Avartana and the future of Indian taste

Anil Chadha, Managing Director of ITC Hotels Limited, told me, “Avartana is a labour of love — a celebration of southern India’s rich food heritage reimagined with modern artistry. Having charmed connoisseurs worldwide, it brings to the capital a refined expression of our passion to serve the best in hospitality. Bukhara, Dum Pukht, and Avartana together create ITC Maurya’s trinity of iconic dining experiences.”

In that one sentence lies the evolution of Indian gastronomy. The same group that gave us the robust romance of Bukhara and the stately serenity of Dum Pukht now finds its rhythm in the sensuous subtlety of the South. Avartana is not continuity — it is courage.

The meal unfolds like a raga in slow bloom. Anika, the thirteen-course overture, opens with grace — sago and yoghurt glazed in tamarind and dried berry, a love letter of tang and tenderness. Bela, the nine-course beauty, pirouettes through playful presentations — rasam reborn as vapour, plantain polished into perfume. Jiaa, the eleven-course journey, bends boundaries between chemistry and craft, where pepper becomes perfume and lentil becomes lace. Maya is a dreamscape of coastlines and nostalgia; Tara, the seafood odyssey, glimmers with moonlit brine and maritime melody. Each course is a verse in a culinary scripture — an edible sonnet to India’s diversity.

Every plate whispers: “Taste is our language, technique our translation.”

And then come the drinks — liquid companions, not footnotes. Avishka, the cocktail collection, travels through the southern peninsula like a caravan of culture. The Guntur Imli Highball fizzes with tamarind and tequila, a flirtation of tart and tender. The Coorg Coffee Espresso Martini feels like dusk in a cup — mezcal meets monsoon. The Madurai Mogra Julep is jasmine draped in gin, lemongrass, and memory — floral, flirty, faintly intoxicating. Each drink carries the scent of a story. They are not just cocktails — they are geography distilled, topography served tall.

The zero-proof menu, Kaleidoscope, sings just as vividly. The Cocofee tastes like dawn — coconut kissed with coffee. The Kokonum hums like a monsoon — kokum, citrus, and the cool breath of ginger ale. And the Piña Curry — pineapple and curry leaf — is mischief in a glass, where sweet meets sacred. These are not abstinent beverages; they are elixirs of restraint and reverence. Without them, the tasting menu would lose its rhythm.

This is the new India — where mocktails meditate, and cocktails converse.

And yet, even perfection can crave poetry. The lighting, though immaculate, sometimes forgets the need for hush. Food like this deserves intimacy, not interrogation. It deserves shadows that flirt, not bulbs that glare. A touch of amber, a sigh of candlelight, a little chiaroscuro — and the room would breathe like the cuisine does: sensual, soulful, slow. But even that wish feels like a whisper — for everything else here glows with grace.

Avartana proves that innovation can be institutional, that experimentation can be an ethic. (Source: Instagram/@itcmaurya)

ITC Hotels has done what few global groups dare — turned commerce into culture, business into beauty. Avartana’s interiors are not design; they are devotion. Brass, pastel wood, silver upholstery, coconut-shaped lamps — a dance of the tropical and the transcendent. The space feels like a southern dream refracted through Scandinavian light: quiet, modern, meditative.

Reflecting on its creation, Mr. Chadha shared, “Avartana was truly born of perseverance. In 2015, when I moved from Delhi to Chennai to lead the ITC Grand Chola, I was inspired by the South’s vast food heritage to recreate something new — rooted in tradition yet forward-looking. After hundreds of tastings, checks, and re-checks, Avartana emerged — a mosaic of flavours, modern yet mindful, echoing the region’s rich culinary repertoire.”

That perseverance defines both the restaurant and the renaissance it represents. It takes courage to respect your roots while reaching for the future. Every swirl of chutney foam, every tempered seed, every hushed drizzle of ghee tells the same story: India can evolve without erasing itself.

Sitting there, watching the chefs move like dancers behind glass, I’m taken back two decades — to New York, 2004. To Devi, where my partners Rakesh Agarwal and Hemant Mathur and I reimagined Indian fine dining with reverence and rebellion. We believed that Indian food could whisper its complexity through tasting menus, through storytelling. We earned the first Michelin star ever awarded to an Indian restaurant in North America — not by diluting spice but by distilling spirit.

Around us, kindred souls like Floyd Cardoz, Tamarind, Junoon — all of us, in our own ways, redefined the diaspora’s dialogue with Indian cuisine. And now, in another hemisphere, Vikas Khanna’s Bungalow continues that work — turning memory into movement, nostalgia into narrative. Together, we laid stepping stones across oceans.

Avartana, however, is the bridge home.

Two decades later, India perfects what we once imagined. ITC Hotels has done what policy, academia, and private enterprise seldom manage — built infrastructure for imagination. In Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, Colombo, and now Delhi, Avartana proves that innovation can be institutional, that experimentation can be an ethic.

This is not fusion. It is evolution — measured, meaningful, magnificent. The crunch of banana blossom meeting yoghurt foam. The tang of tamarind turning translucent. Pepper, once fiery, now fragrant as silk. Every plate is both poem and prism: layered, local, luminous.

This is India 2.0 — confident, contemporary, conscious. No longer trapped between nostalgia and novelty, but gliding through both. For too long, we’ve hidden behind the comfort of butter chicken and dal makhani, drowning brilliance in cream. Those dishes are beloved but borrowed, echoes of empire rather than expressions of essence. The real India — the one that thrives in our homes and hearts — is seasonal, sustainable, sensual. It celebrates lentils as luxuries, vegetables as verses, meat as memory.

We must build the new icons — dishes that delight without damage, that sustain both body and soil. The next butter chicken must not be heavy — it must be honest. The next dal must not be dull — it must be divine.

That is the promise Avartana makes. It reminds us that refinement need not mean restraint, that innovation can still feel intimate. It shows that flavour can be a philosophy, not just a function.

“Flavour is the new luxury. Restraint is the new abundance.”

As the evening deepens, the restaurant takes on the stillness of a shrine. Guests lean closer, their faces painted gold by saffron light. The chefs move with monk-like grace — quiet, reverent, devoted. I sip the last of my Trivandrum Tulsi Smash — gin, coconut water, basil, lemongrass, and galangal — and taste in it the entire Indian peninsula: sacred, medicinal, mischievous, alive.

The future of Indian taste is already here. It’s plated with poetry, poured with precision, and served with purpose. It lives in chefs who honour their grandmothers and understand gastronomy. It thrives in restaurants that turn sustainability into sensuality, technique into tenderness. It glows in corporations that invest in culinary art with courage and conscience.

When I step out into the Delhi night, the city smells of rain and roasted pepper. Somewhere, a young chef is reimagining rasam as a cloud, dosa as silk, sambar as scent. And I think — this is our renaissance.

Indian food no longer asks for validation. It offers revelation. With Avartana as its altar, ITC Hotels as its patron, and a generation of fearless cooks as its keepers, Indian cuisine has found not just its place at the global table — but its purpose.

The world will taste India anew — not through nostalgia, but through nuance. And it will be unforgettable.