In Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda, 'Across' is reframing what ‘Himalayan’ cuisine means in urban Indian imagination. Led by chefs Viraaf Patel and Prakriti Lama Patel, the restaurant brings together regional ingredients from across the Himalayas with contemporary technique and deep cultural and culinary heritage. In a candid conversation with Homegrown, the chefs tell us why their food isn’t defined by a fixed idea of “authenticity”, but draws from moving, living conversations shaped by the mountains, the people, and their own lived experiences.
“Himalayan, for me, means my own love story,” Chef Viraaf Patel says. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and I am talking to Viraaf and his wife, Chef Prakriti Lama Patel — the co-founders of Across, a Himalayan restaurant and cocktail bar in Kala Ghoda — over Google Meet. Even though we are almost two thousand kilometres apart, I can tell his eyes are twinkling. He looks at her, and suddenly it’s almost as if the veteran chef and restaurateur with over two decades of experience is a young man again. When I ask them how they first met, his face lights up with a boyish smile. “Let me do this?” he asks her. She nods, in that faux dismissive ‘this guy!’ way women do that men all over the world know and love, and he goes ahead.
“We met when I was setting up a restaurant in Delhi,” Chef Patel says. “She was in Delhi visiting her mother at the same time, and I was persistent. I kept asking her to meet again, but she wasn’t very responsive at that time,” he says. “But then, she was studying and working in the Philippines, and I happened to go there for something. On the last day before she was leaving, she finally agreed to meet.”
“Actually, I was there for my brother’s engagement, and we got married before them,” he says, seemingly amused. “So that says how quickly this transpired into a relationship.”
Today, Viraaf and Prakriti run Across, a Himalayan-inspired restaurant and cocktail bar that draws on the Himalayan region across Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the Tibetan plateau, combining contemporary techniques with deep cultural and culinary memory. Viraaf, a veteran of professional kitchens with decades of experience and industry knowledge from Gateway Taproom (Mumbai), Frida Cantina (Goa), and The Salt House (Kolkata), and Prakriti, with her family roots, deep understanding of Himalayan ingredients, and aptitude for research from her background in clinical psychology, are equal architects of the Across story.
The idea for Across crystallised in the foothills of the Himalayas almost two years ago, while Prakriti and Viraaf were visiting Nepal. The couple found themselves in Solukhumbu, a remote village in eastern Nepal perched on a windward, high-precipitation slope of the Eastern Himalayas. “The food we ate there, the food we ate at home, changed my desire for food completely,” Viraaf says. “I no longer have cravings for anything but that cuisine, you know?”
“My mother was also an influence. She’s very ingredients-focused. Has always been,” Prakriti chimes in. “She’s almost like a single woman-led co-operative. She works with women farmers and leases them land so they can grow different vegetables like particular varieties of potatoes and spinach. That inspired us to ask questions like: ‘What’s this ingredient? How do they cook it? How can we cook it?’”
“So in Solukhumbu, in a village with maybe 50 people in it, a couple of vans and buses, and an airport — I kid you not, there’s an airport which is used twice a month — ” Viraaf says, “we finally said we have to bring this food to a larger audience because the world needs to see this! We grabbed bags full of ingredients and came back with 85 kilos of excess baggage!”
Over the following year, they developed ideas, tested menus through pop-ups, and eventually settled on the name ‘Across’, reflecting the fluid, borderless nature of Himalayan cultures. “We were discussing a cuisine from across the Himalayas,” Viraaf recalls. “And someone said, should I just write ‘Across’ on the menu? And I said, yeah, just put it down.”
The name holds a more profound and personal significance for Prakriti, whose ancestry spans across regions that refuse to fit neatly into modern, political borders. “What was important for us, and why the restaurant is called Across, is that Himalayan identity doesn’t sit neatly inside one nation’s borders,” Prakriti says. “People kept assuming we were opening a Nepali restaurant, but if you look at the genetic and cultural patterns across the Himalayas, it’s impossible to pinpoint one singular origin.”
