Trèsind Mayfair doesn’t try to make Indian food less Indian. Instead, it takes a very large country and works through it, region by region.
The Hanover Street restaurant comes from the Dubai team behind Trèsind Studio. Its eight-course tasting menu is built around the cooking of different parts of India, with chef Amit Bagyal drawing on the food he encountered while travelling around the country.
Their new lunch money is a heck of a journey for £42 for eight courses.
It starts in Rajasthan with ghewar, the honeycomb-like sweet, turned savoury and served as chaat with avocado, strawberry and pomelo, plus yogurt ice cream. It is an odd-sounding combination that makes rather more sense once you eat it.
Then north to Kashmir for a mushroom “chai”, made with a consommé of morels. It looks like tea and tastes intensely of mushrooms. From there the menu heads east for Bengali kosha mangsho, the dark, slow-cooked mutton curry, with a sweet pea kachuri, before travelling south to Kerala for an Alleppey fish curry cooked with coconut milk and raw mango.
There is a Khichdi of India, made with 20 spices, one from each state, and finished at the table with ghee. It is the sort of dish that could easily become a piece of theatre in search of an audience, but here the point is the flavour rather than the pouring ceremony.
Bagyal grew up in Rishikesh and travelled extensively around India as a young man, eating in roadside kitchens and picking up an understanding of how dramatically the cooking changes from one state to another. That experience gives the menu its strongest quality: it feels interested in regional Indian food rather than merely decorated with regional references.
Dessert takes payesh, the Bengali rice pudding, and removes the rice. In its place are pandan cream and sour milk ice cream. This sounds unnecessarily disruptive until you taste it.
The drinks follow the same geographical theme. Indian wines from Maharashtra appear alongside the food, while the cocktails include an Old Fashioned with banana and browned-butter ghee, a Martini finished with oyster-shell brine, and a non-alcoholic Gimlet with Gondhoraj lime, the aromatic Bengali citrus.
The food remains recognisable beneath all the fine-dining machinery. Ghewar is still ghewar. Kosha mangsho still tastes like kosha mangsho. The difference is that someone has decided to take them somewhere new.
13-14 Hanover Street, Mayfair, W1S 1YH
Opening hours
Mon – Thu / 12:00 – 14:30 Lunch, 17:30 – 21:30 Dinner
Fri – Sat / 12:00 – 14:30 Lunch, 17:30 – 21:45 Dinner