8 Best Restaurants in Mumbai, India

In spite of wincing prices, teatime at Taj Mahal hotel's Sea Lounge is an iconic Mumbai icon meal and a hop, skip, and jump from Colaba Causeway. For your money, you get a blithe gentleman or lady plunking away sprightly, old-fashioned airs on a piano, an unparalleled view of the Gateway of India, five-star service, and a pageant of teatime treats---think demure cucumber sandwiches, scones crowned with jam and clotted cream, along with a retinue of pastry. Or you could choose to go further afield with Sea Lounge's extended high tea, which includes a bacchanal of Indian, Western, and South East Asian dishes. 

This is the Mumbai outpost of Delhi’s award-winning Indian Accent, known for its contemporary twists to canonical Indian food. Chef Manish Malhotra refreshes the menu every season, offering vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, and meat-based tasting menus, as well as a special brunch menu and one for "family feasts." The food is as theatrical and fun as ever.

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.

At this Mumbai outpost of Dubai’s Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant, a mind-boggling variety of vegetables get a global interpretation while staying undergirded by Indian flavors. The restaurant channels vegetables such as avocado and baby corn, as well as more unassuming ingredients such as drumstick, sea buckthorn, and parsnip, into a 14-course degustation menu.

Though the name implies something quite different, this restaurant actually serves Pan-Asian food and attracts a mix of couples and families out for a special occasion. A bubbling pond with wooden statues greets customers to an interior decked out with understated Asian accoutrements—bamboos and various Asian scripts on the walls.

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.

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.