Raga isn’t Gaggan 2.0, but it sings a familiar tune

Chef Gaggan Anand has spent much of his career making meals that do much more than feed diners. His food surprises, provokes, entertains, crackles with humour, and asks you to submit to the chef’s whims and rules. It also sometimes makes you want to hit auto-Shazam while singing along and bobbing your head to the dining room playlist.

Raga, which just opened in Delhi, is being seen as Anand’s return home. But he’s not doing it alone. His first restaurant in India is a partnership with Rydo Anton, an Indonesian-born chef who joined Gaggan’s Bangkok kitchen in 2013, worked his way up to head chef, and after more than 10 years together is now an equal partner and leads the kitchen at 21A Janpath Road. The restaurant’s name reflects this creative partnership: “Ra” for Rydo Anton, “Ga” for Gaggan Anand, and a nod to the Indian classical raga, with its structure and space for improvisation.

For Anton, it’s one of those life-comes-full-circle moments. “I waited about four hours just for a trial in 2013 to join Gaggan. It’s been 13 or 14 years; we’ve come a long way,” he says of upskilling from a pastry chef to managing a kitchen. “I’ve grown from Gaggan to Miss Maria [& Mr. Singh], and opening outside Thailand too, with Miss Maria Singapore. I’ve travelled to 35 to 40 countries, working on pop-ups and events and with Gaggan. To be honest, I feel very proud leading the Raga kitchen. Never in my wildest dreams did I think Gaggan and I would actually open a restaurant here in Delhi. It’s a big thing because it’s Gaggan’s homecoming as well. Plus, he puts my name beside his. It’s bigger than just having my name. He’s a superstar and he’s my mentor as well.”

For months, people have wondered if Raga will be simply Gaggan Bangkok transported to Delhi. It isn’t. Having eaten at one of the early iterations of Gaggan back in 2014, four years after he opened his first restaurant on Langsuan, and at the current Watthana location in December last year, I can confidently say that Raga is an entirely different experience. For diners who have been to Sukhumvit Soi 31 recently, there are recognisable signatures, certainly. But this 22-course meal is its own mood.

In 2014, Gaggan’s menu started with playful Indian street-food dishes: the Yoghurt Explosion under a different name, spiced nuts in an edible plastic bag, and a chocolate pani puri. It included a course called Viagra, featuring a fresh oyster with yuzu-spiced apple, horseradish ice cream, and lemon air. In 2017, he introduced a 25-course Emoji menu. Today, his Bangkok restaurant feels more polished, more astonishing, more theatrical. Its voice is more full-throated and gloriously rock ’n’ roll.

Raga is gentler in personality and bolder in palate. The first few courses start slowly. Chilled orange slices with a touch of tingly, Tajín-like topping and icy, meditative mangosteen clear the palate, saving bigger, punchier ideas for later. Then one of Gaggan’s oldest signatures, the Yoghurt Explosion arrives. Here, its guava-chilli rendition, called Pink Blossom, is slid onto a glossy, shatteringly crisp ‘flower’ with an edible, audible surprise.

Even on familiar territory, the first bite of this inverse-spherified confection has the same effect: you stop talking and your eyes widen. Even after all these years, it makes everything else at the table momentarily uninteresting. There’s nothing to do but let your palate sit with what’s happening to it.

Right after come quick one-two punches of spice, sour, sweet and salt, texture and temperature. The first eight courses of the 22-course tasting have the sort of pacing that makes the most of a hungry appetite. The Aloo Bonda Sandwich is one. It’s a wee toast filled with a vada-pao-like aloo bonda and the flavours of a Bombay sandwich. Except there’s no bread. The “toast” is an onion-water meringue. I was eating it at a leisurely pace, relishing it, when Anand came over. “Come on, finish it,” he said. “It’s meant to be one bite.” I regretted rushing the last morsel almost immediately, wondering if I should now call for seconds. In a 22-course meal, though, it had its one moment.

