This new restaurant in Mumbai's Lower Parel aims to recreate the Indian royal dining experience

Junglee Maas Chaap. Pics/Kirti surve Parade

There are restaurants you visit for flavour and then there are those you step into for a feeling. The Silver Train, we heard, belonged to both. It's a place where the servers call you hukum and regale you with royal kahaniya (stories). Interestingly, the name itself is inspired by a miniature silver train of Gwalior's Jal Vilas Palace that carried cigars, condiments, and crystal decanters, as courtiers watched in awe. It wasn't just a party trick but a symbol of how Indian royalty turned meals into moments of pleasure.

Pista Kulfi

That sense of drama and delight is what restaurateur Shravan Juvvadi and chef Anuradha Joshi Medhora wanted to recreate - not in some faraway fort, but in the heart of Palladium's Gourmet Village. The space hums with quiet opulence, a farcry from the brocaded grandeur one might expect from royal dining, but something more understated - like the palace's ‘cool wing,' where indulgence was effortless and stories were shared over long, unhurried meals.

Born in Indore and raised amid the aromas of royal kitchens, Medhora brings both scholarship and soul to the restaurant - just as she did with her earlier venture, Charoli Foods. Here, her food isn't about nostalgia but continuity - every dish feels like an edible secret passed down through time, restored with precision and quiet pride rather than pomp. "Royal kitchens never asked why, only what next," she laughs, introducing us to a menu that revives the daring, eccentric legacies of India's regal courts. Years of research have gone into decoding royal menus, interviewing old khansamas, and unearthing culinary codes once treated as state secrets. "In those days," she says, "a recipe was guarded like a throne. Sometimes two cooks knew only half of it - to keep it safe."

Rampuri Seekh

The food here reinterprets the luxury of Indian palaces for the modern, mindful diner. From the Junglee Maas Chaap, a rustic four-ingredient shikaar dish born when a king lost his way on a hunt, to Ande ka Halwa, a cook ‘s attempt to coax a prince into eating them, as with the Benami Kheer, made with garlic. The Taaze Masale Ka Maas uses no dry spice - only fresh coriander, green chilli, onion, and garlic - a Bhopali method where fragrance replaces fire. The Rampuri Sheekh Kebab echo the delicacy of Mughal grills. The best part - you can let your appetite and mood dictate your orders for starters and mains, available in portions for one, two or four.

The restaurant's crown jewel is The Silver Thali, a seven-day rotating menu that bridges history, season, and forgotten recipes. No two days are alike. For Juvvadi, founder and CEO, and the man behind Hyderabad's Tabula Rasa restaurants, cultural archives are disguised as experiences. He sees food as a form of belonging, "a way to make people feel part of something timeless, yet new." The Silver Train, he insists, was never meant to be nostalgic. "It's about the present in dialogue with the past - food that remembers, but also moves forward. I wanted to re-imagine our royal legacy not as a museum piece, but as a living, breathing story for today."

Shravan Juvvadi and Anuradha Medhora

We ended with the Curious Kalakand, a clever medley of orange kalakand, betel leaf, and brandy snap. It tasted like memory meeting mischief. Then came the Pista Kulfi Dubki, its pistachio-white chocolate shell cracking open to reveal a hint of sea salt and surprise. As we left, it felt as though we hadn't just dined - we'd been invited into a secret, a continuing conversation between a majestic past and a reimagined present.