Indian Accent

Indian Accent is a fine-dining restaurant in The Lodhi hotel in New Delhi, serving modern Indian food with European plating. It belongs to Old World Hospitality, the company of the restaurateur Rohit Khattar, and has sister restaurants in Mumbai and New York.

The restaurant opened in March 2009 at The Manor, a small hotel in New Friends Colony in south Delhi, with Manish Mehrotra as its founding chef. Mehrotra had trained in Mumbai with the Taj group and spent years cooking Thai and pan-Asian food before he turned to Indian cooking. At Indian Accent he took familiar dishes from across the country and served them in new forms, which made the restaurant one of the best known names in modern Indian cooking. It later moved to The Lodhi, near the Lodhi Gardens.

The menu leans on vegetables and on the street food and home cooking of India, reworked with care. Flatbreads come with unusual fillings beside traditional chutneys, small cornets hold spiced fillings, and tamarind crab with coconut curry is one of the main courses. Earlier menus made names for pork ribs glazed with sun-dried mango and for daulat ki chaat, a light milk froth from old Delhi. A tasting menu with wine pairings runs alongside dishes from the menu, and the bar serves Indian rum and gin.

The dining room has marble floors, white tablecloths and tall windows onto a garden. Shantanu Mehrotra leads the kitchen as executive chef. Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants has listed it, and its New York branch opened on West 56th Street in Manhattan in the middle of the 2010s.