The thing that finally happened
In May 2025, a restaurant called Trèsind Studio in Dubai was awarded three Michelin stars. It is the first Indian restaurant anywhere on earth to receive them.
That sentence is worth sitting with, because of how long it took. Indian cooking is among the oldest and most technically sophisticated cuisines in the world, with regional traditions that differ from each other more than French does from Italian, and for the entire history of the Michelin Guide it had been capped below the summit. Plenty of one stars. Eventually a two. Never the third.
Indian cooking waited a very long time at two stars while the guide worked out that it was not a category of curry but a continent of cuisines.
The reason it took so long is not mysterious. Outside India, Indian food was priced and understood as neighbourhood value cooking, and the guides read it that way. What has changed in the last decade is not the cooking, which was always there, but the willingness of a generation of chefs to present it without apology, at full price, in serious rooms, and to do it regionally rather than serving a flattened pan-Indian menu that exists nowhere in India.
Two lists follow. The first is global. The second is American, where the shift has been fastest of all.
The ten best in the world
1. Trèsind Studio, Dubai
Three Michelin stars · Chef Himanshu Saini
The first three-star Indian restaurant in history, awarded in May 2025, and also a fixture on the World’s 50 Best list. A twenty-seat studio running a tasting menu that moves through India by region and season, rebuilt several times a year.
What earned it the third star is precision rather than novelty. Saini is doing to Indian cooking what the great modern French kitchens did to theirs: taking dishes with deep regional roots and executing them with a technical exactness that removes every rough edge without removing the identity. It is also, tellingly, in Dubai rather than London or New York, which says something about where the money and the confidence have moved.
2. Gaggan, Bangkok
Number one in Asia’s 50 Best 2025, number three in 2026 · Chef Gaggan Anand
The most influential Indian chef alive, and the one who broke the category open before anyone else. Gaggan Anand was named the best restaurant in Asia in 2025, having previously held the top spot for four consecutive years at his original restaurant, and he did it in Bangkok, cooking Indian food, for a region that had no particular reason to care.
The style is progressive to the point of provocation, an emoji menu, dishes eaten with your face in the plate, a soundtrack at rock-concert volume, and underneath all of it a Kolkata-born understanding of spice that is entirely serious. Half the chefs on this page will tell you he made their careers possible.
3. Gymkhana, London
Two Michelin stars · Mayfair · JKS Restaurants
The restaurant that proved Indian food could hold two Michelin stars, and for years the highest-rated Indian restaurant in the world. Built as an homage to the colonial-era sporting and social clubs of British India, all dark wood, ceiling fans and leather, with a menu that is far tougher and more game-forward than the room suggests.
The kid goat methi keema is one of the most copied dishes in London. It survived a serious fire and reopened, which the city treated as a civic event. It has now opened its first American outpost, in Las Vegas at ARIA, which is its own kind of milestone.
4. Semma, New York
Michelin star · West Village · Chef Vijay Kumar
The most important Indian restaurant in America and one of the most important in the world, because of what it refused to do. Semma serves the food of Tamil Nadu, including the rural southern cooking Kumar grew up with, without translating it, softening it or explaining it away.
Kumar won the James Beard Award for Best Chef in New York State in 2025. In the same year New York Times critics ranked it the number one restaurant in New York City, full stop, not the best Indian restaurant. It does not publish a phone number and it is one of the hardest tables in the city.
5. Indian Accent, New Delhi
Asia’s 50 Best · The Lodhi, New Delhi
The restaurant that started the modern Indian fine-dining movement inside India itself, which was a harder task than doing it abroad. When it opened, the assumption in Delhi was that serious money went to French or Italian food and Indian cooking belonged in the home or the dhaba.
Indian Accent broke that by treating Indian ingredients with tasting-menu discipline, and its blue cheese naan and daulat ki chaat became famous enough to force a rethink. There are now outposts in New York and London, but the Delhi original is still the one.
