The head of the table

Mumbai restaurants outshine their Delhi and Chennai outposts. No city can match its bombil and crab. India's restaurant capital has upped its game

- VIR SANGHVI

At ITC Maratha (above), Dum Pukht (left) and Avartana (right) are nearly in the same league as the OGs in Delhi and Chennai.

I don't think anyone seriously disputes that Mumbai is now the restaurant capital of India. Nowhere else in India will you find such great restaurants as Masque and Papa's doing as well as such high-quality but more relaxed places as O Pedro, Americano, The Table, Mizu Izakaya and Bandra Born.

Often, when I have to go out for dinner in Delhi, I struggle to think of places I want to go to. In Mumbai, the opposite is true: There are just too many good options.

Even the best Delhi restaurants now have wonderful Mumbai outposts. Rohit Khattar has brought his restaurants to the city, and the Mumbai versions of Indian Accent and Comorin are as good, if not better, than the Delhi originals.

It surprises me how restaurants that I think of as Delhi institutions manage to maintain their high standards outside of the capital.

Indian Accent is not the only example. I have been a fan of Dum Pukht from the time it opened in the late 1980s, but I rarely eat at its out-of-town versions on the grounds that there is no point in going to a branch when you have access to the original.

But Mumbai continues to astonish me. I went to the Mumbai Avartana only because my son wanted to try it and was startled to discover that it was in the same league as the Chennai original. Something similar happened last week when my wife and I took some relatives to the Mumbai Dum Pukht (which, like Avartana, is at the ITC Maratha). I always judge Dum Pukht-style restaurants on the basis of three dishes: Mutton biryani, kakori kabab and yellow dal (not the Bukhara black dal that everyone now copies.)