genre also includes Bukhara at ITC Maurya as the long-running reference, and Avartana (ITC Grand Chola, Chennai) as the urban-hotel equivalent — chandelier-walled with carpets resembling banana leaves and wall motifs of Kerala boats. India's first South Indian fine-dining restaurant with an open kitchen.
08 — Coastal Goa-influenced metropolitan
Terrazzo, palms, archways, azulejos.
Hosa Goa is the design source. Antares, Hosa Mumbai (separate from the Goa property) and a growing number of metro openings in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi import the language wholesale: terrazzo, palms, archways, hand-laid Athangudi-style tiles, Portuguese azulejos, white-on-rattan furniture.
Bastian Bandra (designed by Minal Chopra of ineedspace, the long-time Bastian designer) takes the same coastal palette into 40-foot-ceiling drama, with cave-like sand-coloured walls.
The trend reads, increasingly, as the new Indian neo-luxury — a way to charge metro-level prices for an aesthetic the customer associates with vacation.
09 — Chef-as-curator / gallery-restaurant hybrids
The chef edits the playlist, the typography, the tiles.
Comorin (Horizon Centre, Gurgaon — Chef Manish Mehrotra; 130 seats; opened December 2018) reads as a community-dining hub with three sub-zones: cocktail bar, coffee bar, marketplace. Coral-hued walls, open glass kitchen, raisin-work tabletops, wave murals tying back to its Cape Comorin namesake.
Nisaba is Mehrotra's 2024 follow-up. Papa's is the more extreme version of the chef-as-curator format — 12 seats, reservations open at 11 AM on the first of every month, gone by 11:03.
The discipline: the chef is no longer the person who runs the kitchen. The chef is the person who designs the room, the menu, the music, the typography, the staff uniforms and the ambience. In 2024 this is no longer eccentric. It is the new baseline for any restaurant with serious editorial ambition.
10 — Indian crafts and typography revival
Channapatna, Athangudi, Kalamkari, custom letterforms.
Custom typography by Itu Chaudhuri Design (Delhi; founded 1997 by Itu Chaudhuri, ex-SPA architect) and a generation of younger Indian designers is showing up on menus, signage and packaging in ways that haven't been seen since the Bombay sign-painter era.
Channapatna toys, kalamkari prints, blue pottery, Athangudi tiles, artisan brass — these are now standard material specifications in the design brief. The Busride's Bombay Canteen menu graphics, Studio Lotus's interior signage, and Hunger Inc's hand-painted custom lettering across Veronica's, O Pedro and Bombay Sweet Shop are the most-cited examples.
The signal: Indian craft is no longer a touch on the side. It is being commissioned as the architectural finish — the floor, the table, the wall, the screen — and priced as such.
The studios that built this map
The names worth knowing for any operator commissioning a serious build in 2026:
| Studio | Based | Notable work |
|---|---|---|
| Studio Lotus | Delhi | Ambrish Arora, Ankur Choksi, Sidhartha Talwar — hotels and restaurants nationally |
| The Busride Design Studio | Mumbai | Ayaz & Zameer Basrai — 100+ restaurants incl. Bombay Canteen, Toit, Le15, Taj Mahal Tea House |
| Renesa Architecture Design Interiors Studio | Delhi | Sanjay & Sanchit Arora — Lair, Elgin Cafe, Geometrication |
| Sona Reddy Studio | Hyderabad | Telugu Medium, Terrai |
| Studio LAB / Language Architecture Body | Mumbai | Shonan Purie Trehan — Bombay Sweet Shop, Papa's |
| Maia Design Studio | Bengaluru | Shruti Jaipuria, Roshni Ramnane, Archana Mangalore — ZLB23, Toast & Tonic Mumbai |
| Sumessh Menon Associates | Mumbai | Takumi, Yazu, Foo Bandra, Juliette, 145 |
| EHV International | Goa | Rohini Kapur — Hosa Goa |
| ineedspace | Mumbai | Minal Chopra — Bastian group |
What this means if you are building
Three reads from the map for any operator commissioning a restaurant in 2026:
- The country has enough good studios that you can — and should — match the studio to the cuisine, not pick the first available name. Bombay Sweet Shop has Studio LAB because Studio LAB does maximal Indian. Telugu Medium has Sona Reddy because Sona Reddy does vernacular brick. ZLB23 has Maia because Maia does narrative-led drama.
- The single biggest design move you can make is to commission a Studio for the typography, signage and graphic identity from the same brief. The interior reads correctly only when the menu, the staff cards, the signage and the exterior carry the same hand. Hunger Inc is the only Indian restaurant group that has this discipline across five brands — and it is why their packaging looks like a brand and yours looks like a vendor.
- Restraint reads as confidence. The restaurants and bars that have moved the editorial conversation in 2024-25 — ZLB23, Papa's, Naar, Avartana, Bare Bombay — share a refusal to add the one more thing the brief invariably suggests. The Indian restaurant of 2026 isn't built. It is curated — by a chef or owner who edits the playlist, the typography, the tiles and the menu in the same gesture.
The 2025 cohort of new openings already shows this. The 2026 cohort will be the year it becomes the country's standard. And the operators who get this right will be on the cover of every list that comes next.
Kaam Hire is the hospitality-only hiring platform behind this blog.
Sources & references 8
Kaam Hire is the hospitality-only hiring platform that powers this blog. If hiring is on your mind — try it.