“I’m the X Factor”: Aditi Dugar

You’d think launching a plush, new genre-breaking bar in a crowded market would be demanding, a full-time project in itself. But Aditi Dugar, the cheerful F&B force who has made her mark in Mumbai’s Shree Laxmi Mills Estate with restaurants like Masque, Masque Lab, and TwentySeven Bake House, knows how to get serious work done while making it look like play.

In the days leading up to the launch of her new bar, Paradox, I met Aditi four times over two weeks, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes for two. Aditi and her husband Aditya were putting finishing touches on their 80-seater space, their sixth F&B brand, which they soft-launched on her birthday, on April 13, with a small gathering featuring people from the food industry, media, friends and family.

In the same week, while prepping Paradox, the model multitasker couldn’t be left to focus on one thing: She shot sandwich recipe reels back-to-back for her bakery and pizzeria brand TwentySeven Bake House in the afternoons and planned a farewell party for friend-collaborator Renjie Wong at her home, complete with a vegetable-stamp painting station, personalised chip bags and jars of sambal as well as a forest-y grazing table inspired by the markets of Mumbai. Meanwhile, her catering company, Sage & Saffron, was prepping for a bunch of parties by billionaires, bureaucrats, and Barbie-loving baby girls with very specific appetites. And Dej Kewkacha—close friend and Asia’s Best Pastry Chef—was in town, collaborating with her for some of these menus. 

Days after Paradox opened, Arjun, the oldest of her three sons, was turning 16, so Aditi put together a custom-made treasure chest. All this right after she came back from Paris, where she went to celebrate a friend’s milestone, straight from Seoul, where at the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants awards ceremony, her fine-dining restaurant Masque won 19th place, the highest rank among Indian restaurants. And on these tiny trips, as is routine for the restaurateur, she sampled the fare at a bunch of new spots in both cities—every meal both research and recreation. 

End April, Aditi hosted Maye Musk at the Masque Lab, Masque’s experimental R&D space with a chef’s table for private events. Soon after, she went to Hong Kong to attend writer Susan Jung’s annual tea party. And yet, as always, every time I met her last month, she looked relaxed, cheerful, at ease in every room she occupied. How can one person do all this?

“I love chaos, and I really thrive in chaos,” she chuckles when I recap her insane schedule. “For me, playing it safe is just so boring. Even at home, if my kids say I want a third dog, I will say yes. At one point we had a dog, a tortoise, a turtle, two rabbits, two hamsters, fish, and then my youngest one asked, ‘Oh, can I get a parrot?’ And I was like, yea!’” 

Nobody knows how she does it, but anyone who has known Aditi from her early entrepreneurial days in 2012, when she launched Sage & Saffron, knows that she’s always been like this—doing in 24 hours what would take us regular folk a week. “But I’ve not done it alone!” she says. “It’s also the support system.” In all her roles—as a wildly successful F&B entrepreneur, a nurturing hands-on mom of three (aged 16, 14, 8), a devoted and connected family person, and a friend who goes above and beyond—Aditi does nothing in half measures.

Nine months ago, on a very wet July afternoon, I was at the then brand new TwentySeven Bake House in the same south Mumbai mill compound. Aditi walked me to a doorway across the lane to show me the shell of a two-level room, all concrete and dust, a couple of lit tube-lights leaning on walls. “Aditya and I are building a bar,” she had said.

But Paradox, as it stands today, is so much more than that. It feels like a bar that could be anywhere in the world—Mayfair or St Mark’s Place, Shibuya or Tsim Sha Tsui—and yet it evokes a deep sense of nostalgia that somehow feels personal. Every space in these rooms within rooms is transportive. Upstairs, a glimmering pitched roof above a burlwood bar and embroidered wall panels is for people who want a few bites while drinking. Downstairs, a dining room alongside an open kitchen and a PDR that looks like a luxury tent is for people who want a drink or two with dinner. Paradox is the company’s 10th property in the mill compound, and one they’ve had their eye on for a while. 

When Aditya was 21, he wrote a research paper at NYU. “It was about opening a trendy, chic, upscale bar in TriBeCa,” said Aditi while showing me a document on her phone during one of our April chats. “These are the drinks he was going to serve. It would be by a group called Innovative Restaurants, and these were his numbers. Since the day I’ve known him, Aditya’s been the most outgoing, charming man who can win anyone over, no matter their age. He’s the one who’s always entertaining, always showing up for people wholeheartedly. And ever since we opened Masque, he’s said that the day we open a bar, he’d leave his day job [he’s a gems and jewellery business owner] and become a full-time restaurateur. With Paradox, that dream has finally come true. [Aditya overhears us, and jokes that he’s on his way out.]

