Masala Kraft — The Taj Mahal Palace

The Restaurant

Masala Kraft occupies a ground-floor dining room of the Taj Mahal Palace on Apollo Bunder — the same 1903 heritage property that anchors South Mumbai's hotel-dining map — and has held its seat as the hotel group's flagship modern-Indian restaurant since the room's design refresh. The dining floor is heavy-wooden, intimate, and architecturally distinct: thick low chiselled wooden rafters work against black carved pillars, sheer wooden screens divide the space into intimate alcoves of four to eight seats each, and dim chandelier lighting reads as continuity with the older Taj hotel-dining vocabulary rather than a contemporary import. The room seats about eighty across two intimate floors and an open kitchen window line where guests can watch the live cooking stations through the service.

The kitchen serves a contemporary Indian menu that turns on hand-ground spices, traditional recipes, and modern technique. Signature plates include the dal Masala Kraft (a black-lentil dal that has held its place on the menu since opening, slow-cooked overnight with tomato, butter and cream); the dum-pukht biryani with hand-pounded saffron and slow-cooked lamb; the seared scallop tikka with raw-mango chutney; the Madurai-style fish moilee; the Sketch menu (a kitchen-built degustation that the chef walks to each table for the live cooking station service); and the dessert programme of phirni with rose, gulab jamun with saffron syrup, and a coconut payasam that reads as the room's working closing course. The Masala Mumbai Tiffin lunch menu is a separate working credential — a daily three-course set that draws the South Mumbai business-lunch crowd from Nariman Point and Ballard Estate.

Service is at the upper tier of Mumbai's hotel-dining map: career captains, multilingual servers, table-side spice-mixing demonstrations for the Sketch menu, and a wine programme paired into the spice register that the sommelier walks the room with each evening. The wine list runs to about two hundred and thirty labels with deliberate French Alsace, German Riesling and Australian Shiraz depth — the three wine registers that pair best into the kitchen's heat-and-spice profile. The dining room at evening service, with the chandelier light off the black carved pillars and the live cooking stations visible from the window-line tables, reads as one of Asia's quieter modern-Indian rooms. For a Mumbai evening that wants the city's reference Tata-hotel modern-Indian format, Masala Kraft is the answer that has held the Taj Mahal Palace's ground floor for years.