It’s the short spring in Delhi – and the perfect time to head to Sunder Nursery. Here’s why.

Speaking of parks, few can match up to Sunder Nursery – and the Sunder Nursery-Humayun’s Tomb-Humayun’s Tomb Museum triad has set itself up nicely to welcome visitors.

Earlier this winter, chef Manish Mehrotra opened Nisaba, a high-end Indian restaurant, on the first floor of the Humayun’s Tomb Museum complex, soon after several other leading cafe-restaurants such as Perch, Cafe Dori Bistro, Meltado, and Cortasso Coffee opened their outlets on the ground floor.

“After 17 years of planning, it is now really a full-time destination. You can come here to look at the monuments, count 300 tree species, 150 bird species, attend cultural programmes, see a museum, and enjoy the living culture of Nizamuddin basti,” conservation architect Ratish Nanda, who is the Projects Director of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), said of the historical-cultural quarter spread over 250 acres.

The AKTC spearheads the Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Project, including the conservation of the three spaces in the quarter along with its more than 60 monuments, as well as the revitalisation of the Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti and the restoration of the Hazrat Nizamuddin Baoli.

The spaces in the quarter have hosted a vibrant roster of events for most of the winter – exhibitions, workshops, concerts, seminars, a children’s literature festival, and more.

On one recent afternoon, the Sunder Nursery-Nizamuddin complex hummed with visitors of various ages and social classes, each looking for their ideal pastime that suited their tastes and pockets.

Posing for a picture on a bench under a tamarind tree by the Garden Amphitheatre, a young woman spoke to her father on her mobile phone: “Papa, yahaan khana kitna mehnga hai,” people around her overheard her saying.

She went on to reassure her father that she had managed nonetheless to find an economical option – a vegetable puff, known as a “patty”, for Rs 60 at the Sunder Nursery food kiosk.

Indeed, the optics of high-end cafes and a restaurant by a top-tier chef like Mehrotra who is best known for his fine-dine space Indian Accent, at a public park and heritage site had for some time triggered concern about the quarter turning into a splashy eat street – distracting from the historical quarter’s core attractions, potentially disrupting the businesses of smaller eateries in the nursery and the neighbourhood, and turning the area into an even bigger traffic nightmare than it is already.

Those fears do not seem to have come to pass so far. The area retains its inclusivity, and the nominal ticket prices have been attracting large numbers of visitors. The museum has an average annual footfall of 2,60,000, Nanda said, adding that almost 80 per cent of those who visit the museum usually end up going to all three locations in the quarter.

Among those visiting Nizamuddin that recent afternoon was a mother who slowly read out to her son the writing on the plaque about Sundar Burj inside Sunder Nursery, her finger moving slowly along the words. Two brothers played catch next to the Lotus Pond, a couple of students walked along the Arc of Discovery talking about a paper on “existential isolation in students”. Tucked away in what they believed was a quiet corner, a romantic couple fed each other lunch.

A group of five women, friends and neighbours in South Delhi’s C R Park for 20 years, played Ludo in the shade of a chikrassy tree. They had brought their tea, coffee, and snacks, but said they might go to a cafe for lunch. “It’s great that they have added more cafes. It is good to have variety,” one of the women said.

There were also some solo visitors – among them a young woman who said she was 21, a student at Delhi University, and gave her name as Rituparna. She said she had come to the garden and the museum in the hope of tackling homesickness. “I have social anxiety,” she said. “But when I come here, I feel like I am with people even when I am alone.”

Nanda said people were spending “at least seven hours” at the nursery and museum. “Where else in Delhi do you get that?” The cafes, he said, “are about giving museum visitors a world-class experience and to generate the revenue to manage the museum”.

Like all museums, the Humayun’s Tomb Museum, home to a collection of more than 500 pieces built up over 10 years, costs a lot of money to run. The electricity bill alone is Rs 6 crore a year, Nanda said. “How do I generate the money if I don’t give out spaces for rent? No museum in the world breaks even. Usually, the Aga Khan Trust provides any shortfall in the revenue, but this year (2025-26) we hope to break even largely because of various measures, including a solar power plant to cut down electricity costs,” he said.

The old and new restaurants and cafes in the complex have been carefully curated by a committee chaired by the superintending archaeologist, and comprising chartered accountants and lawyers.

“We received around 100 applications, we shortlisted about 30, and we then held an auction, where the reserve price (for the cafes) was Rs 5 lakh. We are making 20 times more, and every penny is going into the making of the museum. All of this took us a year,” Nanda said.

According to Nanda, “We knew that we wanted an Indian restaurant, and also that we did not want any fast food restaurants,” and that the space has “something for everybody”. So there is the high-end Nisaba, but there is also the mid-range Carnatic Cafe, and the more economical Sunder Nursery food kiosk and Zaika-e-Nizamuddin run by the women of Nizamuddin Basti.

“The cafes have a completely different clientele. Those who have been having the coffee here, especially the morning walkers, continue to come here even after the cafes came up,” said Anil, who has been running the kiosk ever since Sunder Nursery opened in 2018.

Nanda said his team has done everything to also ensure sufficient parking space. There is an 80-vehicle lot, additional parking space for 400 vehicles along the length of the nursery, and about 300 m after the green space ends, another parking lot that can accommodate more than 300 vehicles.