In the month since its opening, Paradox has become the buzziest bar in town. But Paradox seats only 80 people at a time. Reservations are strongly encouraged, because it will only contain as many people as it can seat, and not for a lack of space. This anti-standing-room-only approach is intentional and a daring decision in Mumbai, a city where a new bar is deemed popular if it involves jostling.

Aditi’s comfort with chaos seems to have been acquired early in her life. As the youngest and only girl for many years among 15 cousins, all in a massive bustling joint family that loved to work hard, cook, entertain and travel, Aditi grew up with a radical combination of experiences that shaped her. She got accustomed to getting her way, thanks to indulgent grandparents. She became deeply competitive from growing up in a household filled with boys. She learned about rigour from her father, who woke up with her at 3 am so that she could top her HSC board exams after switching streams two months before the finals.

From working with her maternal uncle’s investment banking firm, where she learned how to be at ease with handling very large sums of money at a very young age, to assisting her mum with her cooking classes and catering and expanding it into table setting and food presentation, to interning as a teenager during family holidays in London at florists In Water, and restaurant Le Gavroche, where she learned best practices from the best in the business—Aditi picked up a whole lot of skills and gumption along the way. “On vacation, wherever I’d go to eat, I’d ask, ‘Hi, who’s the chef?’ In Bangkok, for instance, I worked at a sushi restaurant and then for 10 days with a Thai street food specialist. Even now, in my free time, it’s the best thing for me to do, connecting with chefs.” 

There are threads that run through Aditi’s stories: her great love for being the first to bring lesser-known ingredients, brands and concepts to the fore (sea buckthorn, ceramics studio Curators of Clay, and Paradox, respectively), and her formidable grit and faith in keeping projects running (Masque broke even only three years ago). Which leads to another Aditi thing—a collaborative spirit.

Just eight months into opening Masque, she wrote to chef Matt Orlando of Amass restaurant in Copenhagen: “I’m wondering if my chef can do a stage in your kitchen for 10 days. I’d love for him to get the exposure and for us to also have that learning.” Matt replied, “Please send him.” 

Now Aditi calls Matt her “mentor and well-wisher for every milestone”. They’re connected. She knows his kids, he knows hers. “In 2018, he was my first ever international collaboration. He put me on the map, for sure,” she says. 

There are many parts of Aditi’s journey that have already been written about—how she hired her company’s first employee, Akshat Agarwal, now head chef at Sage & Saffron, from outside Sophia college initially as a gig worker for catering events; the way she met chef Prateek Sadhu, eventually got him on board as a moonlighting consultant, and came up with the idea of Masque over a coffee after an inspiring trip to San Sebastian; how Masque itself was a happy accident borne from a failed plan for a commissary in the city centre; how she famously pivoted the restaurant to do tailgate parties and takeaway boxes during the COVID-19 pandemic; how she handled the change of guard, switching the reins from Prateek to chef Varun Totlani...

Even as she tells these stories again, there is nary a hint of hubris. Whether she’s talking about taking TwentySeven Bake House’s head chef Rachelle Andrade to an early trip to Tel Aviv to study the city’s bakery culture, or about always creating Masque with the intention of being on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants (it’s currently at 78 on the list); or about hanging with Daniel Humm at a Mumbai house party in 2018, and then eight months later interning at his NYC restaurant Eleven Madison Park (EMP), she demonstrates a childlike glee. 

“During my four-day internship, EMP gave me all their service sheets and were open about sharing information,” says Aditi. “They’d say, this is our handbook, our Dreamweavers program, this is how we do things. It made me wonder why everybody there was so open with sharing information. And I realised, it’s because nobody can copy anybody’s execution. It changed how I operated as well. I realised nobody can replicate me—I’m the X Factor.” 

Today, Urban Gourmet India, the Dugars’ entirely self-owned and -invested holding company, has 240 employees who know the company’s PNL and get ESOPs, health insurance, and life insurance. There are quarterly leadership meetings and a POSH committee. Still, everyone who works there will say that it feels family-run. Not one to ever say “okay that’s enough” Aditi is dreaming of building more spaces that bring hospitality, design, and storytelling together in new ways—maybe a hotel someday. “In five years, I hope to have created new dining formats that didn’t exist before,” she says. “In 10, I want to start something in the FMCG space; it’s another dream I’ve been holding on to. I’m also so fortunate to be married to such a people’s person. All this ambition could have just been killed if I wasn’t with someone who has the same josh, the same jigar, the same excitement as me. We want to create insane wealth for everyone who’s been part of our journey and build a true legacy business.”