A durbar hall on Rama Park Road

West Delhi has never been short of vegetarian restaurants. What it was short of — and this is the thing that started the argument that became this restaurant — was vegetarian restaurants that behaved like serious ones.

The pattern was familiar. A good non-vegetarian kitchen makes its stock daily, builds gravies from scratch, keeps a chef on the pass tasting everything. A lot of vegetarian kitchens in the neighbourhood were buying in a base gravy, colouring it three ways, and calling the results shahi paneer, kadhai paneer and paneer butter masala.

You can taste it. Anyone can taste it. So the founding decision was simply that we would not do that — and that we would still price the thali at a number people around here would actually pay.

Why the menu is so wide

Nine sections is a lot for one kitchen, and food writers occasionally tell us so. The reason is that this is a neighbourhood restaurant, not a destination one. A family of five walks in and wants a thali, a dosa, a chilli paneer and two pizzas, and if we cannot serve all of that they go somewhere that can.

What makes it workable is that the sections are genuinely separate stations with their own chefs — one runs the tandoor and the dosa griddle, the wok section is its own person, and nobody is asked to cover two at once during service.

The room

The fit-out is deliberately theatrical: carved arches, brass sconces, deep maroon and gold. That is not nostalgia for its own sake. A vegetarian restaurant in West Delhi is where a lot of families have their anniversaries and their engagements, because for many of them there is nowhere else. Those evenings deserve a room that rises to them.

In 2026 we closed the mezzanine for six weeks and rebuilt it around six arched alcoves. It cost us twelve covers. You can see the before and after, and it was worth every one of them.