Fine dining · Talab Para, Nayapur · Tuesday to Saturday

Saanjh

Nine courses, cooked by lamplight, for twenty-eight guests a night.

The room

We light the lamps at dusk and cook until the last table leaves.

Saanjh is a single room above an old spice godown: eight tables, one hearth and a kitchen you can see from every seat. There is no à la carte and no second seating.

The menu is written each week from the morning mandi and what the two farms along the river can spare. Most of it touches the fire at some point.

The Saanjh dining room at night: pale linen tables under paper lamps, green plaster walls — The dining room, an hour before service.

Twenty-eight seats: Eight tables, booked a month ahead.
One menu: Nine courses, the same for every table.
One fire: An oak hearth lit at noon, left to burn down after service.

Five of the nine courses on this week's menu. It changes with the mandi and the weather, never all at once.

A raw oyster topped with pale green cucumber granita on crushed dark ice

18:40To begin

Oyster, cucumber ice, kokum

Opened to order and set on ice frozen from cucumber water and a little kokum. One mouthful, cold and briny, before anything is poured.

Poured with it: A dry, salty fino

Glossy slices of ash-baked beetroot with white smoked curd and buckwheat

19:15From the embers

Beetroot baked in ash, smoked hung curd

Buried in the hearth for four hours, peeled at the pass and dressed with hung curd we smoke over the same fire. Toasted kuttu for crunch.

Poured with it: A chilled, light red

A seared scallop in its shell with foaming brown butter and green sea herbs

20:00From the shell

Scallop, curry-leaf butter, sea herbs

Roasted in its own shell so the juices stay put, then basted with butter and curry leaves taken just past nutty. Sea herbs and a squeeze of gondhoraj lime.

Poured with it: An aged white from a cool coast

Slices of pink dry-aged duck breast with black plum sauce and a charred leek

20:50The main course

Duck aged fourteen days, black plum, long pepper

Dry-aged on the bone, rendered slowly over embers and carved at the table. The plums are salted in summer and cooked down with pippali in autumn.

Poured with it: A savoury, older red

A smooth dark chocolate dessert shaped like a stone beside a pale bay-leaf ice cream

21:40To finish

Chocolate stone, tej patta ice

Dark chocolate set in a river-stone mould, with ice cream steeped in tej patta, the Indian bay leaf. One jamun, because the season allows it.

Poured with it: Something sweet, old and brown

22:15, coffee by the hearth.

Nine courses. Wine or house-ferment pairings are offered at the table.

A cook's hands placing a single herb leaf on a plate with fine tweezers

In the kitchen

Chef Vikram Sethi cooks with one fire and no freezer.

He opened Saanjh after years cooking in hotel kitchens and in other people's kitchens, with a simple rule: buy only what can be cooked this week, and let the hearth decide the rest. Four cooks, one pass, and a menu that is rewritten on Tuesdays.

“If a dish needs more than the fire, the season and a sharp knife, it isn’t ready yet.”

How the evening runs

18:30Arrive at the hearth counter. Bread, cultured white butter and a first glass while the room fills.
19:00Everyone sits at once. The first four courses arrive quickly; after that, the kitchen follows your pace.
22:15Coffee and a last small thing by the fire. There is one seating a night, so nobody needs your table.