On the first of every month, at exactly 11 in the morning, a booking link goes live. Within three minutes, it is gone. Twelve seats across four nights a week, every slot filled before most people have finished their second cup of chai. Papa’s Bombay does not advertise. It does not need to. The word of mouth alone has made it the most talked-about, most fought-over, most quietly extraordinary table in the country.

It sits above Veronica’s, Chef Hussain Shahzad’s sandwich shop on Hill Road in Bandra, in a space that was once Jude Bakery. The original signboard is still there, with Papa’s scrawled across it in a nod to what came before. You climb a flight of stairs, and you arrive somewhere that feels less like a restaurant and more like a very good dinner party in a 1980s Bandra home. Warm wood tones. Vintage knick-knacks. Art Deco memorabilia. Hand-blown lamps. A chef’s counter upcycled from the original bar top of The Bombay Canteen. Photos on the walls. Fidget spinners on the counter with messages on them. A pocketbook where guests scribble, colour, and do origami.

Twelve seats. Thirteen courses. And a chef who pours Negroni shots from a hip flask and walks the counter with a tray of duck biryani offering khurchan, the toasted rice scraped from the bottom of the pot, because as a child he was the older sibling who always sacrificed his share for his brother. Now he makes enough for everyone.

The Name

Papa’s is named for Floyd Cardoz, the late chef and co-founder of Hunger Inc. who launched The Bombay Canteen, won Top Chef Masters, and was known to those who loved him as Papa-ji. Shahzad trained at Eleven Madison Park in New York under Daniel Humm and came home carrying the full weight of that experience, but it is Cardoz’s influence that shapes the spirit of what Papa’s is. Not just the food, but the warmth. The sense of being fed by someone who genuinely wants you to feel something.

The Menu

Thirteen courses. Indian in soul. Surprising in spirit. It is the most precise description of what Chef Hussain does, and it does not begin to prepare you for the actual experience.

The evening starts at the bar, not the counter. A welcome drink arrives, the first signal that everything here has been thought through completely. The bar pours cocktails named after dishes: a pizza marinara, a tom yum, each one replicating the exact flavour profile of its namesake dish in liquid form. This is either a very good joke or a piece of genuine technical wizardry. It is, on reflection, both.

The meal itself begins with a sweet, in the tradition of a Bohri thaal, a nod to Chef Hussain’s Bohri Muslim heritage, where the feast starts with something sweet before the savoury arrives. Foie gras laddoo. The sentence lands gently and then expands in the mouth: the richness of foie gras inside the spherical form of an Indian sweet, the two traditions in complete and comfortable conversation.

Then come the modaks, the steamed Indian dumplings, shaped like char siu bao and filled with charsiu pork and green apple. A patti samosa stuffed with feta, spearmint, and pickled apple. Tibetan tingmo with blue cheese, king oyster mushroom, and pickled chilli. Thayir saadam, the Tamil curd rice that is the most elemental of South Indian comfort foods, remade with Spanish goat cheese, slow-cooked beetroot, and shiso leaf tempura. It is recognisable and unrecognisable simultaneously, which is exactly the point.

Bugs Bunny, the dish people most often mention by name, is wild rabbit marinated with weaver ants and grilled over charcoal. The red fever ants add a citric heat, a natural acid, that you would not think to put there and that once you have tasted it you cannot imagine the dish without. The Pootharekulu, inspired by the wafer-thin rice sheet sweet from Andhra Pradesh, arrives with a corn and citrus salad, pomelo, and tamarind chutney wrapped inside the thinnest possible rice sheet. Tangy, fresh, delicate in a way that requires extraordinary confidence to execute at scale in a service of twelve.

The duck biryani arrives with the khurchan. The nihari pie. A rasam flavoured with cured tro. A lamb Wellington. Courses that pull from Chef Hussain’s Bohri heritage, his Tamil roots, his years in New York, and his lifetime in Mumbai, assembled not as a greatest hits but as something more personal and more honest than that.

The Room It Has Filled

AP Dhillon played bartender for an evening, dropped his emerald Patek Philippe into a cocktail glass, signed plates, jammed to Bora Bora, and generally turned the room into the best party in Mumbai that night. Dua Lipa came in right on time, no airs, sat communally with the other guests, and was walked out by Chef Hussain himself at the end of the evening, the way every guest is. Virat Kohli, Alia Bhatt, Ranbir Kapoor, Hrithik Roshan, Anushka Sharma, Karan Johar, Zaheer Khan, Saba Azad. The list reads like an RSVP for the most exclusive dinner party in the country.

Chef Hussain’s position on celebrity bookings is characteristically direct: no special treatment. If they want privacy and he can accommodate it, he does. If he cannot, he says no. Dua Lipa sat with everyone else. The food was the same for her as it was for the person sitting three seats away who had spent two months trying to get a booking.

The Accolades

TIME’s World’s Greatest Places 2025. The only Indian restaurant on the list that year. Food and Wine’s 15 Best Restaurants in the World 2025. DLC Guide Mumbai 2025. A reservation that sells out in under three minutes every single month.

Papa’s has been open since February 2024. In a little over a year, it became the most important restaurant in the country. That timeline is extraordinary in any context. In Mumbai, where the competition for attention is constant and the window for a new restaurant to establish itself is brutally short, it is almost without precedent.

The Practical Reality

Bookings open on the first of every month at 11am IST. Set an alarm. The tasting menu is priced at Rs 7,000 plus plus per person, with an advance payment of Rs 6,500 per person required to confirm. Beverages are separate. The restaurant is open Wednesday to Saturday, with dinner beginning at 7:30pm at the bar. There is a cancellation list for each date. There is no waitlist for future dates not yet released. There are no exceptions. There are no phone bookings, no email bookings, no WhatsApp bookings.

There is only the first of the month. At 11am. With your fastest fingers ready.

The Verdict

Papa’s Bombay is not trying to be the best restaurant in India. It is simply, quietly, completely being itself: a chef’s counter above a sandwich shop in Bandra, where a chef who trained at one of the world’s great restaurants comes home four nights a week and cooks the food of his life. His Bohri background. His Tamil roots. His New York training. His Mumbai. All of it on a plate, in a room of twelve people, for an evening that consistently ends with strangers feeling like they have shared something real.

The inscription above the kitchen counter, placed there by Chef Hussain, reads: Not just a restaurant. A dinner party.

He is not wrong. It is a dinner party. And it is the best one in the country.

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