The 8 Most Exciting New Restaurants in India

The Condé Nast Traveller x District Top Restaurant Awards powered by Visa have been announced, celebrating the 50 best restaurants across India. Eligibility for the list required restaurants to have opened before January 1, 2026, which left some of the year's most exciting new openings just outside the window. This is where they get their due. This year's crop spans the country and refuses to sit still: a Hyderabad bar built around the idea of a village chaupal, a Delhi tasting menu nine years in the making from Gaggan Anand, and a Bengaluru dessert-only degustation born out of a sisters' supper club. There's a pizza workshop obsessed with fermentation science, a cocktail-and-tasting-menu hybrid that runs only on weekends, and a chef's long-awaited return to the city that made him. None of these restaurants qualified for this year's Top 50, but each is already shaping the way we eat and drink, and every one of them deserves an honourable mention. Here are the hottest new restaurants in India this year.

Kadamba, Hyderabad

Hyderabad's bars have been getting bigger for years, so restaurateur Vickas Passary built Kadamba to go the other way: a warm, intimate space in Hitech City modelled on the idea of a village chaupal, the community hub where everyone already knows your order. The room is anchored by a 30-foot omakase-style bar that puts guests and bartenders at eye level, and mixologist Sujan Shetty's menu runs on nostalgia with a technical edge, from an Aam-Chur with tequila and olives to a Bloody Mary rebuilt with black garlic and raspberry. Chef Jyoti Singh's food travels the country too, pulling from a 2019 backpacking trip through Bihar, Nagaland, Kerala and Assam into dishes like Chena Paturi and a donne mutton pulao. It's the kind of bar Hyderabad's maximalist nightlife hasn't made room for in a while– unpretentious, pan-Indian, and built for staying a while.

The Kowloon Tiger, Pune

The Kowloon Tiger comes from Ilvika Chandawarkar, second-generation restaurateur at Pune's Malaka Spice Hospitality Group, and her partner Prantik Haldar, previously bar head at The Bombay Canteen. The idea was born on a trip to Hong Kong and Kyoto, where a wrong turn led them to a neighbourhood bar that became their regular spot, and they wanted to build something with the same pull in Baner. The 35-seat room leans into an Asian-alley, speakeasy mood, with a lower-level omakase-style bar where the real energy sits. Rohan Mahabal's food runs through Hong Kong and Japan with a heavy hand for pork, including dandan noodles with a peanut base and a Sichuan-heavy pork sausage chili fry, while Haldar's cocktail list names each drink after a character, from the Earl Grey-and-melon Blue Lantern to the scotch and black sesame Black Myth.

Minibé, Bengaluru

Minibé started as a monthly supper club run out of sisters Jenny and Steffi Clinta's apartment, and is now a permanent, 20-seat spot in Indiranagar built around a nine-course dessert tasting menu. Chef Jenny trained through a diploma in Bengaluru, an internship at Restaurant Salicorne in Normandy, and a bootcamp under pastry chef Will Goldfarb in Bali, before shaping it all around memories of growing up in Minnie Bay on the Andaman Islands. The menu, called Sagarika, moves from savoury to sweet, opening with a Marina Bites course of pani puri made from puffed potato and a yellowfin tuna cutlet based on her mother's recipe, and building through a chicken shikampuri kebab and a Mont Blanc reworked with chickoo and cashew. It closes with a Petit Fours course that includes a Kolkata-style potato samosa and a crème caramel from the chefs' grandmother. It's rare to find a tasting menu built entirely around dessert, rarer still one this personal.

