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I wasn't supposed to be at Bar Find that night.
I had flown into Mumbai for a magazine interview, finished an early dinner at O Pedro in BKC, and was mentally calling it a day when filmmaker and colorist Sidharth Meer, who has been rooting for Bar Find since its earliest days, sent me a message. There's a new bar inside Kitaab Mahal. You should definitely try it. There was no location pin or no elaborate pitch, but I found myself just curious enough to reroute my evening.
An hour later, I found myself climbing the staircase of an ageing Fort building. Bar Find certainly didn’t spill onto the street with neon signs or music loud enough to stop passersby, but lay quietly in wait, armed with the conviction that the right people will, eventually, find it.
Inside, the room looked like a film set that had been lived in long after the cameras had left. Colonial windows framed the city outside while the room glowed in a deep crimson that softened every edge. White tablecloths sat beneath tiny lamps. Books climbed shelves. Vintage magazine covers, illustrations and old photographs shared walls without feeling arranged for Instagram. It carried the colour palette of a Wong Kar-wai frame, but the intimacy of an old Calcutta drawing room where somebody had slowly collected objects they loved for years instead of ordering them from the same catalogue.
It was almost midnight. Yet Diganta Chakraborty greeted us with the excitement of someone unlocking the doors for the very first guests of the evening. The shift had been running for hours, but he was still walking from table to table, explaining why the menu looked like a little art book, pointing at illustrations hidden across the room, recommending a Gilda Martini the moment I mentioned I had given up sugar. I left with a souvenir I hadn't asked for and the vague feeling that I'd been let in on something.
A month later, while interviewing Diganta, I realised that evening had unfolded exactly as he had hoped it would. 'Bar Find is the act of finding a space,' Diganta told me. 'When people become regulars somewhere,’ Diganta says, 'the signage doesn't call you anymore. The space does.'
Eviction from Kolkata
It explained far more than the route to a hidden bar. A few days after opening in Kolkata, they found that the room they had poured themselves into was suddenly taken from them in an allegedly unlawful eviction. Diganta talks about those days with surprising restraint. Instead of listing everything they had lost, he speaks about the people who had to leave with him. Bartenders who had imagined a life in Kolkata were suddenly packing bags for another city. 'The biggest challenge was packing the emotions,' he says.
There is something almost stubborn about the way he talks about Kolkata. Friends suggested softening its identity. Let the bar belong everywhere, they said. Diganta refused. 'We're Calcuttans,' he tells me. 'Why would we pretend otherwise?'
That refusal travelled to Mumbai and it sits in the illustrations scattered across the walls. In the little flipbook tucked inside the menu. In the postcards waiting on tables. In the red glow that settles over the room every evening. One drawing, which most people would dismiss as another playful graphic, is actually a portrait of Bar Find itself. Diganta points out tiny figures hidden inside it – his co-founder, the architect, the bartenders, himself – everyone who carried the place before anybody else ever walked into it. 'You'd probably think it's just a nice illustration,' he laughs. 'But everyone who built Bar Find is inside it.'
Arrival in Mumbai
When Bar Find moved to Mumbai, Diganta wasn't interested in recreating Kolkata brick by brick. He wanted the room to carry its memory instead so the search for that room began long before he found it.
'I sometimes think friendships matter more than space,' he tells me. KMC came to mind before its dining room did. He already knew Kitaab Mahal. The old timber, the impossibly tall windows, the grandeur of a building that had watched decades pass beneath it. He kept returning to one thought: the room already had good bones. Everything else could be rewritten.
So the walls changed first. Photographs from Kolkata appeared. The red light returned. Menus were redesigned to acknowledge the new address without pretending the old one had never existed. The cover no longer carried Kolkata's façade. It opened instead with Kitaab Mahal.
He and his co-founders spent years sitting at bars, watching what happened after the first drink. Too often, they found themselves ordering something extraordinary, only for the next cocktail to feel louder, stranger, more eager to impress than the one before it. Somewhere along the way, drinking had turned into a procession of solo performances. 'We didn't want ten hero drinks,' he says. 'We wanted an orchestra.'
