Nila

Nila's a restaurant characterised by pure ambience – one that hovers somewhere between a culinary haven and a wellness retreat. Pared back interiors, soft around the edges, and I bet you like, ₹500, that you won't be able to find the door to the loo on the first try. 

Essentially, Nila's a 24-seater tasting room built like a theatre, with a kitchen thrown open to guests, so they can watch the meal be built in real time. What's more? The menu never stays the same.

Chef Rahul Sharma calls each menu a 'chapter'. The first one, launched in January 2026, took guests through Naga terrain. The second, which launched in May, turns to Kerala's backwaters. It's the one I'm here to sample. 

The menu treats the region less as a cuisine to reproduce and more as a landscape to interrogate – rice varieties, sundried black lemons, chillis, sweet tamarind, all used in an unconventional style. The pork course, in particular, tastes like Kerala and Oaxaca had a very good collaboration. The whole affair is elaborate, extensively so. I called this a theatrical experience for a reason.

Living Room

The 12-course meal opens away from the table, with a nutmeg soda and two kinds of crackers – jackfruit and banana – to nibble on. A loosening-up round rather than a course, and a sign the kitchen wants you settled in before it starts feeding you.

Mingle

This is where the menu properly introduces itself. Coastal Coconut is a smart, layered play on a single ingredient: coconut in texture after texture, lifted by curry leaf oil and fresh herbs. It's followed by the best bite of the night: Coastal Takoyaki, a toddy-shop-inspired snack that's closer in spirit to a paniyaram than the Japanese original, with an onion-garlic-pepper centre wrapped in an excellent kappa (tapioca) pâté. Texturally, it's the kind of thing you want to stop and dissect before finishing. Mulberry Leaf, pickled and grilled over fire with a glutenous rice filling and generous crab topping, riffs on the shape of a puttu without quite becoming one. The round closes with a Kutunadu Bagel built around local rice-fed duck laid across a layer of mascarpone on a slice of sourdough. The sourdough leans a touch chewy, but it's a minor stumble in an otherwise confident opening.

Sharing

The Fire Toasted Vatta Pattani Soup is where the kitchen's instincts really show. A duck fat and smoked-drumstick salsa gets stirred through at the table (a small bird perched on the lid signals the non-vegetarian version), and it arrives alongside the Nila whole wheat flatbread and a spread of chutneys and dips: Unakka Naranga (black sun dried lemon), coriander, curd, tamarind, radish, and a bread topped with potato paste and fried potato. It's the most 'shared table' moment of the meal.

Feast

A sous vide boneless chicken leg, cooked to perfection, arrives with a curry leaf sauce and a genuinely lovely pairing of rice – Navara, an indigenous, GI-tagged medicinal red rice native to Palakkad – and Gandhakasala, an aromatic variety from Wayanad. The rice selection across this menu is a highlight in its own right. The curry itself runs a touch salty, worth flagging if you prefer a lighter hand on seasoning. But the Alleppey Pepper Pork is the standout of the meal, prepared with pepper picked specifically at 4.25mm (anything over 4.75mm tips into Thalassery pepper territory), it lands in a sauce that plays like a Mexican mole – coconut, coconut oil, and 70% dark chocolate sourced from Idduki. The pork belly is sous vide, then air-dried for 4-6 hours, smoked for two, brined in salt and sugar, and finished over a wood fire. The chocolate note in the pork's sauce is the thing you'll be thinking about on the drive home.

Dessert

Malabar Tamarind Ice Cream, finished with smoked wood salt, is a clever bit of sour-meets-smoke. It leaves an ashen taste in your mouth but it’s well camouflaged by the Crème Diplomate that comes along with it. This is followed by the Jackfruit and Idukki Dark Chocolate Cake layered with jackfruit curd and a caramelised white chocolate ice cream. 

As a piece of storytelling that trusts rice varieties and pepper gradation to do what a recognisable dish usually would, it's one of the more ambitious tasting menus in Bengaluru right now. It's also on a clock: this chapter closes in July, so this isn't one to file away for later. I can't wait to see what chapter's next.

The vibe: Interiors that feel considered rather than decorative. A room built to match a menu that takes itself seriously without being self-serious.

The food: Twelve courses tracing Kerala's backwaters through Varara and Gandhakasala rice, Mariyur jaggery, Aleppo chilli and Kotturkonam mango, peaking hard at a pepper-and-mole pork course that's the best thing on the table.

The standout: Alleppey Pepper Pork – smoked, brined, wood-fired, and sauced with 70% Kerala dark chocolate.