Nila, Bengaluru

Nila comes from chef Rahul Sharma, a graduate of the Oberoi group's STEP programme whose path runs through two stints with the opening team at Masque, an internship at noma, and a stretch leading the kitchen at Araku, where he met his eventual investor, Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal. Set in a remodelled bungalow in Cambridge Layout, the space leans Japanese-Scandinavian, with rounded archways and a one-wall open kitchen, and the 12-course tasting menu is built around the forests and tribal food traditions of India's northeast, particularly Nagaland. A Black Rice Momo arrives with a glutinous, nutty filling nothing like a usual momo, and a Tree Tomato Custard pairs a Nagaland tamarillo with a cheese broth laced with confit wild garlic. The menu changes every three months, and Sharma promises to keep digging into regions of the country that rarely make it onto a tasting menu at all.

rāga, New Delhi

rāga is Gaggan Anand's long-awaited Indian homecoming, run day-to-day in Janpath by chef Rydo Anton, his Jakarta-born right hand, since Anand himself splits his time between the Delhi kitchen, his Bangkok restaurant and a hotel project in Japan. The 22-dish menu runs nearly three hours and is deliberately less intense than Anand's Thailand flagship, with a page of house rules on phone use and smoke breaks handed out before the welcome drink. The highlights carry real weight. A tribute to the Bombay sandwich is a technical showpiece, a cup of chicken dashi with Japanese puffed rice and toasted tea tastes like something worth returning for on a rainy night, and the bhetki paturi builds from mustard to kaffir lime to green chilli in a single, restrained bite. It's vegetarian-forward, the bar is tucked out of sight, and at Rs11,111 a head before taxes, it is one of Delhi's most anticipated and most expensive new tables this year.

The Cavity, New Delhi

The Cavity is a nine-seat basement experience tucked beneath Barbet & Pals in GK II, where co-founders Jeet Rana and Chirag Pal pair cocktails built around India's GI-tagged, seasonal ingredients with food from chef Amninder Sandhu, running Fridays through Sundays only. The nine courses move between drink and dish, from a Sundarban honey mead with cotton candy to a Tooyamalli rice cocktail with clarified rasam, whiskey and rice foam, served alongside a Gunpowder Idli filled with pepper crab and caviar. Portions are deliberately small, capped at 240 milliliters of alcohol per person across the whole tasting, so the point is range rather than volume. The standout pairing is the Black Cardamom cocktail, smoky with single malt and mezcal, next to Sandhu's nihari reworked with compressed shank meat. It's a rare instance of a cocktail menu and tasting menu built as equals rather than one serving the other.

Yokocho, Kolkata

Yokocho is chef Auroni Mookerjee's return to Kolkata, two years after he left Sienna Calcutta, the restaurant he helped place at number five on this list in 2023. Tucked on Park Street behind a deliberately maze-like entrance, modelled on the back-alley izakayas of Tokyo, the restaurant runs on Mookerjee's bajaar-to-table instincts but stretches them across Asia, with a rotating bank of 25 to 30 banchan made entirely from local market produce, from pickled Malabar spinach seeds to dried shrimp. A Xiao Long Bao built on a slow-cooked chicken broth comes in a bowl handcrafted by Sienna Calcutta, and a pork belly char siu gets a topping of crunchy shrimp shutki in place of fish sauce. The drinks, developed with Pankaj Balachandran of Countertop, include a whisky highball made with water softened in clay pots over days. It's a quieter, more restrained version of a chef who built his name on going big, which might be exactly the point.

Pizza No Cap, Bengaluru

Pizza No Cap opened on Ulsoor Road in February this year, founded by chefs Rahul Singh and Vichita Kumar alongside Siddharth Nest, whose background in microbiology shapes how the team treats pizza dough, which is cold-fermented for up to 96 hours and adjusted for Bengaluru's climate and the seasons. The 40-seat space is built like an open workshop, with a handmade wood-fired brick oven and counter seating that lets diners watch the whole process, from dough to bake. Start with the Parma & Peru Pizzette, a mini pizza layered with Parma ham and guava jam that chef Vichita based on her own after-school snacking memories, mixing something familiar with something a little more expensive. The Kerala Flex is also worth trying. It's a young, still-evolving menu, but the obsession with getting the dough right is already the kind of thing worth building a reputation on.

A version of this story originally appeared in Condé Nast Traveller India.