Chef Prateek Sadhu’s Naar enters Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list, puts Kasauli on culinary map

In 2022, when he walked away from Masque, the Mumbai restaurant he had co-founded in 2016 with Aditi Dugar and built into one of India’s most celebrated dining addresses, the industry saw it as an unexpected loss. But Sadhu stepped away to build something different.
Naar — the word means fire in Kashmiri — opened in November 2023 on the grounds of Amaya, a sustainable retreat in Darwa, a village outside Kasauli in Himachal Pradesh. It has no storefront, requires a flight to Chandigarh and then a two-and-a-half-hour drive.

When Sadhu first saw the site, it was a small shed on a hill. He and Deepak Gupta, Amaya’s founder and now his partner, stood there together, half-joking. “Deepak was like, ‘Who will come here to dine?’” The question wasn’t rhetorical. It was the same one the industry had been asking for years. Sadhu was prepared to be the answer, and to fail at it. “We were mentally ready that it might not work. But we did it with honesty. We were confident about the product. What we weren’t confident about was whether people would travel.” They did, and how.

Today, guests book months in advance, flying in from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. They arrange taxis and accommodation, arriving with the intention of spending four to five hours at the table. So established is Naar’s reputation that at the Chandigarh airport, mention Darwa and the response is immediate: “Aapko Naar jaana hai?”

Interiors of Naar (Photo: Naar)

Sadhu, a Kashmiri Pandit, grew up displaced — a word he uses without self-pity. His family had a home, a garden. Then they were in refugee camps before making Delhi their home. Food became the thread that held memory together.

His mother insisted they speak Kashmiri at home and cooked Kashmiri food, always. “Food meant a lot in our house. There were constant conversations about why we dried vegetables, why we ate dried fish, why certain dishes existed,” he says, explaining that in Kashmir, winters are harsh. “Vegetables were dried, potatoes stored underground, and the family ate nose-to-tail — liver, lungs, everything the animal offered. Today, people call it nose-to-tail cooking. For us, it was survival,” he says. That inheritance runs quietly through everything at Naar, where zero-waste philosophy is not a borrowed concept but a memory, retrieved and honoured.

However, Sadhu did not set out to become a chef. He was fascinated with planes and wanted to be a pilot. Hotel management was an accidental choice. What followed was not. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America, graduating with double gold medals, a milestone his father mortgaged the family home to support. Stints at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry and Per Se, Alinea, and finally Noma, under chef René Redzepi, followed. “Noma changed the perception of Copenhagen and Denmark. That’s when I started wishing someone would do the same for Indian food.”

When he returned to India in 2013, he began travelling, not as a tourist but as someone trying to understand a cuisine he barely knew. “For me, Indian food was just Kashmiri.” So he travelled across Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Assam and Shillong, among other regions. He sat in home kitchens, talked to older generations and ate things that didn’t have restaurant names. Foraging, which he would later become known for, began as professional curiosity. “In Europe and America, chefs forage a lot. Later, I realised that for many communities here it’s not ‘cool’, it’s a necessity,” he says, when we meet him at Naar in March, “People still depend on forests. You see how closely their lives are tied to climate.”

Naar in Kasauli (Photo: Naar)

At Naar, the architecture draws from mountain vernacular — not a single large structure but smaller units, the way a traditional Kashmiri household is organised. There is a salon, an outhouse and a main house. The experience begins in the salon, where head bartender Dixit Kaundal works with tinctures made from kitchen discards. A drink like Scrap Splash uses fruit peels, leftover green tea, oxidised wine, fallen apples and mango leaves, reworked with gin or vodka. Small bites accompany it. A warm, spiced Tichoni broth, root vegetables slow-cooked into a savoury liquid. A skewer course inspired by Maki point in Kashmir — lamb with mustard oil and onion juice or Solan mushrooms glazed with onion chutney. Stinging nettle, or bichubutti, paired with smoked duck or bottle gourd. An Askalu-inspired bite arrives as a donut, made from tapioca and isomalt with a filling of smoked yak cheese, pickled chilli and orange marmalade. It is prepared outdoors on a custom-built circular wood-fire grill.

From the salon, guests move to the dining room — the largest space, by deliberate design. The logic, Sadhu explains, comes from the mountain home: the kitchen is where people gather, where the fire is, where conversation happens. Even the dishwashing station reflects that philosophy. Rather than being tucked away in the dingiest corner, as it is in most professional kitchens, it faces the mountains. “The best view in the restaurant is for the dishwasher,” he says.

The meal that follows moves through the Himalayan belt, not a single cuisine but a geography, spanning Jammu and Kashmir to the Northeast, following the six seasons of the mountains. Nearly 80 per cent of the produce comes from Naar’s two farms nearby. The multiple course tasting menu is priced at Rs 7,000 plus taxes per person. They serve lunch and dinner on all days except Mondays.

A winter carrot dish opens the meal. A dirty toast made from Bansi wheat sourdough — “best eaten with your hands,” says executive chef Kamlesh Negi — arrives with grilled trout or glazed beetroot. Every course carries a story. “We talk to people, especially older generations. They have incredible stories about food and ingredients,” Sadhu says, as he serves a noodle dish tracing the journey of its arrival from Tibet into Uttarakhand. A winter salad references Nimbu Saan, made with gal-gal lemon, hemp seeds, mustard oil, and jaggery. A main of local Sobu rice is paired with stuffed Guchi mushrooms with Himalayan cheese for vegetarians, and a pork dish for non-vegetarians.

While the ingredients and stories are borrowed and inspired by tradition, the dishes are created from scratch and are visually and texturally distinct from the original dishes. “We are cooking in 2026,” Sadhu says, “We cannot cook exactly like people cooked in 1956.”

When asked what comes next, he says, “There’s something in the works but it’s not Naar, its soul belongs to the mountains.”