Food23 Jan 20266 MIN

Is it an art gallery? A cafe? A restaurant? A cocktail bar?

Depending on which door you open, Worli’s shapeshifting Bare Bombay can be anything you want

Photographs by: Bare Bombay

What is Bare Bombay? It’s hard to tell immediately. The answer, we find, depends on when you get in and which way you turn. From the outside, Bare seems like an art gallery. Passersby stop and look, thrown off by provocative, sculptural, assertive works. (One, for instance, looks like a very red human brain being held by a pair of black hands.)

Past the glass door, on the left, is caffeine and cake. At one end of the shallow, wide salon with its T-back speckled grey upholstered seats and round tables is Mumbai’s first micro Boojee Cafe. We hear it before we see it, hissing and steaming, because someone asks for an espresso. (Matcha lattes with almond milk are also at hand.) During the day, the gallery space is swathed in natural light, and at night it lights up the walkway outside.

There are two secret doors—they look exactly like the walls around them, with art jutting from them instead of handles. Someone from Bare’s team leads us to the right and approaches a long white and black carton stuck on the wall at an angle. It has the word ‘PATIENCE’ painted on it, the fine print reading “Never run out of patience again”. The team member pushes on the surface right by the box, and like a scene from a Nancy Drew novel, it swings open. Inside and utterly unexpected is Bare’s dining room and bar.

So, what is Bare then, really? It’s all these things—gallery, cafe, restaurant, cocktail bar—and then some. Dreamed up by Pooja Raheja, the founder of the inventive, design-led catering studio Eat Drink Design, Bare is also the latest opening in Mumbai’s burgeoning Raheja Altimus in Worli. 

Anyone who has been to an EDD-catered event knows that Raheja connects food and design in pretty unusual ways. (Twelve years ago, we attended a dinner after a talk by members of the armed forces. EDD was catering; cocktails came in mini hip flasks, and the dining room had a cauldron with a large ladle while guests stood around with bowls for helpings.) Currently, and for the first three months, Bare’s menu has been composed by its head chef, Aman Sehgal. Every quarter, a guest chef will take over the kitchen.

Bare’s been open a scant month, so there are about two months left to try Sehgal’s excellent savoury madeleines, glossy and redolent with goat cheese and pistachios, to be dipped in lemon butter cream and fermented hot honey. Or the astonishingly meaty but fully veg lion’s mane mushroom shawarma edged with pools of chromatic condiments (koji khubuz, mutabal, qizha, corn hot sauce) that we swiped our fingers across and licked clean. Their brie Basque souffle somehow meets three cravings: cheesecake, fondue, souffle, all at once. With it came a pressed, glazed rosemary croissant, savoury carom biscotti, and tiny half discs of fresh and cured pineapple to make each bite taste a bit different.

The food is cuisine-agnostic and hard to categorise. On the evening we visit, every dish is comforting but also thoughtfully composed; not one element on the plates seems performative. We asked Raheja later: what makes any of these “a Bare dish”? “Our key criteria for each dish were that it should be high on taste and creative, full-stop,” she says.

Pickles Celeriac Tartare

Dirty Rice Cakes

Black Garlic Chicken

There are croquettes made for lovers of chicken kaleji, melting squares of liver pâté streaked with cherry-timur sauce. There is Jaipur matar tostada, its base really a ridiculously crunchy plantain tostone with the sweetest, freshest winter peas tumbling off it, barely held together by sour cream. A delicate rava crumb on a scallop makes us wonder why no one thought of this before. As does its black garlic sofrito. Every dish ties into Raheja’s manifesto.

Dish descriptions sometimes seem underplayed. We resist the recommendation for one dish until we are positively propelled. Layers of tender chicken mousse and gossamer sheets of dough with mushrooms and basil are laid sideways so that its seams are all visible. A bright and punchy tomato sauce pools on one side, a soothing Emmental cream on the other. The menu simply says ‘chicken lasagna’.

A bowl of winter greens saag has an unfurled burrata, but it’s hidden under a crunchy layer of chopped asparagus and a swirling maze of phyllo. And so it is with the pickled celeriac tartare, for which we will give away no spoilers.

Winter Greens & Celeriac Phyllo

Beet Tuna Tarte tatin

Lion's Mane Shawarma

Crisps and Dips

Raheja says she has been dreaming up Bare for years, as a “hybrid hospitality space [that] is rooted in creative collaborations, coupled with a collaborative kitchen”. Indeed, Bare has several fun people from the city’s creative cohort as stakeholders and contributors—it’s less a checklist and more a happy collision of their sensibilities. The art has been curated by A&H Colab, founded by Amrita Kilachand and Hina Oomer Ahmed. They have picked artworks for impact, specifically contemporary works with colour and personality. 

The wide rectangular dining room, with glowing lakes of light on the ceiling that change colour to mimic daylight as time progresses, has been designed by Niketa Raheja. There are high and low seating zones to match conversations that are animated or intimate. The room is windowless but, mercifully, not wan; its design feels more like a sanctuary than a silo. In a couple of months, Bare will also launch its 11-seater chef’s table, tucked away in a separate room.

Rajdeep Singh of Boojee has been brought in for the cafe. His coffee also makes it into our dessert, an affogato with shards of hazelnut, cacao, and buckwheat, as well as into Raheja’s preferred espresso martini. Chocolatier and pastry chef Prateek Bakhtiani of Ether Atelier has come on board and added some of his patent shine to classic desserts here. Creative maverick and branding and strategy consultant Ajoy Advani heads brand design for Bare and has also baptised the cocktails here…with numbers. There are 10 cocktails (plus one off-menu surprise), and five zero-proof drinks (lettered A to E) in addition to classics and a full bar. We like the No. 7, with London Dry gin, mezcal, strawberry, chipotle, campari, and vermouth, especially with Bare’s loopy grissini and vegan yakhni butter. “This idea of numbering the drinks was actually a drunken suggestion by Ajoy,” says Raheja. “Leave it open to interpretation, he said. Plus, it’s easy to remember.” Turns out he was absolutely right. Everyone on our table left with a number to come back to. 