#blahvsfood goes to Naar… the greatest restaurant India has ever seen

Naar isn’t just India’s best restaurant.

It is the best restaurant that India has ever seen.

And in its first few months, it is already one of the thirty best restaurants in the world. 

I’m not going to try and do a review of the food at Naar. It’s not much point sharing details of the dishes and what I liked about them because by the time you visit, the menu and the food will be transformed and not a single dish will remain. 

What’s more relevant and interesting is to examine how Naar marks an evolution in Prateek Sadhu’s journey as a chef, and how it differs from his stint at Masque.  

I was the first person in India to write about Prateek as India’s greatest chef. This Naar version is the fourth iteration of Prateek since Masque opened. There was the initial ingredient focused, farm to table version which was good but not special. Then the shift to food inspired by his childhood memories of Kashmir and Ladakh, which was the single most important  moment in India’s food journey in the 21st century, the step that really elevated Prateek above every other chef in the country. Version three saw him start exploring pan Indian ingredients and start having a big more fun with his creative ideas.

Naar is version four of Prateek Sadhu.

I don’t call this ingredient driven food which is  default expression when writing about this kind of food. Yes the ingredients are the highlight of every dish but that’s not the focal point. Nor is it a particular technique or approach to cooking. 

If I had to describe the food at Naar at all, I would describe it as “inspiration” based food.

The broad, geographical inspiration is the Himalayas. But this isn’t an attempt to showcase or reimagine specific Himalayan cuisines or dishes. It also doesn’t focus on specific ingredients or insist that the food must have canonical Himalayan ingredients like juniper or nettle or sea buckthorn as a bedrock rule.

Instead Prateek takes the Himalayas as inspiration in the truest sense. He takes the history and culture, the space and its beauty, the terrain and terroir, the food habits and agricultural practices, the products and produce in marketplaces, the seasonality and the nature, and uses it all to cook food that seems freer and looser than anything that he has ever done. Yes it’s fine dining. But there is a certain “fuck you-ness” and irreverence to it, a sense of not needing to prove anything to anyone, which means that this is food that is more surprising and creative and impossible to pigeonhole than anything Prateek has ever done.

Whether at Masque or any other great fine dining restaurant, the cooking always serves a larger goal, a goal that has the customer at the heart of it. The act of creating a tasting menu is an act of creative tension, between what the customer expects/wants/demands and what the chef seeks to imagine and create. It is a dynamic that is inescapable and the source of greatness when done right.

But strangely at Naar, it feels like the customer doesn’t matter. Like Prateek just wants to have fun. Like he wants to be inspired every day. Cook the food that makes him and his team happy. Not bother with any rules or expectations. Just follow his creative muse with complete and utter conviction, approaching the Himalayas with a sense of wonder and curiosity, and with the certainty that his process of discovery will lead to food that is joyful and imaginative and spectacular. 

Whether it’s the little cottage where you start and end the night with starters and drinks and desserts or the actual meal itself, this isn’t just a restaurant. It’s a transportive experience. It is a place of conversation and creating memories, a place to be inspired by nature and be inspired by Prateek and his courage and creativity. This is Faviken beauty meets Den attitude up in the Himalayas to create a completely new thing that the world has never seen before. 

I don’t think the word brilliance does justice to Prateek anymore. What he is doing isn’t brilliant. It’s pure genius. I think the only other time I have been this blown away by a new restaurant is at Atomix (and maybe Disfrutar). If this isn’t seen as one of the world’s top 10 restaurants within the next decade, the reason will be its remoteness and because not enough judges and writers will have eaten in it. It will certainly not be because of the food and experience of Naar because that is irrefutably, unarguably as good as anything in the world. 

So if you claim to be someone who travels for food, cancel your Singapore and Dubai and London and Bangkok tickets. Fly to Chandigarh instead. And drive up to Naar. Because something extraordinary is happening up in the mountains. And you really really can’t claim to be a serious food person without visiting the greatest restaurant India has ever seen. 

I ate:

• Sha Phaley: Potato starch, cauliflower 
• Askalu: Yak cheese, sesame lun
• 
  
  Fehrigaad: Smoked carp, trout roe
• Sharjen: Salted lamb, bichubutti leaf
• Life of an apple: Aged apple, smoked apple, walnut milk 
• Trout flight: Patande, apple peel butter, cured trout / Poached trout, Green garlic chutney / Trout bone shots 
• Chutagi: Fire cooked tomato / cheese fondue 
• Sheermal: With pickles, chutney and butter, spiced pork 
• Naangphani: Everything cactus in a few bites 
• Shabdeg: Lamb neck, mushkbudij, chutney 
• Seabuckthorn: Timru cream, crushed black pepper 
• 
  
  Himalayan cheese: Jams, honey, pine honey 
• Pine: Everything pine 
• Coffee and a selection of small sweets