In Mumbai’s newest XS eatery, last summer’s mangoes get the spotlight

There’s only one seating at Fitour, and it starts at 7:30 pm. Fourteen of us arrive more or less together, slipping past the evening crowd at House of Akina on Turner Road in Bandra, and heading down to the basement. Nobody here is trying to turn your table. “You are coming to my house,” says chef Ashwin Singh, and he means it. Service wraps up around 10:30 pm, but you’re welcome to stay till midnight.

If the set-up sounds familiar, it's because Bandra already has one of these. Papa’s, Hunger Inc.’s 12-seat chef’s counter located above Veronica’s, is a tasting menu by chef Hussain Shahzad that even two years after opening remains one of the hardest tables to get in the city. Fitour borrows the idea of a small room tucked inside a bigger restaurant, but that’s roughly where the likeness ends. Papa’s charades and dish explainers are amiss here: nobody explains a dish until you’ve eaten it, and the lights and music change through the night.

The basement was once Privé (Mumbai’s party regulars will remember it), and turning it into Fitour took four rebuilds—once the ceiling was too low for Singh to stand up straight, and another monsoon took out a floor. The final version was signed off over ChatGPT renders Singh sent over to Aspect Hospitality’s Hitesh Keswani when the latter was on holiday in Greece. Designed by Mahek Kapoor, it now feels like an old Indian home: uneven, handmade terracotta tiles, niches lined with woven fibre, and four arches with hand-drawn landscapes behind rippled glass.

The room is dimly lit, and right in the centre of it is a wall of jars. Most restaurants would hang art there; here, the jars hold a lot of what ends up on your plate. There are pickles and ferments, but many hold whole spices and blends made in-house—apart from salt, turmeric, red chilli, and coriander, the kitchen makes everything: the garam masala, the chaat masala and even the meat masalas. Nothing in the kitchen gets frozen either. The jars are a memory of his grandmother, who was from Rajasthan, where preserving was a way of life. As a boy in Meerut, Singh watched her make pickles and listened to her stories. 

When the R&D for this menu began in April, the team bottled raw mangoes and other summer produce to see it through to January, when the menu changes; a new one arrives every three months. “It is like the story of the previous season coming in on the plate,” Singh says. So, what you eat here in October is, quite literally, a taste of last summer.

Dinner comes in 18 courses, which Singh calls ‘verses’. His favourite artists are poets, he says, and a poem only makes sense once you’ve read it through. So, the verses arrive with no introduction, three or four at a time, carried out by Singh and his team so the whole room is served at once. You eat, you guess, and then he tells you what each one was.

Partly, it’s so that no one eats cold food or melted ice cream. Partly, it’s mischief. The Mangalore bun I wolf down, turns out, had sea snails. If I had known before, I’d have hesitated (of course, allergies and dietary preferences are noted when you book).

The early verses set the tone. The pani puri comes hidden under marigold petals—bitter with karela and amla, and an unexpected finish of mint chocolate. With it comes the first cocktail of the pairing—gin, watermelon, jasmine, and Campari—floral, bitter, and fizzy enough to cut through the fried shell. The litti chokha, shaped like a Jim Jam biscuit, catches everyone’s attention: you bite into it expecting something sweet and get something mustard instead. The Pahadi crab masala, shaped like an actual crab, pairs crab meat with mountain greens, a little palm, and a dry-fruit cookie dusted on bell pepper. Midway, the tomato sol kadi arrives, made with gently fermented tomato water, a bright, light breather before my pick of the night: the shirvalya and mango mahura rasam, soft rice noodles in a tangy rasam sharpened with that bottled summer mango,  peas, seafood, and a cloud of foam.

The tricks on the plate are Singh’s own. Though his culinary CV boasts stints at Gaggan in Bangkok and Masque in Mumbai, he’d rather Fitour wasn’t read through either. “At Fitour, the focus is on finding my own expression of Indian cuisine,” he says. He calls it progressive, not modern, not fusion: every flavour is rooted in India, but the techniques are borrowed from cuisines that can feed you a long tasting menu without weighing you down. Technique, for him, is a way “to understand an ingredient more deeply” without losing the memory behind the dish.

Many dishes on his menu are built over two to three days. The tomato sol kadi starts with fermented tomatoes, whose water stands in for kokum, and the finished kadi is clarified overnight. A pork dish uses three different cuts, each cooked separately for 12 to 14 hours, then thinly sliced and further processed to bring different textures into one cohesive preparation. The jackfruit in the vegetarian rice course is cooked five times to develop its flavour and texture.

The performance carries on around the plates, too. The kitchen is open, so you watch Singh and his team put every dish together in front of you, and each time a round is cleared, the lights and the music change. The playlist, curated by Singh, is sequenced so that each song matches the energy of the dish on the table. The brief is nostalgia, so naturally the playlist matches that: There is ‘Dreams’ by The Cranberries, Nat King Cole’s ‘L-O-V-E’, ‘Hotel California’, a club mix of Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’. And adding to this good all nostalgia is their Nostalgia Wall with a newspaper clipping from a cooking contest he entered in eighth grade and photos of the over-the-top plates he made as a teenager after watching too much MasterChef.

Even the restaurant name goes back to childhood. At seven, Singh saved his pocket money for Vikas Khanna’s cookbook Flavors First and, taking a cue from Khanna’s restaurant Junoon, told his mother he’d one day open a place called Fitoor. Both words mean passion. A spelling tweak later, it’s Fitour—a portmanteau of fitoor and tour.

Behind the bar, the brief is simple: don’t upstage the food. It comes from Singh himself, and head mixologist Shrineet Sonsurkar—formerly of Naar and Masque, where the two first worked together—sticks to it. The one with the rasam—tequila, pink dragon fruit, toasted zucchini, and curry leaf—is savoury and a little smoky. It’s my favourite pairing of the night, also because I tend to veer towards anything tangy. The pairing, of course, is optional; there’s wine and an à la carte list too.

Whatever you are drinking, save room for the last three verses. Dessert starts with Mogra, a pre-dessert inspired by Singh’s grandfather, who would buy a gajra for his grandmother on the way back from his temple run. It’s jasmine in smell, taste, and look, with lychee sorbet and kaffir lime leaf oil. Then comes Mithai Shop, the dessert Singh is most proud of. It’s 10 elements in one, including a mawa milk cake, a kada prasad cake, goda barfi ice cream, jaggery caramel, a chocolate foam, and a crisp of milk cooked two ways. And then the sweetest end to the night: a petit four.

Meal for one: ₹8,245 plus taxes

Timings: Thursday to Sunday, one seating at 7:30 pm

Address: Basement, House of Akina, Golden Palace, Turner Road, Bandra West, Mumbai

Reservations: Call +91 81087 89304 or via District