69 Best Restaurants in Mumbai, India

With its whitewashed walls and bright blue decorative highlights, Parsi Dairy Farm is eminently Instagramable and influencer-friendly, but you should go for its creamy kulfis, its candy floss–esque sutarfeni, and its adorable milk mithai, fashioned into the shape of fish. It’s also more than a century old, and run by four generations of the same family—in short, it’s a Mumbai icon.

This unpretentious restaurant in Bandra Reclamation—a scenic, walkable section of Bandra—has a classic nouvelle cuisine menu and a simple rooftop terrace. It gets crowded on weekends, so be sure to make a reservation, preferably for the terrace, where the cover of giant palm trees somehow blocks out the cacophony from noisy Chapel Road below.

India's French influence might be strongest in sunny Pondicherry, on the east coast, but with two Frenchmen at the helm, this tiny crepe joint can provide a taste of it right here in Mumbai (branches have blossomed across Mumbai, including in Bandra and Powai). Try the Méditerranée, with grilled chicken, olive tapenade, mozzarella, and tomatoes, or the Italie, with arugula, a tomato coulis, mozzarella, and oregano, or build your own crepe from an extensive list of ingredients.

Popular with rich Mumbai housewives—who pack the place for lunch during the week—this Italian restaurant helmed by Chef Ritu Dalmia serves gourmet food in a relaxed, tasteful setting. On the top-floor veranda of Good Earth (a designer furniture store), the Tasting Room shares its hosts' penchant for subtle Indian minimalism in bright jewel tones.

This restaurant inside the local Taj is as good a place to sample the distinct flavor of Indo-Chinese—which blends powerful Indian spices and delicate Chinese preparation—as you're likely to find outside of Mumbai proper. The menu features an excellent array of teas (try the Darjeeling) and cocktails (the sweet but subtle mojito is especially nice), and unlike most of the rest of the pack in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, the atmosphere here is quiet and refined.

Although most of the items on Trishna's seafood menu are of respectable quality, you'd be remiss not to order the much-vaunted butter garlic crab---even if that was all this legendary Kala Ghoda restaurant served, it'd be full year-round. The succulent crab is available in myriad treatments—with Indian and Western spices, green hariyali masala, black (spicier) Hyderabadi masala—and Trishna maintains the quality that's made it a favorite with tourists for more than 30 years.

Granted, Mumbai is not exactly known for its carbonara, so the bar isn't set too high, but Vetro could stack up against Italian food in any moderately sized American city. And if you're in the mood for a break from spicy food, this minimalist chic restaurant is perfect, with its wide variety of salads, pastas, and antipasti.

On the second floor of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel and styled after an upscale but fairly authentic Japanese sushi joint, the wildly expensive Wasabi offers great service, a nice view toward the Gateway of India, and—we cannot emphasize this enough—great sushi. If you've got the cash, try one of the omakase menus (6 to 12 courses), which will take you through the best dishes, from whitefish carpaccio to rock-shrimp tempura to salmon nigiri, depending on what's freshest at the moment.

Opened in 2010, Ziya quickly shot to the very forefront of Indian cuisine, and although other modern Indian restaurants have taken its place at the top of the heap, it still serves really tasty food. Here, traditional Indian flavors receive nouvelle cuisine treatment from chef Vineet Bhatia, the first Indian chef to win Michelin stars.