Restaurant of the Week: VATAVARAN

Knightsbridge is the destination that sees fashionistas willing to spend their cash, whether it’s the ultra-luxe department stores of Harrods and Harvey Nichols, or the luxury stores: Burberry, Balenciaga or Apple? It's a spaceship ride away from the mesmerising Himalayas, geographically bounding the Indian subcontinent, but Vatavaran is on a mission, since opening doors in November 2025, to offer a window peek into the region. Its own richness stems from dramatic landscapes, versatile history and a swimmingly vivacious culture, as India houses a fifth of the world’s population. 

Stepping inside the restaurant, just off Beauchamp Place, you will be transported to serene mountain peaks –  there’s an inescapable calming and intriguing presence to the restaurant. Winding through its core is a staircase that leads you through four floors – each alive with a different atmosphere to the next. The idea behind this, from Michelin-starred chef Rohit Ghai and long-time business partner Abhi Sangwan, is to take diners up the mountainous region, showcasing the fresh and bold flavours of the Himalayan landscape.

The entrance floor boasts an opulent cocktail bar, sprawling with shimmering glasses and covered in an earthy pink and spiky textured wall, a nod to faraway jagged mountains, while the bar itself is fancied with a marble countertop and alight with warm sconce lamps. As you step up to the next floor, where my guest and I were seated, a larger dining room awash with pale azures and dramatic topographic art awaits.  

The third floor is both simultaneously grand and artsy– with a generous feel – as a vast dining room kitted out with luscious green paintings and grand, thick curtains meet open wine racks and bare brick walls. Here, the restaurant shares a glimpse of the forested environment found higher up the mountains.

Snaking up above to the top floor – there’s an extravagant bar – where fiery, deep and plush red and yellow seating is complemented with glistening mirrored ceilings – reminiscent of sparkling snow and colourful cultures.

While the first floor sees tranquillising blues and bright pendants, the higher up you go the bolder and more decadent the restaurant’s décor becomes, in turn, the more glitzy your night can become. A treasure it is, then, to reach the summit, which in real life looks like peaks of snows and once-in-a-lifetime vistas.

Hence each room has a charm of its own and you could easily spend many different evenings here all in one, as you sandwich your meal with a pre-dinner drink on arrival – and perhaps catch some live music on the weekend – and a swanky, indulgent post-dinner treat up the top.

To match the vibrant and varied surroundings? Well, that’s where the food comes in. As soon as we’re seated, friendly waiters embrace us and offer recommended cocktails and mocktails. We choose without knowing much about the concoctions we’ll receive, which arrive promptly and exotically-presented – mine has a zesty, gingery kick and my guest’s is a colourful, fruity tipple, topped with two delicate flowerheads. We’re impressed with both and pleased to be stepping away from overdone classic cocktails.

To complement our drinks – rather than the other way around – we tuck into an assortment of crunchy poppadoms in various forms, obligingly plunging them into sweet, spicy and sour chutneys. To follow there are four more courses, so it’s a good thing we came hungry. These courses are not always densely populated – unlike the country itself – so despite working our way through various dishes and flavours we feel happily satiated afterwards. This is a welcome feeling over the I need to lie down immediately inner plea, which a night of thick curries and fluffy naans can all too easily lead to.

Initial starters arrive in rich maroon and reddened sauces, peppered with pomegranates and green leaves to enhance the taste of the main ingredient – which in the Aloo Tikki’s case is crispy potato. Next, it’s dishes fresh off the grill, and the salmon tikka bedded on kobum beetroot in a magenta-coloured coconut sauce is succulent, sweet and flavoursome.

Like the restaurant’s layout, each dish is made up of different variants of an array of colour – whether its pomegranates, radishes or chickpeas – as if they are different character traits making up a personality of flavours each time.  

For the mains – my favourite course – the lamb barbat comes lavish, tender and perfectly spiced, while the buttery chicken balances our tastebuds as a sweet and creamy pot of delight.

We have room for dessert, and it would be a shame not to as these are as eclectic and sprightly as the rest, with exotic sorbets sprinkled with burnt caramel and coconut shavings, as well as an interesting – and I mean sincerely interesting rather than a politely negative way – cashew, carrot and orange cake.

There’s a lot to take in at Vatavaran. It provides a taste of faraway lands, which for a region home to a dizzying array of landscapes, languages and cultures feels fitting. Does it magically whisk us away from designer boutique surroundings into whitewashed mountain peaks? Perhaps not exactly, but there is certainly atmosphere at Vatavaran – and a pretty captivating and full-flavoured one at that.

Find out more and book a table at Vatavaran via vatavaran.uk