The most interesting story on this list is the No. 1. Naar is a 16-seat restaurant in the hills of Himachal, and you have to drive two hours of winding mountain road from Chandigarh just to eat there. Condé Nast Traveller and District announced India's Top 50 Restaurants for 2026 at a ceremony in Goa. They started with a longlist of more than 1,000 restaurants across the country. Mumbai's The Table and Papa's came second and third. Goa matched Mumbai's number of entries for the first time. Kolkata got four restaurants in. But the top spot went to Naar, near Darwa village outside Kasauli. Not a big-city restaurant. It is literally a tiny room in the mountains. To understand Naar, you have to understand the man behind it. Prateek Sadhu grew up in Kashmir. As a kid he wanted to be a commercial pilot and even prepared for the NDA entrance exam. As luck would have it, he ended up in a kitchen instead. He trained at The Culinary Institute of America and then worked at some of the most famous restaurants on Earth. Noma in Copenhagen. Alinea in Chicago. The French Laundry in California. Le Bernardin in New York. For a young Indian chef, that's like playing for Manchester City, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich in the same career. In 2016 he came back to India. Coincidentally, that September, Masque opened in Mumbai inside an old textile mill in Mahalaxmi, with Aditi Dugar as owner and Prateek as head chef. Masque became famous for using only Indian ingredients, many foraged from the Himalayas. In 2017, Condé Nast Traveller ranked it 7th in India and named Prateek chef of the year. Masque went on to become one of the most respected restaurants in Asia. Then in April 2022, right at the peak, Prateek left. It shocked the food industry. People couldn't understand why someone would walk away from the top of the game in Mumbai. He left to go to the mountains. During this time he kept visiting Amaya, an eco-resort near Kasauli run by his friend Deepak Gupta. It's spread over 20 acres of hills, works as a farm, and is built from local stone and wood. Prateek turned an old cow shed there into a research lab. He and his team started studying how people in the Himalayas actually eat. Not Maggi. Not momos. Not pakoras at a hill station dhaba. The real food. What gets foraged from the forest. What gets dried, pickled and stored for winter. What changes from one valley to the next. They laid out a big chart paper and mapped everything they found, then turned it into the pillars that shape Naar's menu. He named the restaurant Naar, which means fire in Kashmiri. Even Prateek wasn't sure it would work. He has said the idea is impractical and that nothing like it had been tried in India. Indians are used to great restaurants being in big cities. But Naar was asking you to plan a trip around one meal. It calls itself India's first destination dining restaurant. There are only 16 seats. Booking happens through a WhatsApp bot on their website, by phone or by email, and timings get confirmed within 48 hours. The staff live on the property. He describes the food as simple and says they're cooking the mountains and bringing them to your plate. :) It's also very much a team. His wife Aashina Kaul used to work in Bollywood film marketing, including with Shah Rukh Khan. She moved to the hills to help run the place. Chef Kamlesh Negi has worked alongside Prateek for 14 years, and Prateek jokingly calls him his "work wife." Kamlesh co-leads Naar's kitchen today. Eventually the world started noticing. In 2024, TIME put Naar on its list of the World's Greatest Places. In 2025, it was ranked 66th on Asia's 50 Best Restaurants. In 2026 it jumped to No. 30, making Kasauli one of only three places ever to appear in that top 50 for the first time. Food & Wine ranked it 6th in the whole world in its 2026 Global Tastemakers list. Yes, a small restaurant in a Himachal forest was sitting in the global top ten. And now it's No. 1 in India. What I love about this story is that for years, "fine dining" here meant French or Japanese or modern European. Naar took food that most of us never bothered to learn about, the food of Himachal, Kashmir and the high villages, and treated it with the same seriousness Noma gives Nordic food. It worked because Prateek spent years studying it before he served even a single plate. It also says something about taking big risks. He left one of the best restaurants in the country at its peak. He moved to a place with no city crowd and no walk-in customers. He built a 16-seat room two hours from the nearest airport. Four years later, it's the best restaurant in India.