At Avartana, drumsticks — wrapped in a crunchy gram flour coat — look like they hopped off the Met Gala red carpet. Buttermilk — spiked with pepper, jaggery, beans, asparagus and toasted almonds — resembles an embroidered sari with pink-yellow petals and green leaves.
The award-winning restaurant, launched in Chennai in 2017, is known for its progressive South Indian cuisine. The food is avant-garde, poised on technique, and marries surprising combinations. Loyalists are familiar with the menus available. Now, the team of chefs has added an inventive new collection of recipes to the roster. But you cannot just walk in and order them.
The chilli guava palate cleanser
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Special Arrangement
Anoma, Avartna’s limited edition menu can be prepared for a minimum of eight guests with a prior intimation of 48 hours. Targeted at celebrations and get togethers, Anoma means illustrious in Hindi, explains Chef Nikhil Nagpal with an air of a pedagogue.
We sample the 10-course menu, along with a bright slew of cocktails. The hotel has been working hard on its cocktail programme, under its young general manager Shaariq Akhtar and mixologist Chingngaihlun, and now offers the ability to do a bar crawl across its six restaurants and one bar.
However, enamoured by Anoma, we stay at Avartana and sip on heady guava picantes, spiked with ruby red dry Chettinad chillies, and Uthukuli butter washed Cognac with banana, cinnamon, filter coffee, and butter biscuit cream. The new beverage menu Kaleidoscope uses local ingredients — fruits like mango, banana, jackfruit, and narthangai, paneer rose, nannari root — to craft nine cocktails and five mocktails.
The team at Avartana
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Nikhil does not want to give away too many spoilers, but the food, in typical Avartana style is thoughtfully engineered to be a fun, surprising series of traditional, familiar flavours recreated with unexpected ingredients, modern techniques and artistic plating. Keep an eye out for the seabass, encased in a crisp, tasty pumpkin leaf. Also, be prepared for a little excursion mid-meal, complete with eye masks.
Twirling his trademark moustache that has now become synonymous with Avartana, Nikhil says that of all these dishes, it was the Potato Malabari that seemed most challenging. “It may sound simple but it took us 12 trials to perfect the technique,” he says, adding, “The challenge was to get the texture of the potato right when mashed and used as an outer shell to encase the curry. If you just take mashed potato and steam it, the curry inside tends to leak. We had to add starchy ingredients like amaranth in the right quantity to get the soft texture of the potato, otherwise it can get hard and chewy.”
Duck Neer Dosa
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The cogs are continuously turning at Avartana with the team of chefs — Mayank Kulshreshtra, Satheeswaran Loganathan, Lakshmanan Subramanian, and Nikhil — constantly identifying ingredients and pairings, and then working on turning them into dishes. One of the unique combinations in Anoma is the fragrant marikolunthu paired with lobster.
While putting together the duck, it started with a Kerala style preparation with those spices. Then the team felt the flavours were similar to that of the quail and aborted that. We paired orange with that but it still had to be South Indian. So, we additionally made a sauce made with bydagi chillies, says Nikhil.
Payasam with a twist
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The dessert is a poster child for the phrase ‘If looks could deceive.’ It’s a dish that showcases the flavours of banana, jasmine, and apple, with a faux banana, what looks like a crumpled brown leaf, and stones. Make sure you pick the right one!
Price on call. Avartana is located at ITC Grand Chola. Tel: 044 2220 0000.
Published – August 15, 2025 01:04 pm IST
