Samyukta Nair opens Makaan, a Gujarati restaurant in Mumbai
The London restaurateur behind Jamavar and Bombay Bustle makes her India debut in Juhu, serving Gujarati home cooking with business partner Karan Shah of Swati Snacks.
Samyukta Nair has opened her first restaurant in India. Makaan, a Gujarati restaurant in the Mumbai suburb of Juhu, is the debut India project for the London restaurateur behind Jamavar and Bombay Bustle.
Nair runs LSL Capital, which operates five London restaurants: Jamavar, MiMi Mei Fair, Nipotina, Bombay Bustle and Miko Mei Fair, plus a MiMi Mei Fair site in Dubai. Makaan is her first venture on Indian soil, built in partnership with Karan Shah, who ran the vegetarian casual-dining chain Swati Snacks in Mumbai and Ahmedabad for seven years.
Gujarati cooking, not fusion
Makaan is our way of giving Gujarati hospitality a home of its own in Mumbai
The menu stays vegetarian and regional. Locho, a soft steamed Surat specialty, and pudla, a savoury gram-flour pancake, sit alongside panki and dahi batata puri. A satpadi roti comes with gatta shak, a curry built on gram-flour dumplings, and vatana muthiya pairs steamed pea dumplings with a pudina roti. Dessert is soft-serve ice cream in shrikhand and kesar pista flavours, a nod to the sweetened, saffron-laced yoghurt Gujarat is known for.
Esha Pandya x Design Practice designed the 58-seat dining room around a terracotta palette, split between an indoor space and an outdoor section.
A homecoming in Juhu
Nair spent her early school years in Juhu, the coastal Mumbai suburb where Makaan now sits. "Makaan feels like a homecoming in more ways than one," she said. Shah framed the opening as filling a gap in the city's dining scene: "Makaan is our way of giving Gujarati hospitality a home of its own in Mumbai."
The restaurant lands as more London-trained operators look to India rather than the other way round, a shift that echoes chef Garima Arora's move into a modern Indian kitchen in Kuala Lumpur, and comes the same week Indian whisky maker Indri marked Diwali with a new cask release. For Nair, the test now is whether a menu built on home cooking, rather than the tasting-menu format of her London rooms, finds an audience back where she grew up.
