India’s Best Restaurant Is Closing So It Can Get Michelin-Ready
Aditi Dugar is renovating Mumbai’s Masque after five years as India’s top restaurant and the World’s 50 Best Art of Hospitality Award.
- restaurateur
- mumbai
- masque
- fine dining
Aditi Dugar co-founded Masque in a former textile mill in Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi in 2016. A decade later the room sits at the top of India’s fine-dining lists, holds the World’s 50 Best Art of Hospitality Award for 2026, and ranks on Asia’s 50 Best. Instead of coasting, Dugar is rebuilding it. Forbes India and World’s 50 Best coverage describe a temporary close for renovation and a full rethink of menu and service, framed as Masque 2.0 ahead of the restaurant’s tenth year.
The useful news is the ambition behind the scaffold. Dugar has told Forbes India she wants Masque Michelin-ready for when the guide arrives in India. Plans reported with that interview include a reworked tasting menu under head chef Varun Totlani, elevated service, roughly twenty added seats, and a ticket price expected to rise about 15 percent. Totlani started as a commis in 2016 and took the kitchen in 2022 after Prateek Sadhu’s exit; the partnership between owner and long-tenured chef is the operating story, not a celebrity-chef handover.
Masque’s pitch has never been one regional cuisine. The tasting menu pulls ingredients and techniques from across India, with an on-site lab for fermentation and R&D and a hospitality style Dugar has contrasted with pin-drop-silent fine dining abroad. Urban Gourmet India, the company she runs with husband Aditya Dugar, also holds Sage & Saffron catering, TwentySeven Bakehouse, Bar Paradox, and the Masque Lab. The flagship stays singular; the bakery is what they say they want to scale.
For diners watching Indian fine dining from outside Mumbai, the signal is timing. A bootstrapped restaurant that spent years convincing skeptics that progressive Indian tasting menus belonged in Asia’s rankings is spending peak status on a reset, not a victory lap. Confirm bookings and reopen timing on Masque before you plan a trip; renovation windows move.