Since 1945, Mumbaiites and visitors have been lining up outside Shree Thaker Bhojanalay’s door, sometimes even down the stairs and onto the dusty chaos of Kalbadevi’s streets, and for good reason. Their unlimited Gujarati thalis are revelatory, and the warm, efficient service ensures you never want to leave. No matter how busy it gets (seating is first-come, first-served), the movements in this energetic dining room always seem choreographed.

Why do Mumbaiites go wild for the seasonal ₹5,200, 10-course tasting menu at Masque? It’s an experience, and one that begins when you step into the elegant dining room housed in a former textile mill. The pendant lamps hanging from the high ceiling, the lab-like, glowing bar, and the metal sculpture rising from the floor create the perfect setting to impress a date, celebrate, or listen to your server tell stories about all the locally sourced or foraged produce you’re about to consume.

Among Mumbai’s many vada pav joints, 85-year-old Aram is an institution that always impresses. Wait your turn to grab the assembled-to-order snack from this sidewalk counter. While the potato filling for most vadas in the city is laced with turmeric, Aram bucks the trend, and proves that the golden powder isn’t necessary for maximum flavor. Sips of buttermilk will help break the heat as you marvel at the grand Victorian Gothic railway terminus across the street.

Flavors from six Deccan coastal regions bump into each other at this casual, earth-toned Bandra West restaurant, and the resulting mashups demand repeat visits. This city loves to combine ingredients from the region and beyond, and at Kari Apla, those pairings feel balanced, and work like they were meant to be together. We keep going back for the lush omelet moilee, the slow-cooked, warmly spiced Madurai mutton cutlets, Angamaly pork pepper roast, and bone-in kingfish wrapped in a banana leaf.

The all-vegetarian spot makes street food and chaat, but we love it for its traditional Gujarati snacks, comforting plates, and seasonal specials like vegetable-loaded undhiyu, and tangy-sweet aamras puri platter. A visit to this homey, briskly run spot, not far from Girgaon Chowpatty beach and across from a large Shiva temple, should feature any combination of these: crunchy palak cheese samosa, healthy-but-not-boring vitamin bhel, slinky panki, and fragrant, spicy Surti chaas.

Anyone who comes to this casual, always busy Lower Parel spot in a central Mumbai office complex falls unfailingly in love with it. Blame it on their playful riffs on traditional Indian dishes that amp up familiar flavors and textures. Flying off the pass are the cheese bombs known as the Eggs Kejriwal, the flaky, fragrant Guava Tan-Ta-Tan (a post-school street snack meets tarte tatin), and the Chettinad prawns Ali-Yolio, an intense study in umami.

Every time we walk through Fort’s narrow lanes—past the engineering works, tool shops, and Xerox centers—and enter Americano, we feel a fizzy anticipation, like going to meet a crush who kinda already knows we’re crushing on them. We can’t put our finger on exactly why this Italian restaurant ensures we always leave happy, but we have theories. For starters, the glowing bar belts out the city’s most creative cocktails, and the custom gold-tiled oven turns out perfect Neapolitan-style pizzas.

We’d gladly move into any of the three rooms at this all-day Kala Ghoda cafe that almost feels like you’re in Europe. The high-ceilinged main room, inspired by the OG Parsi and Irani cafes in the city, is where to meet with a friend or co-work over coffee, tea, and the best chef's salad in town. And the back wine bar feels built for big conversations thanks to heavy curtains, moody lighting, and plush armchairs.

O Pedro does for Goan grub what The Bombay Canteen does for Indian food—play with tangy, spicy, meaty, and coconutty flavors, to wow diners (both restaurants share owners and an executive chef). O Pedro feels like a sundowner at a colorful beach shack, and an escape from the tall glass-and-steel buildings of Bandra Kurla Complex’s new-ish downtown. It brings the susegad of India’s tiniest state to Mumbai—you'll eat surrounded by tented ceilings, blue and white painted pillars, and rattan chairs.

You better enjoy coconut if you’re going to Taste of Kerala. It’s all over the sadya, the ₹310, all-you-can-eat vegetarian meal served on a banana leaf. Here pumpkin, beans, and other vegetables are cooked in coconut in all its forms—light and heavy milk, rich cream, freshly grated, desiccated—to make avial, thoran, kootu, pachadi, erisnsery, kalan, and more. Rounding out this coconutty feast are dabs of pickles and mounds of rice with sambar and rasam.

Ekaa is an upscale restaurant in Fort that highlights hyper-seasonal Indian ingredients, and treats them with the love a local jeweler might have for emeralds—fermenting, emulsifying, and roasting them so they feel refreshingly new. The minimal, slightly industrial space with the glass roof doesn’t adhere to a single cuisine, so every dish that lands on your table is full of remarkable surprises.

The food at this former pop-up in the old Salt Water Cafe space makes us feel like we’re traveling through time. It’s both nostalgic and futuristic, inspired by Bandra in the ‘90s, and reimagined as a trippy underground venue. Did the graffiti and neon signs give it away? This place is pumping out dishes inspired by the chef’s childhood, and flavors from the communities that shaped the western suburb, from East Indians to Goans to Sindhis.

For the best traditional Chinese food in Mumbai, cross the gaudily lit footbridge spanning a koi pond inside Ling’s Pavilion, the city’s oldest Chinese restaurant. On the other side is the two-level dining room with high-backed chairs flanking tables, each stacked with hard-bound menus that are as large and heavy as ledgers. This Colaba institution has looked the same throughout its 30-odd years—and so has the food—and we’re eternally thankful for its unchanging steadiness.

