#blahvsfood: Palaash at Tipai, by Chef Amninder Sandhu, is one of the greatest restaurant experiences of my life.

 

The reason why Naar is my favourite restaurant in India is because it goes beyond food. The whole experience of Naar is something that is incomparable… the location, the magic of nature, the service, the connection to community, the food and drink… everything comes together to make one of the world’s great dining experiences.

I’m not ready to move on from my favourite. But I have to admit that I’ve found a restaurant that’s right up there in the conversation, that is the kind of complete dining experience that is worth taking a flight for, that people from across the world will come for and remember their entire lives. 

Palaash at Tipai, nestled in the wilderness of Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary, is the greatest Indian restaurant that you’ve never been to. It is Chef Amninder Singh’s masterpiece, a reminder that behind the fame and celebrity and the inspiring entrepreneur, she is first and foremost one of India’s greatest chefs.

Cooking only with fire, in the middle of the jungle, working with local women rather than trained chefs, and using largely local ingredients, she is pushing the boundaries of fine dining, of how and where a restaurant is supposed to exist and operate. 

The location is magical, surrounded by actual jungle, not just a lot of greenery. You are transported to the restaurant in a buggy and that’s essential because you can literally see wildlife around you like the family of wild boar digging for roots I spotted at dinner. Not too far from the restaurant is a little pathway that was visited by a tiger for a week a year ago. There is something exhilarating about eating at a restaurant this beautiful in this sort of an environment, a thrilling sense of being truly in the wild. 

But for all the wonder of the location, it still ultimately comes down to the food so let’s talk about that! 

The food is anchored in Maharashtrian food and Vidharbha ingredients. Chef Amninder takes these ingredients and uses traditional techniques to create contemporary, creative dishes and a menu that is completely original and unique. 

It starts with the Nagpur orange sphere amuse bouche. It is the first time in two years that I’ve tasted a sphere that actually had a point. The fresh sweetness of the local orange bursting in my mouth reminded me of joyful childhood summer afternoons eating local oranges under blue Shillong skies. 

The first course was crisp fried Ambadi leaf, almost tempura like in how it was cooked. Served with a pineapple ice cream and dahi, where the pineapple was slow cooked overnight, this was a highly sophisticated and technical take on chaat, using local ingredients, playing with textures and creating something completely unique. 

There is an elevated Dabeli, with pomegranate and masala peanut, ash charred Potatoes and Ber jam, with an incredibly light and flavourful charred potato and peanut butter made at the resort. 

The raan for the next course is cooked in an underground pit and served taco style on a jowar bhakri with marrow and lal thecha. This was one of the best tacos I’ve ever had. The slow cooked raan was tender and juicy with the fattiness of the marrow, but like a guajillo in a classic taco, the heat of the thecha cut through the fat and gave it a zing. But what really impressed me was the restraint with the smokiness despite the raan being slow cooked in a fire pit. There was a humility to the jowar that reminded me that while tacos became popular in India via American urban culture, at its heart it is a dish eaten by regular people in Mexico.. farmers and workers and peasants and not just by suburbanites in cool taquerias in Los Angeles or El Paso. 

The star dish was the Seafood Poti Party, something I had never tried in thirteen years of living in Maharashtra. Nagpur Black Crab and Tiger Prawns stuffed in an earthen pot with  Gutti Aloo and Quail Eggs with some chilli butter, covered with Bhamrooda leaves and cooked upside down on a bed of burning coal. I didn’t know that Nagpur had crabs and prawns like this, that river crustaceans grew to this size and had so much flavour. The baby potatoes took me home to my childhood in the North East and were a nod to Chef Amninder’s roots growing up in Jorhat. This dish was pure soul food, better than the best seafood boil, a smoky, earthy seafood and vegetable dish that was both transportive and transcendent. 

Of course there had to be a saoji dish but in the absence of refined oil, Chef Amninder chose to make a dry saoji bater instead of mutton, cooked with liver pate and wild mushrooom glaze and served with lambi roti. The choice of meat was inspired because the gameyness of the quail really accentuated the robustness of the flavours, allowing for the earthiness of a great saoji masala to find expression. The liver added layers of depth and complexity that elevated it from a traditional saoji masala dish, and the Lambi roti was crisp and light, making the absence of oil a virtue rather than an impediment. 

After a gendaphool gola sorbet course, we moved on to a bamboo smoked pork that was a wonderful way to showcase Chef Amninder’s north eastern roots in a local context. The flavour of the pork was clearly Naga in its inspiration. But a classic Naga pork and bamboo shoot with rice was transformed by the choice of indrayani rice, the use of vidharba vegetables and haldi patta rooted it in local terrior, and the dish was served with chiccaron, which felt like a bridge to global cuisine, a reminder that mastery of Indian cuisine is a conscious choice made by the chef, the result of conviction and philosophy, and not a by product of familiarity. 

At this stage I was stuffed and satiated but I still found space for some Mahua kala jamun with hand-churned Pistachio ice cream and the petit fours. 

I look at great restaurants through four lenses. Flavour. Originality. Experience. And significance. Let me end by talking about the fourth. 

At Tipai, a major focus of Chef Amninder’s work has been community empowerment through food. The kitchen is entirely staffed by local women who she has trained in culinary arts so their traditional wisdom becomes a valued  skillset. This impacts the community and its women in ways that go deeper than just work, building confidence and economic independence, while respecting their sense of identity by providing work rooted in local technique and ingredients, rather than the physical and psychological dislocation of most modern employment. This ensures that the success of Palaash and all the restaurants at Tipai benefit the land and people who have lived there for generations, not just the owners of the resort. This is impact and engagement rather than extraction, the power of food to be an agent for sustainable change. 

For all these reasons (and more), I believe that Palaash deserves to be a must-visit global culinary destination for anyone who really seeks to experience the full impact and potential of a great restaurant. I don’t expect the restaurant to make the typical awards lists like Conde Nast or 50 Best. The way those awards are structured, it’s really about gaming a process and a mathematical formula. Get a sense of who the jurors are and get enough of them to come and eat at your restaurant for free and vote for you. That’s never going to happen to a limited seating restaurant in the heart of the jungle three hours from Nagpur.

But sometimes, it’s not about the numbers and rankings. Sometimes you achieve greatness by just being great, and eventually the world will recognise it, acknowledge it and celebrate it.

That is Palaash’s destiny. Take a bow Chef Amninder Sandhu. You have created something miraculous and magical, and you’re changing people’s lives … and that’s better than any ranking on any list.