A decade of Masque, the Mumbai restaurant that changed how India eats out

“We weren’t trying to rewrite traditional Indian cooking, but rather celebrate our local ingredients and seasonal produce in a way that hadn’t really been done here before,” Dugar says. “We realised we didn’t need to look elsewhere. India’s produce, heritage, culture and traditions are infinitely vast and largely unexplored.”

At Masque Lab, seasonal ingredients are pickled, fermented and turned into sauces and bases so that they last beyond their growing season. The Lab also hosts cooks from outside the restaurant, including members of Mumbai’s Koli fishing community, Dugar’s mother, who prepared a Rajasthani meal, and Singaporean home cook Renjie Wong for a secret supper.

“Through all of it, whether we’re experimenting with flavour development or hosting a collaborative tasting, we stay true to the soul of Indian food because everything is rooted in local ingredients and spices,” she says.

Totlani joined Masque as a commis chef and took over the kitchen in 2022. Dugar says his voice was clear from his first menu as head chef, when he put grilled pork and corn chai on the table, along with vegetarian versions of both.

“Varun has always been fiercely big on flavours and a true master of the grill,” she says. “Even in his earliest iterations, that intensity came straight through. Honestly, it took the dining room by surprise!”

The current menu is entirely his. It still draws on research, but memory and instinct lead. It makes no attempt at a definitive portrait of Indian food, which a country this varied would not allow anyway. “You can’t call yourself Indian when you’re holding back, right?” Dugar says. “Indian food is all about flavour.”

The room has changed around him. For the anniversary, Atelier Ashiesh Shah rebuilt the dining room with the kitchen behind a full-height glass façade, so service happens in view. Guests walk in past an entrance lined in burl veneer, then into a room of linen-covered walls and marble floors in burnt amber, rust and deep green. The furnishings, artworks and materials are all Indian-made.

Dugar credits Mumbai for the nerve to try any of it. “It is a city that embraces people who are willing to dream a little differently,” she says. “The warmth of the local community gives us the courage to keep pushing boundaries.”

The next decade, she says, is not about reinventing Masque for the sake of change. It is about keeping the curiosity that got the restaurant started, looking after its relationships and letting its understanding of Indian food keep moving.

“Reaching this 10-year milestone feels deeply emotional,” she says. “Looking back at how far we’ve come, from those early empty tables to welcoming friends from all over the world for our anniversary, it’s just overwhelming gratitude.”

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