“Borders are a very recent geopolitical creation. They have nothing to do with food.”Chef Viraaf Patel
“Even in my own family, we can trace lineages to Nepal, Sikkim, Mongolia,” she says. “It would be a disservice to choose one country or one city and say, this is the border and this is where we belong. But geography doesn’t behave that way. When you look beyond political lines, you realise how interconnected the region is across shared terrain, shared ingredients, and shared challenges that shape similar ways of cooking.”
“When we brought these cuisines to Mumbai, one of the considerations we made was how do we adapt to a diner that has no understanding of this,” Viraaf says. “We understood that either people will not understand what we’re trying to do, or people will have had a very limited and adulterated experience. So our first thought was this is not going to be a place where we are going to stack these things against a cuisine, but we are going to modernize it.”
“For instance,” Prakriti says, “in most places, the umami in thukpa comes from a packet. What we have done is we have taken the most exotic winter mushrooms and made this intense mushroom broth which we then use for our thukpa.”
“It’s the same thing, but we have elevated it from a culinary perspective,” Viraaf adds, “because we have the ability and the knowledge and the means to do it. But we are still hand-kneading our noodles, so in terms of technique, we have also gone back to the old ways.”
“It’s like a dear friend of mine, Chef Gresham Fernandes, once said, ‘authentic yes, but authentic to whom?’” Viraaf says.
“Authentic is what authentic does.”Chefs Viraaf & Prakriti Lama Patel
For Viraaf and Prakriti, authenticity is rooted in engaged, grounded practices such as sourcing ingredients ethically and directly from the hills, learning from local families and farmers, and remaining faithful to the region’s flavours and landscape. They also embrace change by incorporating finer cuts, refined textures, and modern techniques to elevate the cuisine without losing its character. They see Himalayan food as vibrant and continuously evolving, much like the region’s contemporary culture. Their approach isn’t about conserving a fixed tradition but about highlighting how these cuisines are transforming and can continue to develop. For them, authenticity is a representation of the Himalayas as they are: diverse, porous, and always in flux.
The kitchen’s routines are tightly synced to logistics. Ingredients come in every Tuesday through a supply chain perfected over the past year and centred around Siliguri–Kalimpong–Darjeeling — a hub connected to Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. “Tuesdays is when we have our specials because that is when most of the new things come in,” Prakriti says.
Most of Across’ fresh produce — such as meats, dairy, vegetables, and mushrooms — comes from Maharashtra itself. But they also import ingredients from the Himalayan regions. For example, the prized beans for their signature black dal come from Nepal’s Mustang and Solukhumbu areas. They source peppercorns, chillies, and artisanal semi-hard Kanchan cheese from Kalimpong, along with more from the hills. When I ask which ingredient they cherish the most, Viraaf and Prakriti answer almost instantly: Timur peppercorns. Similar to Sichuan peppers, but black, citrusy, deeply aromatic, and mouth-numbing, they source five varieties from different Himalayan regions, each for a different use at Across.
Across is the culmination of all these ideas, techniques, traditions, as well as Viraaf and Prakriti’s decades of experience and industry know-how. Evolution remains at the heart of Across. They refuse to let their menu ossify. Unlike their previous restaurant Café Zoe — where they couldn’t change the menu for nine years because of regulars who wanted the same things again and again — dynamism is what drives Across forward.
“Our cuisine keeps evolving every week,” Viraaf says. “We don’t have to continue doing something just because we started that way.”
Since opening Across in November 2024, chefs Viraaf and Prakriti have made hyper-local Himalayan cuisines more accessible to Mumbaikars while also educating those unfamiliar with the region’s culinary traditions about its diverse flavours. Going forward, they plan to refine their offerings, explore seasonality more deeply, and eventually bring their Himalayan cuisine to more people across more cities.
Follow @across.bombay to keep up with chefs Viraaf and Prakriti, or call 7506128945 to reserve your table.
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