Bar Find was never supposed to be in Mumbai. But we are glad it is

About halfway through my evening at Bar Find, I looked over my shoulder at the room from my little lamplit two-seater by the window.

I’d arrived at 6pm, just after opening time, but now, by 8.30, the place had properly filled up. I’d been tasting dishes and photographing them for the ’gram, trying thimblefuls of cocktails, surreptitiously making notes in my phone for this preview, and taking quick snapshots of interesting corners. I had a flight the next morning. I should have thought my work here was done. Instead, I held on to my Bar Find Negroni, chewed on the drink, and wandered, like a regular customer for just a while.

A long birthday table was in full swing. People were passing plates across tables. The bar had become the busiest part of the room, and guests three deep were trying to catch the bartenders’ attention. Nobody looked in a hurry to leave. When I came back, my little two-seater by the window was gone. Good, I thought.

But Bar Find wasn’t supposed to be in Mumbai at all.

In late May, it opened behind a patisserie in Kolkata. Days after opening, it lost its home to some property and paperwork trouble. Instead of disappearing, a little over a fortnight ago, founder Diganta Chakraborty packed up the team, the cocktails, the artwork, the playlists, and the little design details he’d planned, recreating it inside KMC Bistro at Kitaab Mahal for the next three months before it looks for another temporary home.

Hospitality loves the word residency. This isn’t one. Residencies happen when one bar visits another. Bar Find has no bar to return to, not yet. KMC is still recognisably KMC. The room still has its soaring heritage ceiling, solid old windows, long bar, and familiar proportions. But the light has turned red. On the walls, there are framed renderings of the Kolkata bar that almost was. Vinyls sit on some shelves. Little “Finders Keepers” stickers, and postcards addressed to guests somehow show up scattered on tables.

Bar head Matteo Ciarpaglini’s drinks (he has spent time at the kitchens in Copenhagen’s Noma and Barcelona’s Bar Paradiso) have travelled well. The food has travelled too, before changing shape in Mumbai. Here, chef Manish Prajapati reinterprets Bar Find’s Bengali-inflected menu through KMC’s kitchen rather than trying to reproduce the Kolkata menu plate for plate.

My first pass of the cocktail menu is practical: what should I try first? Then I keep coming back to the book through the evening. My second pass is slower, noticing things like a little crow dressed for front-of-house, running with a bottle in his hand and a glass on his head at the bottom of one page, a colour-coded flavour-and-intensity grid showing where each drink sits, and tasting notes that look like margin scribbles. The Gilda Martini page comes with a little Rita Hayworth and pintxo story. On the Spumante Marino page, I find myself mentally leafing through The Flavour Thesaurus, trying to work out how tomato, bergamot, olives, and anise could possibly belong in the same drink. I’d notice something, turn the page, then flip back because I’d missed another detail. Before I left, I had to ask if they could send me the PDF of the menu.

Later, Chakraborty would tell me he wanted guests to “enjoy the drinks first, then the process”. The team uses contemporary techniques, but he doesn’t want clarification or fermentation to become your dinner-table conversation here. Bar Find’s Spumante Marino is one of the freshest cocktails I’ve had in a long while. The tomato brings savouriness and fragrance without it becoming a Bloody Mary, in a drink that is both complete and feather-light. I went back for a third sip, because my palate couldn’t quite reconcile its weight with its flavour.

The Spicy Margarita, Bar Find’s second low-ABV offering, keeps the architecture of a margarita but is free of its jaw-clenching intensity. Green vegetable water and carbonation make it a good Tuesday after-work drink that won’t have us suffer the next morning.

Among the stronger pours, the Gilda Martini, served from its own super-chilled labelled bottle, is all cold, fragrant precision. If you’ve joined Mumbai’s growing crowd of martini faithfuls, you’ll want this iteration with lemon, umami, and spicy smoked green pepper vinegar on your table.

Thankfully, the Ceviche Mary, leche de tigre softened with flower and corn cordial, did not become ‘food in a glass’. Each sip made me want another, not only because I liked it but because I couldn’t entirely explain why it was intriguing. The next time I’m at Bar Find, I’ll likely ask my companion to order one simply so I could keep stealing sips.

The only cocktail I offered away was the Garibaldi. I struggle with fruit-forward drinks that edge towards pulpy, candy sweetness, and this wasn’t the one that converted me. It’s a bias I’m aware of. Looking at the tables around me, though, I may have been in the minority.

Instead, I turned to the Pistachio & Coffee, with its dome of pistachio foam over espresso and coffee liqueur made with Julith’s Cherry Candy coffee blend. The drink changes as you work through it, the dense foam gradually folding into the coffee beneath. But it was the BF Negroni with mango and coconut that I took for a walk. Its description hints at tropical-fruit sweetness, but what arrives has a lovely, bitter, toasted backbone that offsets it.

When the team started nudging me to try the begun bhaja from the one-page food menu, I pushed back. I was convinced it would disappoint me. It arrived anyway. A Japanese eggplant was sliced lengthwise, and left connected at the stem. Under its audibly shattering crumb was buttery flesh. A dusting of proprietary red spice mix added a tangy tingle that drew my fingers back to the plate.

The jhalmuri provoked a similar reaction. I adore the classic puffed rice street snack, so I wasn’t convinced it needed fixing. The one at Bar Find has layers: mustardy, piquant muri and wheat puffs on top, creamy aloo posto in the middle, shredded mutton boti below. It was so much fun, I had to stop myself from polishing off the plate.

The kasundi prawn ravioli with sage butter sounds like mismatched jigsaw pieces. But here, kasundi’s warmth and mustardy bite settle comfortably into the balmy butter. Bar Find’s silky pork wontons floating in soy-truffle broth with chilli bean topping are made for a Mumbai July, while the coffee tiramisu rasgulla is bracingly bittersweet from espresso, with a little chew, a little sweet cheese. (One small suggestion: don’t order the baingan bhaja and bhetki fish and chips on the same visit. Both rely on beautifully crisp coatings, and one inevitably steals a little thunder from the other.)

By this point, I’d gathered everything I needed. My flight was 12 hours away. The wise thing would be to exit. Instead, this is when I took my Negroni for a walk, and started thinking less like someone writing about Bar Find and more like someone deciding who to bring back to this room. Later, I sent Chakraborty a message: “It simply cannot leave.”

Address: KMC Bistro, Kitaab Mahal, 192, Dr D.N. Road, Fort, Mumbai 400001

Timing: 6 pm to 1:30 am, Tuesday to Sunday. (Mondays closed.)

Price: ₹5,000 for two with cocktails

Reservations: Call +91 99033 83207

Instagram: Bar Find

Bar Find will be in Mumbai (at least) until the first week of September.