That way of thinking owes something to Matteo Ciarpaglini, Bar Find's beverage director, whose years at Noma and Bar Paradiso trained him to chase flavours. Diganta still remembers watching him wander through Indian markets, picking up vegetables he had never seen before and immediately tracing them back to ingredients from Spain or Italy, already imagining what could sit beside them on a plate – or in a glass. 'He thinks like a chef,' Diganta says. 'Taste comes first. Technique only matters if it gets you there.'
He reaches for the cinema to explain it. 'If Christopher Nolan made films that nobody enjoyed watching, and only kept talking about how difficult they were to shoot, you'd stop caring.' The comparison makes perfect sense because Bar Find rarely advertises the labour hidden behind its drinks. In the development process, a painstaking peanut, banana and white chocolate cocktail was left behind because making it at the same standard every single night simply wasn't possible. Diganta speaks about shelving it with surprising affection, almost like a favourite scene that never made the final cut.
The menu
The menu refuses to organise itself around gin, whisky or rum. Instead, it moves through savoury, spirit-forward, aromatic and dessert cocktails, almost inviting guests to drink the evening in sequence. There's the cold, briny Gilda Martini, the startlingly light Spumante Marino built around tomato and bergamot, and Pistachio & Coffee, which has quietly become one of the bar's signatures. Across the kitchen, chef Manish Prajapati responds with kasundi prawn ravioli, begun bhaja, pork wontons and coffee tiramisu rasgulla, allowing Bengal to linger without reproducing it plate for plate.
The editing doesn't end once the menu is printed. Every service carries its own soundtrack. Diganta keeps one eye on the room and another on the playlist, moving from soul to hip-hop to low-tech depending on the conversations unfolding across the tables. He isn't chasing genres so much as temperature. As more people settle in, the room asks for different music. By the end of the night, most guests couldn't tell you what was playing.
He knows.
'I spend two weeks on things people notice for two seconds.' It's an oddly revealing sentence. The music. The postcards. The illustrations. Even the menu that slows you down before you've ordered a drink. None of these are trying to become the evening. They simply hold it together.
It takes a village
For someone who has spent months thinking about every inch of Bar Find, Diganta is surprisingly quick to shift the spotlight elsewhere. Ask him who understands the bar best and he doesn't mention himself.
He mentions Vishwas Paraka, one of the founding members . 'There isn't a day I worry about Bar Find if Vishwas is around,' he says. 'If something happened to me tomorrow, I know he'd run it exactly the way we imagined it.' Diganta describes him as the person who knows how every moving part fits together; the person who has watched the place take shape closely enough to recognise when something is even slightly out of place. In a bar assembled from hundreds of tiny decisions, that kind of memory is difficult to replace. Perhaps that's why Diganta's favourite view of Bar Find isn't from behind the counter at all. It's across the room.
When I think back to that first night now, I don't remember the tasting notes of the Gilda Martini as clearly as I remember Diganta walking across the room, stopping every few minutes because someone had a question about a poster, a menu, a drink or a drawing on the wall. Every answer turned into another story and that's what stayed with me.
A few weeks after my visit, I found myself opening the little souvenir that Diganta gave me and it struck me that Bar Find doesn't really ask you to remember a cocktail. It leaves you collecting fragments instead. Maybe that's what Diganta meant all along. You don't always find Bar Find the way you find an address. Sometimes it reaches you much earlier, in somebody else's recommendation, in a conversation that refuses to end, in the certainty that you'll bring someone back the next time you're in town.
Until when can I visit Bar Find in Mumbai?
For now, Bar Find remains inside Kitaab Mahal until around September 10, while the team prepares a three-month Bengaluru pop-up, with dates still being finalised. Somehow, that uncertainty feels perfectly aligned with the bar itself.
DETAILS
Address: First Floor, Shop No. 2, Kitaab Mahal, Azad Maidan, Fort, Mumbai
Timings: 6pm till late, Mondays shut
Price: ₹3000 for two with cocktails