Trésind Studio: The world’s best Indian restaurant isn’t in India

Where would you expect to try the best Indian food on the planet?

Mumbai, most likely, for its vada pav and pani puri chaat snacks. Goa for the seafood and coconut-fragrant curries.

Maybe it’s somewhere in Punjab, the breadbasket of India, for its heady variety of kulcha, naans and parathas. All excellent options.

But for cuisine so outstanding and creative that it earned a third Michelin star in May this year — the first and only Indian restaurant in the world to do so — you need head for Dubai.

Trésind Studio, which opened in 2018, sits on the top floor of the St Regis Gardens in Palm Jumeirah — home to a somewhat contrived collection of high-end restaurants.

Dubai has a tic for the flashy and famous and it collects big-name chef openings like trophies (Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and Alain Ducasse all have shrewd little moneyspinners in the city).

Trésind Studio is different. Once you step from the rather sterile terrace entryway, there’s no trace of ego or pomp.

There’s also only six tables. Gentle deep house pulses through the stereo.

A brigade of chefs, led by executive chef Himanshu Saini (formerly of Indian Accent in Delhi), glide noiselessly around the central kitchen.

You’re welcomed with smiles, led to your table and presented with a cocktail menu printed with circular pastel mandalas that help describe the flavour profile of each drink (a large blue mandala means it’s heavy on the umami, yellow indicates sweet).

Order the “Injipuli” if it’s there — a smoky purr of tequila, tamarind, ginger, black pepper and curry leaf spirit, and your journey begins.

The current menu is called “Rising India”, an exploration of the different regions of the subcontinent.

The 15-course meal wanders everywhere from the central Deccan Plateau to the seafood-rich coastal plains. Between each section a waitress, Mehak, brings over an enormous 3D map of India to explain where we’re heading next, an act that begins with solemn reverence but dissolves into wry chuckles as she wrangles the giant artwork (“I’m back!” she says with a grin by the time we reach course four).

The tables even get a rotation of decor to help place guests in the landscape: a shifting sand sculpture appears for the Thar Desert section, a vase of wheat, cotton and cat o’ nine tails arrives to represent the grain-growing regions of the northern plains.

In the wrong hands it could be cheesy. Here it adds levity, and it’s a clever way to help guests realise that India is anything but monolithic.

The food is exactly what a modern restaurant should be — layered with storytelling, technique, flourishes and fanfare but above all genuinely delicious.

The ghee-roast crab opener snack, served in a woody curl of cinnamon bark and a plate swirled with psychedelic rainbows, is equal parts flavourful and fragrant.

The “Sadya” — that one sits under the Deccan Plateau— is a take on a ceremonial Keralan meal where dozens of tiny tastes are presented on banana leaves.

Here, the entire kitchen team arrives at the table, and each one adds a single ingredient to the leaf-shaped plate - a ring of pickled pineapple is placed first, then a swirl of rice cream, pumpkin and mango curry, black lime and banana vinegar, and so on.

Eventually a completely composed dish materialises, topped with a little pappadum hat.

It’s clever but watching the team march around the table and flick their droplets and swirls onto the plate is also just plain fun.

A modern dinner and a show. No one ever said fine dining had to be po-faced.

When you eat a lot of food at this level, you tend to see a lot of the same tricks and trends. Trésind Studio does its own thing, beautifully.

Saini and his team have blended flavour with fun, and just enough elegance to snaffle those stars.

Time for an extended stopover. tresindstudio.com