6. Avartana, Chennai
Asia’s 50 Best · ITC Grand Chola, Chennai
The most quietly radical restaurant on this list. Avartana takes South Indian food, the idli and dosa and sambar that most of the world regards as inexpensive breakfast, and rebuilds it as a multi-course tasting menu without a shred of condescension in either direction.
No dish is announced in advance. The menus are named simply by the number of courses. It has been on Asia’s 50 Best and has expanded to other Indian cities, and it is the strongest argument going that the future of Indian fine dining is regional rather than pan-Indian.
7. Masque, Mumbai
Asia’s 50 Best · Chef Varun Totlani
India’s answer to the ingredient-driven, forage-led restaurants of Scandinavia, in a converted cotton mill in Mumbai. Masque runs an entirely seasonal Indian tasting menu built on producers the kitchen has sought out across the country, from Himalayan foragers to Kashmiri farmers, with no imported luxury ingredients at all.
That last constraint is the whole point. It insists that India has everything a world-class kitchen needs already.
8. Trishna, London
Michelin star · Marylebone · JKS Restaurants
Coastal south-western Indian seafood in a bright Marylebone room, and the restaurant that first established the group behind Gymkhana. Where Gymkhana is dark and gamey, Trishna is light, sharp and full of citrus and green chilli. It has held its star for well over a decade, which in London is the harder achievement.
9. Veeraswamy, London
Michelin star · Regent Street
Britain’s oldest Indian restaurant, open since 1926, and a Michelin star holder in the modern era, which is a remarkable double. Almost no restaurant of any cuisine survives a century and then gets better.
It has fed Winston Churchill and assorted maharajas, sits above Regent Street looking down on it, and serves a refined, historically grounded menu that treats the last hundred years as an asset rather than a costume.
10. Bibi, London
Michelin star · Mayfair · Chef Chet Sharma
The most interesting new-generation Indian kitchen in Britain. Chet Sharma has a doctorate in physics from Oxford and cooked at Mugaritz, Noma and The Ledbury before turning to the food of the subcontinent, and Bibi reads as exactly that combination: rigorous technique, British produce, Indian intent.
A small room with an open kitchen and a menu that changes constantly. It is where I would send someone who thinks they already know what Indian food in London is.
Also in the conversation: Jamavar and Quilon in London, both Michelin-starred. Bukhara and Dum Pukht in Delhi, the old guard, still magnificent. Naar in the Himalayan foothills, a recent arrival on Asia’s 50 Best. And Amaya in Belgravia, the Michelin-starred grill that has been getting it right since 2004.
The ten best in America
America currently has four Michelin-starred Indian restaurants. All four are here, and then the list continues on merit.
1. Semma, New York
Michelin star · West Village · Chef Vijay Kumar
See above, and then go. Tamil food with no compromises, a James Beard Best Chef award in 2025, and a number one ranking in New York City from Times critics the same year. There is no serious argument for anything else at the top of this list.
2. Indienne, Chicago
Michelin star · River North · Chef Sujan Sarkar
Chicago’s starred Indian restaurant, running a tasting menu that moves through the subcontinent with real technical polish. Sarkar had already built a reputation in the Bay Area before opening here, and Indienne is the more disciplined expression of that work. It also proved the model outside the coasts, which mattered.
3. Rania, Washington DC
Michelin star · Chef Chetan Shetty
The newest of the American stars and the most ambitious room of the four, in a city that has taken Indian food seriously longer than most of America. Shetty cooks a modern, regionally sourced menu in a setting built to compete with any fine-dining restaurant in Washington on its own terms rather than as an ethnic-category alternative.
4. Musaafer, Houston
Michelin star · The Galleria · Chef Mayank Istwal
The name means traveller, and the concept came from exactly that: the team toured India extensively before opening, collecting dishes region by region. The result is an opulent Houston room with a menu that is genuinely a survey rather than a greatest-hits selection, and it earned Texas its first starred Indian restaurant.
