Beyond the masque: Mumbai’s most emphatic restaurant story enters act II

Ten years after betting on tasting-menu-only dining in Mumbai, Masque has taken itself apart and put itself back together. Now, we get a darker room, a bolder menu and a restaurant that still has India as its starting point.

There are restaurants you revisit for nostalgia, and there are those that never stay still long enough to inspire it. So, when I walked back into Masque, expecting traces of the restaurant I had known, I instead found myself looking twice at almost everything, awkwardly grinning like a kid in a candy shop. The address in Mahalaxmi is unchanged. The ambition, however, seems to have developed a second wind.

UN-MASQUE-ING

Masque began in 2016 with an absurdly simple question: What does India taste like? It set about answering it through a tasting menu. This may have felt risky at the time, but given the ‘tasting menu wave’ that has enveloped so many restaurants of late, Masque’s foresight has paid dividends. Indeed, by carefully picking ingredients, layering sumptuous fare with fascinating origin stories, and letting the dining experience unfold like an epic, Masque cemented its place in the city’s culinary ecosystem early and has often pushed the envelope since.

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A decade later, the restaurant has undergone a thorough reworking. Coming back to my ‘unMasque-ing’, I noticed that the kitchen had suddenly become part of the theatre, visible behind a glass façade. So, the evening began with movement: chefs, plates, hands, repetitions. But the real pleasure was how, despite this intimacy, Masque did not give itself away immediately. There was a pause before the dining room; only then did the layers begin: a darker tone, marble, linen, wood and a carpet with an almost oldworld presence. The colours deepened as I moved through it, from warm amber and rust towards green.