In The Powder Room, beat the server at a board game and win a picante shot

There’s a version of a Bandra night out that everyone in this city has lived through at least once: dinner here, drinks somewhere else, a cab in between, and an effusive WhatsApp group deciding at 10 pm that it’s time to just go home. The Powder Room, which opened earlier this month on the eighth floor of Mansionz One on Linking Road—just left of Gong, the group’s other Asian restaurant on the same floor—is betting that Mumbai is tired of that math. Walk in for dinner at 8, and there’s a real chance you’re still there at 1 am, several cocktails deep, having just won a round of achi against your server and claiming the shot that comes with it.

That ability to turn dinner into a longer night is really what the 40-seater dinner and cocktail club is built around. The restaurant’s influences are deliberately hard to put in one box: Mediterranean food gets an Asian mix, the cocktails pull from European and Asian flavours, while the room and soundtrack draw from sub-Saharan Africa. “MediterrAsian” is Avik Chatterjee’s coinage, but the idea is less about a label than about what happens when different influences are allowed to sit together.

Chatterjee recently took over as CEO of Speciality Restaurants, the 34-year-old legacy his father Anjan Chatterjee built, home to Mainland China and Oh! Calcutta. The Powder Room (TPR) is his first full-service restaurant since taking over, alongside Walter’s Burgers, a quick-service restaurant that has outlets everywhere from Bandra to Powai to Fort and even Pune. TPR is also his most personal project yet. “A lot of the visual language comes from my travels through Maasai territory in Kenya,” he says, talking about the trip he took with his wife that became the moodboard for Sumessh Menon Associates to design this space

There’s no signage on the street; you find it on a dim corridor of weathered timber marked by a bronze medallion bearing the restaurant’s name. Inside, a large three-dimensional sun rotates on the wall, while animal-print upholstery, Georgia marble against deep red Levanto stone, timber, and handcrafted artwork adhere to the sub-Saharan theme. Looming over it all is 12x5 ft chandelier.

When we arrive, at around 7:30 pm, notes of Afro-jazz hum through the space. The rotation includes Nubiyan Twist, Fatoumata Diawara’s ‘Chasing Shadows’, Jembaa Groove’s ‘Bassa Bassa’—tracks that make you want to Shazam mid-conversation.

The room changes as the night does. There isn’t a designated dance floor, but there’s enough room to get up and dance if you feel like it. And if you stay at the table, servers have another way of keeping you entertained: achi, a traditional African strategy game, is carried around the room to challenge diners who are ready to give it a try. Beat your server at it and you win a complimentary za’atar picante shot finished with sumac.

That idea of a night that keeps unfolding is built into the food, too. Sahil Singh, chief of culinary and operations, has spent more than two decades moving between food cultures—from modern pan-Asian at Papaya to molecular-gastronomy at ITC Maurya and a modern Japanese-Peruvian kitchen in Dubai, before two and a half years at Speciality. His menu here leans on tapas, flammkuchen, robata, crudo, and plancha, built for grazing over the evening.

We started with the Sichuan burrata, crispy chilli oil and a mantou bun standing in for Italy and China on one plate, along with the hamachi tiradito, jalapeño and orange-yuzu leche de tigre under shaved black truffle. On paper, some of these combinations sound like they’re having an identity crisis. The chicken parma okonomiyaki is probably the clearest example: fried chicken, cheese sauce, tomato sauce, Spanish aji verde, truffle caviar, and Japanese tonkatsu glaze—five sauces from four different food cultures on one plate. It sounds chaotic. But taste it, and you know it isn’t.

The confit New Zealand lamb chop comes with matchstick fries and a spinach yellow curry that carries the char of the chop. Thankfully, the curry doesn’t overpower the meat and yet it cuts through the richness of the lamb. My top pick was the baked Chilean sea bass: a shattering top of phyllo over fish that stayed properly flaky underneath, with kombu butter and olive tapenade. I’d go back just for this.

Then there’s the Powder Bread, which was highly recommended by our server and was seen on almost every table. Made with potato flour and freshly baked, it’s warm and fluffy, layered with shaved parmesan, truffle, and pepper mornay. It is very hard to stop at one piece.

By the time dinner gives way to drinks, the combinations get even more unexpected. The cocktail list reads like a dare: peanut butter whisky next to wild banana liqueur, shiitake mushroom in an Old Fashioned, Sichuan peppercorn dropped into a mezcal built around watermelon. “We like to complicate things,” says Yuvraj Singh Solanki, only half joking. “A normal person looks at the menu and thinks, how the hell do these work together? But they do.”

He’d know. Solanki is the co-founder of Anonymous Food Labs, the outfit behind Delhi’s Lair, which ranked No 8 on Asia’s 50 Best Bars in 2025, and AABBCC, which landed at No 85 on the 2026 extended list. With more than a decade in the business and 40-odd bar and restaurant projects across India, Dubai, and Nepal, his brief for TPR came down to one line: take European and Asian flavours and make them work in the same glass.

Our table started with the Burnt Fashioned—toasted shiitake-infused whisky, mirin cordial, truffle amaro, and smoky bitters finished with beurre noisette. It’s nutty, umami-heavy and smoky rather than sweet, with the smoke hitting first. The Pink Phoenix is designed for sharing: bergamot tequila, pink guava liqueur, ember malt, and yuzu, served with a drilled block of guava ice that gradually changes the drink as it melts. Rosa del Mare takes mezcal in a very different direction, pairing Sichuan peppercorn-infused mezcal with watermelon liqueur and Lillet Blanc, finished with a mezcal mist. The pepper leaves that faint, pleasing numbness you get from good mapo tofu. If you’re not into fruity or floral cocktails, Solanki’s pick is the Narnia—cacao vodka, in-house miso-Alphonso caramel, and chocolate hazelnut bitters, somewhere between sweet, bitter, and umami.

Dessert gets its own visual moment. According to Chatterjee, it’s also the most photographed element at the restaurant. Instead of simply choosing from a menu, the options are first presented in a framed shadow box: five miniature plates behind glass, each a scaled-down replica of what’s coming—the Mont Blanc’s pale green vermicelli swirl, a single dark orb of chocolate fondant, a stacked Jenga Ice Cream, the Kunafa Sushi’s glossy chocolate-striped roll, and a trio of pink Berry Tacos.

The idea traces back to Chatterjee’s travels and the dessert trolleys he’d seen abroad, refined over three to four months after a miniature trolley failed and he spotted something similar on Pinterest. 

We had Chatterjee’s pick, the chocolate fondant, made with 55 per cent Valrhona chocolate in custom craftsman-made pots, its warm centre breaking open into miso caramel ice cream. We also tried the Kunafa Sushi, mochi wrapped around a kunafa filling and sliced like a roll, and the Berry Tacos, with strawberry crème fraîche inside and Nutella and berry icing on top.

By midnight, the DJ had moved two shots past Afro-jazz into something louder. Dinner had stretched into cocktails, the tables around us were still filling up, and there was enough room for the night to keep going. That’s probably TheTPR’s biggest trick: it gives you plenty of reasons not to make that second Mumbai-night-out decision—to leave one place and find another.

Meal for two: ₹3,000 (without alcohol)

Timings: Tuesday to Sunday, 7 pm to 1:30 am

Address: 8th floor, Mansionz One, Linking Road, Bandra West, Mumbai

For reservations: Call +91 8976834895