Also read | I went for a 10-course Meghalayan feast in Bengaluru and ended up dining with royalty, discovering the culinary soul of the northeast I’ll be honest, I walked into Nila expecting to be impressed. I did not expect I’d be plucking edible flowers off a plant on my table. Bengaluru has no shortage of tasting menus, but Nila is on a different frequency.
The name Nila means moon in Tamil. During our post-service chat in a quiet corner outside the restaurant, chef Rahul explained that India has always run on a lunar calendar — festivals, harvests and seasons tethered to lunar cycles. Every three months, Nila changes its region. The moon is what connects them. That rhythm is everywhere. Scandinavian simplicity, soft curves, textured mud walls, muted tones, diffused lighting. Nothing loud. “The collaboration was built around a shared understanding. Not recipes. Ingredients. For this special service — a tasting that combined its first three menus — the dishes featured ingredients from Ladakh , Kerala and Nagaland.
It’s chef Rahul Sharma’s intimate, moon-obsessed, quarterly-shapeshifting restaurant — 24 seats, no paintings, one open kitchen, and a 12-course menu that rewired my brain about what regional Indian food can actually be. The decision to keep it at 24 seats was intentional. Every quarter, the kitchen picks a new belt of India and builds a 12-course tasting menu around indigenous ingredients from that region. Cold desert at 12,000 feet, coastal backwaters, tribal hills.
“Rather than approaching it as simply designing a restaurant, the intention was to create a space that could become an extension of the philosophy behind Nila,” Prachi said. “The interiors were imagined to complement the food, the stories behind each menu, and the experience we wanted guests to take home,” she added. “We wanted to move away from the conventional idea of a restaurant and create an environment where guests could slow down, connect with the food, interact with the team and truly experience every course,” she said. The architecture, materials, lighting and movement all contributed to the larger narrative,” Prachi said. “The idea was never to create a space that competed with the food, but one that quietly complemented it,” she added.
What made it remarkable was the service. Despite a pass that never stopped, chef Rahul and his team explained each course to every table. No table was skipped. At the entrance, before service, a large platter of raw ingredients from across the regions was laid out. Chef Rahul crouched beside it to walk us through each one. We could smell them too. Most were unfamiliar.
Chef Rahul Sharma founded Nila, which opened earlier in 2026, to celebrate India’s regional ingredients. He started at Oberoi Hotels across Udaipur, Mumbai and Gurgaon, then The Leela, earned a MAD Symposium scholarship as one of 10 chefs globally, staged at the world-famous Noma, helped found Masque in Mumbai, and set the food language for Araku Coffee in Bengaluru and Mumbai.
