Kyoto, 2012. A reservation at Kikunoi — Yoshihiro Murata’s century-old ryotei, holder of seven Michelin stars, and the chef who influenced both Heston Blumenthal and René Redzepi. Every course was more beautiful than the manicured gardens outside and tasted unlike anything I had the vocabulary for: kaiseki at its most refined. Next, Nishiki Market, Kyoto’s 400-year-old culinary artery, to an all-tofu restaurant where a single ingredient appeared in a dozen textures. A gekikara shopping street where vendors refused to serve the next spice level until you’d conquered the last. Late-night wagyu counters and sake bars barely wider than a corridor. In Japan, eating is a philosophical act. I came home to India, and felt this gap.
There were exceptions – a handful of high-end hotel dining rooms doing something genuine for a specifically moneyed audience. But Japanese cuisine here existed as a speciality. What was found in copious amounts was Asia as a category: Chinese, Thai, Malaysian, Singapore hawker, Chinese-Indian. Imprecise, yes — but collectively, that conflation educated a palate for fermentation, umami, and textural upgrade. The Indian diner was being trained for a cuisine they hadn’t yet been properly introduced to.
By the early 2010s, that introduction was underway.
Chef Karan Bane, then working at the Japanese kitchen at San-Qi at the Four Seasons Mumbai, was among the few chefs serving serious sushi and sashimi in India. He was experimenting with dishes that sat just outside the Indian diner’s comfort zone with familiar ingredients and unfamiliar flavours.
But most guests still gravitated towards the safe bets: tempura, teriyaki and California rolls. There were questions about raw fish, uncertainty around chopsticks, and wasabi relegated to a condiment. He and his kitchen kept going deeper anyway, to gradually introduce flavours and textures gradually. More than a decade later, he continues that evolution at Seefah, where Japanese and Thai influences meet with far greater confidence.
In Mumbai, Izumi was making a similar case for patience. When the restaurant opened, recalls chef-partner Nooresha Kably, the biggest misconception was that Japanese food began and ended with raw fish.”We would constantly hear: ‘I don’t eat raw fish, so Japanese food isn’t for me.'”
Today she measures progress differently — guests who walk in and confidently order Uni on the specials, no explanation required. “When people immediately recognised it, ordered it excitedly, and understood what they were eating, that was the moment I felt the Indian diner had truly arrived.”
In Delhi, Megu was making a more ambitious argument: that the Indian luxury diner was already a global connoisseur and needed no hand-holding. Their approach fused craftsmanship with theatre, precision with spectacle. Rather than adapt to the market, Megu bet on a sophistication the industry had largely underestimated. In hindsight, the bet paid off — not just for Megu, but for every serious Japanese kitchen that followed.
At Otoki in Mumbai, restraint is part of the experience. “In Japan, dining is often about observation, trust, and gradual discovery — we want our diners to go through the same process,” says Chef Mohit Singh.
A new generation of restaurants are navigating the space between accessibility and authenticity; a balancing act that once seemed impossible. At JSAN in Goa, Chef Vishesh draws on experience from New York kitchens including Restaurant Daniel, Atoboy and Mari, where classical French technique intersected with Korean fermentation and Japanese influence. Unexpectedly, that training taught him patience.
“Access is quicker in America, but India teaches adaptability. You stop trying to replicate another country ingredient-for-ingredient and start understanding what local produce is capable of.” He translates that into local snapper and chonak with Japanese curing and ageing techniques that concentrate sweetness and deepen umami. Dried Goan sardines, already embedded in local food culture, reframed through the philosophy of Japanese dried fish for broth and extraction.
The supply chain is the real MVP. Jaydev Desai of Tropical Trading Co imports soy sauces from small Japanese family breweries: naturally brewed, barrel-aged, and made from whole soybeans rather than defatted soy. He believes Indian chefs are ready to treat soy sauce with the nuance of wine or olive oil. The market, it turns out, may be ready. A smoked soy sauce developed an almost immediate cult following. One of Desai’s latest experiments: a gelato made with a double-brewed soy sauce aged for four years.
Fermentation is the story underneath all of this. Prachet Sancheti of Brown Koji Boy, Goa has watched the appetite build. Today, customers aren’t simply asking for miso; they’re asking which miso. “That shift signals engagement beyond trend,” he says. What excites him most is that Indian kitchens aren’t replicating Japanese fermentation — they’re localising it. Cashew miso from Goa. Millet ferments shaped by Indian climate. Chickpea koji from Indian agriculture. “The future won’t come from perfect imitation. It’ll come from chefs and producers building a new ingredient vocabulary” he concurs.
On a recent stay at Coco Shambhala on the Maharashtra coast, I found myself in the water to harvest seaweed & sea urchins, a marine world that Japanese cuisine has always treated as foundational. Gabriella D’Cruz, marine conservationist and founder of Good Ocean, India’s first seaweed food company, is candid about the challenge. Japan’s advantage is centuries in the making: island geography, colder waters that produce larger species, and aquaculture systems refined over generations. India’s tropical seaweeds are different — intensely mineral, but less suited to the glutamate-rich extractions that form the backbone of many Japanese broths.
Still, D’Cruz is optimistic. Her appeal to chefs goes beyond sourcing. Swim through a seaweed forest, she says. Understand what grows there, learn what lives alongside it, and bring that story to the plate.
There is a detail I keep returning to from my time in Kyoto. At Nishiki Market, I came across a single yam priced at 10,000 yen. The vendor handled it with the reverence of a rare artefact. At the time it struck me as extreme, but makes so much sense now.
Japanese cuisine is, at its core, a philosophy about paying attention — to ingredients, to season, to the person eating. India, for all its complexity, has always understood this. We have our own traditions of reverence for produce, deep fermentation histories, multi-cultural extremities. The two cuisines were never as foreign to each other as the distance between them suggested.
