North Indian Food in Bangalore: Where the Real Thing Is

“The problem with North Indian food in Bengaluru is not quality. It is that so much of it is the same eleven dishes, cooked competently and without conviction, on a menu that also offers Chinese.”

• On the generic restaurant problem

Bengaluru has excellent North Indian food and a great deal of mediocre North Indian food, and the ratio is worse than it should be for a reason. Decades of migration brought large communities from Punjab, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bengal and the Northeast, but the restaurant market also produced hundreds of all purpose places serving a standardised menu of butter chicken, paneer tikka, dal makhani and naan to people who just want dinner.

That standardised menu is not bad. It is simply not the interesting part, and it crowds out the genuinely regional cooking that exists here if you look for it: Awadhi kebabs and biryani, Rajasthani thalis, Bengali fish, Northeast cooking, and the Punjabi food cooked by people who came here to cook it.

So this guide is about finding the real thing: the regional traditions present in this city, how to identify a kitchen that means it, and what to order at each. Naming areas and traditions rather than specific restaurants, for the usual reason that good ones are numerous and change.

Where Do I Find Good Punjabi and Tandoor Food?

At restaurants that do only that, rather than at all purpose places. The Cantonment, Richmond Town, the CBD and the newer belts of Indiranagar and Koramangala all have serious tandoor kitchens.

The key is the tandoor itself. A real clay tandoor running hot produces breads and kebabs that a gas oven cannot, and you can usually see or smell it from the entrance. A restaurant with a working tandoor and a menu of twenty five dishes is a better bet than one with a menu of a hundred and forty that includes chow mein.

What to order to test a kitchen: dal makhani, which should have been cooked for many hours and tastes immediately of whether it has; a tandoori roti or kulcha, which tells you about the oven; and one kebab. If those three are right, the rest of the menu will be. Expect four hundred to twelve hundred rupees a head depending on the establishment, and note that Bengaluru does this cuisine at genuinely high standards at the upper end, particularly in the hotel dining rooms.

Where Is the Best Mughlai and Kebab Food in Bangalore?

Frazer Town, Mosque Road and Shivajinagar, in the evening. This is the Cantonment's Muslim cooking tradition and it is the most authentic North Indian influenced food in the city.

• Go after seven in the evening. These are evening kitchens. The grills fire up late afternoon, the crowd builds after eight, and many shops run well past eleven.
• Order seekh and galouti kebabs. The test of a kebab kitchen. Galouti in particular, the melting Awadhi kebab, is difficult and tells you everything about the cooking.
• Try nihari and paya if available. Slow cooked overnight stews, traditionally breakfast dishes, and served at a handful of places here. Genuinely special when you find them.
• Understand the biryani options. Hyderabadi, Awadhi and Bengaluru's own donne biryani are all available and are three different dishes. Our biryani guide covers the distinctions.
• Add the bakeries. The Cantonment's bakeries, producing puffs, cakes and bread, are a separate and equally old tradition worth a detour on the same trip.
• Visit during Ramzan. Mosque Road and Shivajinagar become one of the great food events of the Bengaluru year, with the whole area eating outdoors after sunset. If your dates allow it, plan around this.
• Expect Rs 350 to 1000 a head. Considerably less at the street level shops, which are frequently the best of them.

“A menu that offers North Indian, Chinese and Continental on the same page is telling you something honest about its ambitions. Believe it.”

• The single most reliable filter

What Other Regional North Indian Food Is Here?

Rajasthani and Marwari thalis, Bengali fish cooking, Northeast Indian food and Delhi street food. All four have real communities behind them in this city and therefore real restaurants.

The Rajasthani and Marwari restaurants are the most underrated thing in this category: unlimited vegetarian thalis with dal baati churma, gatte ki sabzi, ker sangri and a sequence of breads and sweets, at roughly three hundred to eight hundred rupees. They are generous to the point of absurdity and they are excellent value. Bengali restaurants serve fish in mustard, kosha mangsho, luchi and proper mishti, and Bengaluru has enough of a Bengali population to sustain good ones.

Northeast Indian food is the most interesting and the least known: Naga, Manipuri and Assamese cooking, with smoked meats, bamboo shoot, fermented ingredients and chilli used in a completely different register from the rest of India. There are dedicated places in the city, frequently small and frequently in the newer eastern neighbourhoods, and they are worth going out of your way for. Delhi street food, chole bhature, chaat, parathas and rolls, is widely available and cheap at a hundred to four hundred rupees.

How Do I Avoid the Generic Version?

• Read the name first. A restaurant naming a region, Awadhi, Rajasthani, Punjabi, Bengali, Naga, is telling you what it actually cooks. Order from that section only.
• Count the menu length. A short menu is confidence. A hundred and forty dishes across four cuisines means a freezer and a microwave doing most of the work.
• Look for the tandoor. Visible, clay, and hot. For Punjabi and Mughlai food this is the single most important piece of equipment in the building.
• Check who is eating there. A North Indian restaurant full of North Indian families is the strongest possible signal, and it applies equally to every regional tradition on this page.
• Order the difficult dish. Dal makhani, galouti kebab, dal baati churma, shorshe maach. The dishes that cannot be faked will tell you whether to come back.
• Avoid the hotel buffet for this cuisine. Buffets flatten everything. The same hotel's a la carte kitchen is frequently excellent, which makes the contrast more annoying.
• Ask for it cooked properly spiced. Many restaurants dial down heat by default for the local market. Saying you want it as it should be made usually produces a noticeably better dish.

Same city, new stories, always.

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