5. Dhamaka, New York
Lower East Side · Chef Chintan Pandya
The most uncompromising Indian restaurant in America and the one that changed what New York expected. Pandya, a James Beard Award winner, built Dhamaka around what he calls unapologetic cooking: goat, offal, fierce regional heat, dishes from parts of India that had never appeared on an American menu.
No fusion, no softening, no tasting menu. It is loud, cramped and thrilling, and it made the case that authenticity could be a commercial strategy rather than a compromise.
6. Bungalow, New York
East Village · Chef Vikas Khanna
Vikas Khanna is the most publicly recognised Indian chef in America, and Bungalow is his return to a New York dining room, drawing on the food of Punjab and Amritsar where he grew up. Beautiful room, warm service, and a menu that is more personal and less formal than his reputation would suggest. It was one of the most talked-about openings in the city.
7. Rasika, Washington DC
Penn Quarter and West End · Chef Vikram Sunderam
The American Indian restaurant that set the standard before any of the others existed. Sunderam won a James Beard Award, Rasika has been a Washington institution for close to two decades, and its palak chaat, crisp fried spinach with yoghurt and tamarind, is probably the single most famous Indian dish in the United States.
Not the most modern restaurant on this list. Arguably the most consistently satisfying.
8. Copra, San Francisco
Fillmore District · Chef Srijith Gopinathan
South Indian coastal cooking from a chef who previously held two Michelin stars in San Francisco for his Cal-Indian work. Copra is the looser, more direct project: seafood, coconut, Kerala and Tamil influence, and a menu built for sharing rather than for ceremony. It is the strongest Indian cooking on the West Coast.
9. Pijja Palace, Los Angeles
Silver Lake
An Indian sports bar serving pizza, and one of the hardest reservations in Los Angeles. It sounds like a gimmick and it is not. The malai rigatoni and the tandoori-spiced pies come out of a genuine Indian-American sensibility rather than a marketing meeting, and it has been enormously influential on how a younger generation of chefs think about the category.
It belongs on this list precisely because it is not fine dining. Not every advance arrives with a tasting menu.
10. Gymkhana, Las Vegas
ARIA Resort & Casino · JKS Restaurants
The American debut of London’s two-star institution, on the Las Vegas Strip. Worth watching rather than pronouncing on, but its arrival is significant on its own: the most decorated Indian restaurant group in Britain chose Las Vegas for its first American room, which tells you they expect Indian fine dining to sell at the very top of the American market. Ten years ago nobody would have taken that bet.
Late addition: Ambassadors Clubhouse, New York
1245 Broadway, NoMad · JKS Restaurants
This opened in NoMad in early 2026, after the list above was drawn up, and it belongs on it. The London original holds a Michelin star, and the New York room is a maximalist hundred-and-fifty-seat, two-storey space in dark timber and deep navy, run by chef Karan Mittal, previously of Indian Accent.
The cooking is Punjabi, drawn from the royal kitchens, the roadside stalls and the family homes of the region rather than any one of them. Together with Gymkhana’s arrival in Las Vegas, it means the most decorated Indian restaurant group in Britain now has two American rooms open inside a year, which is the clearest signal yet of where this is heading.
What to order, wherever you are
If a menu is organised by region rather than by protein, follow the region. That structure is a signal the kitchen has a point of view, and the dishes will be better where its heart is.
Order at least one thing you cannot identify. The whole reason this category has been underrated for fifty years is that diners abroad kept ordering the six dishes they already knew, and kitchens kept cooking them.
And if you find yourself at a table with a proper South Indian tasting menu, notice how much of it is vegetarian and how little you mind. That is the actual argument these restaurants have been making all along, and it took the guides a very long time to hear it.
Whatever Suits You · Style. Sound. Substance.
Read next: The Counter, the best sushi in America and Japan →