Ode is one of the newest spots to hit the city's dining scene, but feels established because it's from Rahul Akerkar, the chef behind the game-changing Indigo, and the father of fun, casual fine dining in Mumbai. The menu is an eclectic mashup: modern European- and American-style food with slivers of desi flavor. Here, that translates to sophisticated, comforting, and straight-up irreverent dishes, like pasta, pizza, and tartare with local ambat-goad notes, and the “best damn” tarte tatin.

The servers at this intimate, laidback South Indian bistro won’t let you order a main course until you’ve worked through the 4x4 tasting caddy, a spectrum of curries, rice dishes, and gravies. That’s fine by us—it’s a punchy start to a meal of traditional Deccan dishes. We're more than happy to revisit this bungalow-like space in Bandra and run through the entire menu, which is inspired by the owner’s grandma’s cooking.

This sunlit cafe is a quirky, charming spot, but the point of a trip to Jimmy Boy is always the ₹1,150 (or ₹850 vegetarian) lagan nu bhonu. The heaving feast is a parade of three main courses: either the sweet-sour saas ni machhi or patra ni machhi, tangy salli marghi or lacy farcha, and the pulao with dhansak dal, including free rotli, achaar, wafers, and dessert—and, yes, you’ll want to grow an extra stomach for all of it.

Meet the only restaurant in Mumbai with a motorbike parked between two tables during business hours. It’s the owner’s, and he’s (almost always) by the bike inside this stuck-in-time Parsi cafe, having a snack, meal, or cup of gingery chai. We don’t know a better way to endorse a place. Ideal occupies a rounded corner in the gorgeous Art Deco Horby View building in Fort’s office district, so you’ll eat cutlets and gravy, spicy-sweet patra ni machhi, and mutton dhansak next to lawyers and clerks.

A Bombay sandwich is held together by green chutney, and without the bright condiment smeared on its insides, a Bombay sandwich isn’t worth its bread. Anand Stall’s chutney is so compelling, we’d pay top rupee for the recipe. At this hectic street kiosk near Mithibai College, students and old loyalists huddle to pay for the sandwich tokens needed to place an order. Everyone ignores the dusty blare of traffic, and the sewer nearby, since their classic Mumbai snack is just that addictive.

Dadar has long been the Marathi community’s preferred neighborhood to live in, so some of the city’s best and oldest Marathi restaurants are located there. When it comes to dependably delicious food from the Malvani region, we turn to the cave-like, village home-inspired dining room of Chaitanya. If you’re solo or with a friend, the dishes to order again and again include the kombdi curry with crispy wade, tisrya bhujane (unshelled clams sauteed in spicy coconut), and chicken sagoti on the bone.

Ask 10 people in Mumbai to recommend their favorite idli spots, and you'll get 10 different answers. Ask us, and we'll tell you Cafe Madras every time. On weekends, especially, locals travel from all over the city to tree-lined Matunga to share a table with strangers for a South Indian breakfast or lunch (expect a wait), and dive into this spot’s fluffy, grainy rice cakes with hot sambar and coconut chutney.

Shalimar’s maze of different rooms and moods—from loud, hot, and busy, to private, plush, and cool—seem to go on and on (a walk through the entire restaurant’s many levels can take a full 10 minutes). The menu at this grand shrine of Mughlai food on Mohammad Ali Road that’s been around since the 1970s is neverending, too. It’s a rabbit hole of choice with hundreds of dishes.

Before it was refurbished in 2023, C D’Souza felt like a rundown parlor of a stingy distant relative. Now this spot near Marine Lines station—with new polished Burma teak rafters, and a glass case filled with vintage wine glasses (but no wine, because local laws don’t permit a bar in the vicinity of a church, go figure)—has transformed into a Goan classic. Here, the portions are big, and the hospitality is friendly.

There’s no shortage of seafood places in Mumbai. After all, this megalopolis started as a fishing village. Bharat Excellensea is an over three-decades-old spot that trumps all other seafood institutions in Fort. Here, the fish is uber fresh, the service is instantly friendly, and you won’t find their scrape-the-plate-clean prawn curry with unripe mango, onions, tomatoes, and green chillies anywhere else in the city.

People rarely first encounter Sarvi on their own. It’s on an unchanged corner of Nagpada, and is privileged information you get in on only after a diehard of the dive-y, over 90-year-old restaurant takes you here and orders you the best Irani kainchi seekh kebabs (₹35 apiece) in the city. These are long, spiced mince kebabs, with a head-filling meatiness, not bludgeoned with spice, freshly nudged off double flat skewers to order.

This original, decades-old Colaba outpost of the international chain is an institution for Sindhi chaat, snacks, and sweets—and one of the few of its kind still standing in a city where Gujarati bhel and pani puri are more of a thing. Their dahi batata puri is sensory overload—the crunchy shell collapses into mashed potatoes, topped with cool yogurt, tangy tamarind, and spicy green chilli chutney.

For over 20 years, three dishes have had fans flocking to this momo-mad city’s only dedicated Tibetan restaurant: the spicy then-thup soup with hand-pulled dough, aromatic bamboo rice finished with wine and served in a bamboo jar, and, of course, the momos. Their thin, adeptly pleated dough and juicy pork filling surpass many of those found at momo shops that have proliferated the city. What else has worked in the favor of this no-fuss Oshiwara spot is that it’s consistent and affordable.