Mike Kathrani and Tina Vora’s fine-dining restaurant offers modern, complex Indian cuisine in North Hills in a luxe atmosphere.
by Catherine Currin
Floor-to-ceiling windows frame a shimmering scene: green velvet booths canopied by matte gold arches, chrome pendant lights over a marble bar. This is Tamasha, the brainchild of entrepreneurs Mike Kathrani and Tina Vora, infused with flavor by chef Bhavin Chhatwani. It’s a North Hills restaurant designed to invite guests to explore and expand their palates.
Tamasha means “grand performance,” and both the restaurant’s aesthetic and menu deliver on the definition. Each dish is impeccably balanced — like a slow-cooked Yellowtail Red Snapper finished with coconut curry sauce or the Kozhi Vepudu, where fermented rice and lentil pancakes are topped with spicy chicken. Many elements happen tableside for guests to experience: a final dribble of sauce or dusting of spice, a smoke bubble that pops to reveal a cocktail. “We wanted to create something which is truly elevated, not just the food or service, but the whole experience,” says Vora, who designed the space. “Everything is artfully presented.”
Chhatwani calls the menu his “love letter” to India. “Every state in India has its own cuisine, and it’s all a little bit different. We want to broaden our guests’ palates,” he says, noting that the Indian fare most familiar to American diners is centered around the milder, creamier curries of the state of Punjab in northern India. By contrast, Tamasha’s menu represents a blend of these diverse cuisines, from Delhi to Mumbai and beyond.
Before helping launch Tamasha, Chhatwani spent several years working in restaurants across the globe, including Michelin-starred Campton Place in San Francisco, as well as across India, visiting and working in the country’s diverse culinary regions. Some of his dishes, like the Oyster 65, a dish inspired by the iconic Chicken 65 developed for a luxury hotel in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, and the Hyderabadi Dum Biryani, a dish that dates to the Nizams, or kings, of Hyderabad, are pulled directly from Chhatwani’s experience creating cuisine for high-end kitchens in India.
Chhatwani says he felt called to create his own concept after working for years under other brands, and then he met Kathrani. “Our vision and our passion for the food matched,” says Chhatwani. Kathrani and Vora, who are married, were both born in India and came to the U.S. to work in the tech industry, eventually starting their own business ventures. But they felt a fine-dining version of Indian food was missing from the Triangle. “From the moment you walk in, you have a very clear indication that this is not an Indian experience that you’ve likely had,” says Kathrani.
Tamasha celebrates and elevates the rich variation in Indian cuisine. The Tuk Aloo Chaat, for example, nods to Chhatwani’s Sindhi roots and what his mother cooked as he was growing up in Rajasthan, a state in northern India. Aloo Tuk is a traditional fried potato dish, which he’s offering as a savory snack, infused with spices, onion, ginger and tamarind, with a chutney sauce. The Byadgi Chili Shrimps, by contrast, bring the heat from byadgi, a variety of chili pepper from the Haveri region of Karnataka in southern India, balanced with the sweetness of coconut milk. (Tamasha’s menu does offer some more familiar items, like an expertly done Butter Chicken, for less adventurous guests.)
For dessert, there’s North Meets South, a dish that pays homage to traditions from these two broad regions of the country. From the North, ghewar — a honeycomb-like sweet made from ghee and sugar — is paired with payasam, a sweet broth made from condensed milk that’s typical of Southern India. The chilled payasam is poured tableside. “I have spent time in both of these broader Indian regions, and I wanted to bring something to the menu that’s a marriage of North and South,” says Chhatwani.
Chhatwani recruited six chefs he’d worked with in India to perfect his dishes, each of whom relocated to Raleigh to work at the restaurant. “Indian food is very complex. For one dish, there could be 15 different kinds of spices in it,” he says. “It’s very difficult to create the bases and standardize everything. It was important to have people who understood these techniques.”
Chhatwani and his team use hand-ground spices for all of their mixtures, adding to the time and care put into each dish. “For all of our dishes, we have a different kind of garam masala, which is made in house,” says Chhatwani. Garam masala is a medley of spices like cinnamon, coriander and cardamom. “We dry roast all the spices for a day, then grind it to make the powder.”
Just as “barbeque” can mean something different based on where you grew up, Tamasha allows Vora, Kathrani and Chhatwani to celebrate the subtlety and variation in Indian traditions.
“We love our cuisine,” says Kathrani. “It is vast and rich. We want to take it as far as we can.”
This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of WALTER magazine.
