2 Best Restaurants in Central Mumbai, Mumbai

Indian food is often perceived to be a monolith of spicy curries and tandoori chicken, but for those looking to shatter these snap judgments, Bombay Canteen is the place to go. In a brilliant effort to champion the sort of ingredients that rarely make it into restaurant dishes, executive chef Hussain Shahzad and its late culinary director Floyd Cardoz (once chef of New York restaurant Bombay Bread Bar) have wended their way around the country, subsuming ingredients like rat tail radish and colocasia roots into a playful menu with a global edge.

Owner Aditi Dugar and chef Prateek Sadhu, alumni of the Culinary Institute of America and a rapidly rising star in the Indian culinary landscape, comb the country for intriguing indigenous ingredients and make them the heroes in prix-fixe progressive menus that change every fortnight. Chef Sadhu's stints at Alinea, Noma, Le Bernardin, and French Laundry may have been the seed for his degustation menus, but the bedrock of all his dishes is staunchly Indian, albeit in a clean, pared-down way.