The dish also took me back to a bite from the 2014 menu, when foie gras mousse was piped into an onion-water baguette with onion chutney and hazelnut candy. An entirely different dish, obviously, but an ingredient-technique combination that has endured over the decade.

Raga’s Cold Curry comes on a plate sculpted into a snow-capped mountain range, with prawns, pomelo, and little pools, powders, and dollops of curry that are so lovely to look at, it felt like sacrilege to follow its instructions: “Mix it all up and eat.” There is bhetki paturi, glistening and extra-fragrant with kaffir lime and chilli; a gilded Golden Egg pani puri; and a leaf-shaped pyaaz kachori, one of the few dishes to dip in its spunk, especially flanked by more exciting flavours.

For 22 courses (including some stellar tabak maaz, nihari, an eyebrow-raising bheja, and a generous morel curry), the pacing holds up remarkably well. The meal fills you up steadily, and the hours go by without feeling like you’re a hostage at the table. And as Zorawar Kalra of Massive Restaurants (Masala Library, Farzi), who has partnered with Gaggan and Rydo Anton on the restaurant, says, “I’d rather people leave a little food on their plate than go to Pandara Road after.”

Raga’s tone is inherently different from Gaggan’s. Gaggan is a performance. Raga lets you into a long, easy dinner. Anand agrees: “Gaggan is very different. It’s a lot of uncomfortable moments. You can’t touch your phone. The experience is very, very crazy, and we have very serious food. It’s not an every-week or every-month restaurant. Raga is completely based on memories of India, Delhi, and how we can really push it from here.”

Here, even if you sit at one of the five chef’s-table seats by the kitchen, you can still have a conversation. While phones are allowed, Raga has a thoughtful phone policy: capture the moment, but don’t let your screen take away from the experience. When we visited, the music switched from classic rock to old Bollywood hits. (Gaggan took control of the playlist toward the end of the night.)

The room itself is calm, sexy, and intimate. A double-height ceiling keeps it from feeling enclosed even many hours in. Tables are well-spaced and dressed in white linen, with ceramic vases of red flowers and portable lamps for good Insta stories. The lighting is flattering enough that everybody looks lovely, which is not a trivial thing during an hours-long dinner. More importantly, there was none of that late-night tasting-menu urge to go for a short walk outside.

The open kitchen takes up nearly half the room, so diners can watch the chefs prep and plate over counters cut from a spectacular green stone, somewhere between jade and emerald, with rivulets of gold and flashes of teal running through it. The kitchen has the brightest lighting in the room, because, as Kalra says, “the stars are all there”. Can’t argue with that. There are, in fact, as many people on the team as there are guests in the dining room.

Most of what’s on the plate is sourced locally, and there’s a Delhi-ness to the place that’s hard to pin down. “We try to make things from India so that we have consistency and don't depend on foreign ingredients. You know how food can be very political in our country, so I had to make sure it is very local, seasonal, and what we can get within the markets,” shares Anand.

If Raga was in Mumbai, Bengaluru, or Hyderabad, it would almost certainly be a different restaurant. At the same time, some of Bangkok’s energy, excitement, and cool has clearly made the trip too.

Kalra had wanted to bring Gaggan to India for a while. This Janpath address has previously housed Masala Library and, after real estate issues, went dormant for a while. He sat on the space rather than rushing to fill it with something else. He says he approached Gaggan, they clicked, and the rest of the pieces fell into place.

Then there’s the price. At ₹11,111 for 22 courses, before drinks, Raga feels almost absurdly good value versus a meal at Gaggan Bangkok. Those with the means and the proclivity would want to head here tomorrow, except that tables are already impossible for weeks.

Address: 21A, Janpath Road, Connaught Place, next to Le Méridien Hotel, New Delhi - 110001

Call: +91 92051 80004, +91 92051 80003

Book here

Price: Raga by Gaggan Experience, ₹11,111. Dinner plus non-alcoholic beverage pairing ₹15,111. Dinner plus wine pairing (7 glasses), ₹18,111. Prices are per person, not including taxes.

Timings: Wednesday through Monday, dinner only, from 5:30 pm. Last seating at 9 pm