A Cuisine Finds Its Voice

 MEMORY IS A tricky seasoning. Use too much and it overwhelms; use too little and the dish loses depth. Walking into Indian Accent—housed within the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, all Art Deco elegance and jazz-age glamour—I was acutely aware of my own culinary past. Not as nostalgia, but as navigation. What I tasted here was not a mirror of what once was, but a moment of arrival worth marking.

In 2004, at Devi, I cooked one of the earliest French-style degustation menus by an Indian chef in New York. It was anything but cautious. Bitter melon arrived unapologetically bitter. Jimikand was earthy and insistent. Banana blossom, jackfruit, tindora, gourds of every kind stood centre stage. We cooked venison, rabbit, pheasant, partridge—ingredients rarely granted Indian context then. The menu was bold because it needed to be. Not as bravado, but as belief.

The world at that time was still learning how to read Indian food beyond curry-house shorthand. The challenge was never dilution; it was legibility. And insistence.

For years after, modern Indian tasting menus—Indian Accent included—were part of a necessary global conversation. Techniques travelled. Ideas crossed borders. Some dishes mirrored what chefs abroad were exploring, then returned home gently reworked, thoughtfully Indianised. This wasn’t imitation; it was dialogue. And it changed the way Indian food was understood.

What makes Indian Accent today feel different is that the dialogue has ended. This menu is not conversing. It is declaring.

In the confident hands of Rijul Gulati, the Cluster executive chef who rose through the ranks of Indian Accent and now helms the Mumbai kitchen, the food has shed any residual need to explain itself. This is not a restaurant seeking approval from Paris or Copenhagen. This is Indian food speaking in its own register—clear, calibrated, and completely at ease with itself.

Sour is allowed to bite. Bitter is allowed to linger. Heat is layered, not tamed. Texture is playful without being precious. Ingredients arrive with memory intact—not as museum artefacts, not as metaphors, but as lived experience. This is food that trusts its own grammar.

What struck me most was restraint without reticence. These dishes do not shout, but they do not soften either. There is courage in letting mustard remain pungent, gourd remain vegetal, smoke remain smoky. This is not nostalgia plated as novelty; it is evolution with a spine.

There are echoes, inevitably. Any chef who has lived long enough at the stove hears them. A structure familiar from early degustation logic. A rhythm that recalls the global tasting canon. But echoes are not repetitions; they are lineage. Every cuisine grows by standing on shoulders—and then looking elsewhere.

What feels genuinely new is the absence of defensiveness. Indian Accent does not translate itself. It assumes intelligence. It trusts appetite. It cooks for pleasure, not permission.

The setting helps. The room—graceful, luminous, Art Deco in spirit—feels celebratory without being stiff, urbane without being intimidating. It allows the food to breathe, to glow, to arrive without fuss. Beauty here is not decoration; it is confidence made visible.

For someone who has lived through Indian food’s global adolescence—cooked its rebellions, witnessed its negotiations—this menu feels like maturity. Not rebellion. Not bravado. Just clarity.

Indian Accent in Mumbai is no longer translating India for the world.

It is speaking—fluently, confidently, deliciously—to itself. And the world, if it’s wise, will listen.