Aditi Dugar

The maverick restaurateur reflects to Shirin Mehta about curating menus, foraging for ingredients, seasonality, sustainability and zero waste. All at that restaurant, Masque.

- Shirin Mehta

With the light seeping only through the high atrium ceiling in the late afternoon, with the clatter of crockery, cutlery and diners silenced, the beautifully appointed interiors of Masque, the daring Mumbai restaurant that has been making news over the past two years, seem to withdraw darkly into the cavernous mill building that the eatery has been culled from. Devoid of artful lighting and comforting air conditioning, the rawness of the space becomes apparent. Masque owner Aditi Dugar bustles in. She is young, and looks younger in her black fitted jeans and loose grey T-shirt. But her grit becomes apparent soon enough when, after over an hour of discussion, we somehow manage to lose the recording of the entire session. “Oh no!” she exclaims and immediately digs in to start all over again. The deed is soon done, or re-done, with the same amount of passion for her project that she had shown the first time around. (Masque chef and co-owner Prateek Sadhu, on the other hand, quickly runs into the kitchen emerging with a bowl of steaming haleem (meat and lentil stew) that he places before me, ‘to cheer me up’, which it certainly does.)

A day earlier, Dugar had energetically traipsed up Bhandarwada Hill in Mazgaon to reach Joseph Baptista Gardens while I had straggled behind huffing and puffing. With full make-up on, in the torturous afternoon heat, she pivoted, turned and posed for cameraman, Sushant Chhabria, in crayon-blue oversized outerwear while make-up artist Riviera Vaz wiped the sweat pouring off her face. “I had fun!” she exclaimed, at the shoot’s end, striding back down the hill, energetic and strong.