Pincode

Kunal Kapur has spent enough years on your TV screen judging other people's food that it's easy to forget he's also spent decades cooking it across continents with a Michelin nod picked up somewhere along the way in Abu Dhabi. 

The name of Pincode, his restaurant, isn't a marketing department's idea of quirky. Kapur's grandmother used to painstakingly get the pincode right on every letter she sent to family scattered across the country, because a wrong digit meant a lost letter. Launched in January 2023, the restaurant borrows that same logic: get the coordinates right, and the food (and the memory attached to it) reaches exactly where it's supposed to.

The menu wanders the country with a few detours that feel more playful than necessary: chaat hummus and dhokla chaat sit somewhere between homage and gimmick, and falooda shows up because, well, why wouldn't it. But the kitchen is clearly more confident in certain other spots. Every server pushed the pressure cooker chicken curry, the malai prawns, the lamb seekh tawa masala and the Old Delhi-style bread pudding with the sort of conviction that made saying no feel rude, so we didn't. The bread pudding earns the hype. It’s more or less a house signature.

The real find, though, was the chicken curry momos. It’s Pincode's spin on the jhol momo. A curry this good is allowed to hog the plate. The dakkahni mushroom, stuffed with green peas and cheese, plays a similar game: charred and savoury on the outside, rich within. 

Nostalgia is an overused word in food reviews, but at Pincode it's less a theme than a starting point.