GRAMMIE, Delhi Review: A Restaurant That Understands How People Actually Want To Eat

Ask anyone who eats out regularly in Delhi what they are tired of and you will get variations of the same answer. Too loud. Too rushed. Too performative. The kind of restaurant that is more interested in its own concept than in the person sitting at the table. What people want, though rarely say out loud, is somewhere that cooks seriously, pours well, designs thoughtfully, and then simply lets you be. GRAMMIE, sitting inside Sangam Courtyard in RK Puram, is that place. Chef Tanveer Kwatra's restaurant operates at an easy, unhurried frequency, and from the moment you settle in, something about it makes you want to cancel whatever you had planned for later. You will not regret it.

GRAMMIE First Impressions: A Room That Knows Exactly What It Is Doing

GRAMMIE does not walk up to you with a handshake and a business card. It lets you come to it. Headlight Design Studio has built a space that feels lived-in and intentional in equal measure: marble floors that glow in the afternoon, an elliptical dining bar positioned at the centre of everything like a calm eye in the middle of the room, and a quality of light that manages to be gentle without feeling sleepy. Frida Kahlo hangs on one wall with the air of someone who has always been there and plans to stay.

After dark, the room quietly transforms. Projections drift across the surfaces: smoke, birds, movement that catches your eye and then lets go. Arjun Rathi's lights, shaped like oversized sweets, cast the kind of warm glow that makes every table look like it is having a better evening than the one next to it. Rohit Chawla's art installations punctuate the space with wit, keeping things from ever feeling too precious. The whole effect is of a room designed by people who have sat in a lot of restaurants and remembered which ones they actually wanted to return to.

Storm Evans' Ponté bar team oversees the cocktail programme here, and the drinks list signals early on that the bar is as serious as the kitchen. Open every day from noon until 1 AM, GRAMMIE invites the kind of visit that has no fixed end time. Lunch slides into the afternoon. The afternoon becomes dinner. Dinner becomes one more round. Delhi has seen this promise made before. Here, it is kept.

The Food: Working Through the Menu

We gave the kitchen most of an evening and ordered broadly. This is how it went.

Starting Small

The first thing out of the kitchen was a bellpepper and corn kataifi, and it immediately told you something useful about what GRAMMIE is doing. Kataifi, the fine pastry threads you more often find wrapped around something sweet, here enclosed a filling of sweet corn and charred pepper and arrived crisp, golden and genuinely light. The surprise was in the form, not the flavour, and that restraint felt deliberate.

Next was the arancini nigiri, which is the kind of dish that makes you put your phone down mid-scroll. The nigiri format is borrowed without apology: the silhouette, the proportions, the single clean topping. But the rice has been replaced with a crispy risotto bite that carries all the richness of a proper arancini. It should feel like a gimmick and instead it just feels good. Of everything we ate, it came closest to explaining the kitchen's whole approach in a single mouthful.

The Yellowtail Hamachi Crudo arrived third and shifted the register entirely. Paper-thin slices of hamachi, yuzu ponzu, enough citrus to lift the fat of the fish without bullying it. The discipline here is in what was left out. The tuna torta with caviar followed in a similar vein but with more luxury: the caviar doing what good caviar does, adding salinity and occasion without overcrowding the plate. Both raw dishes together made a convincing argument that Kwatra's best instinct is to stay out of his own ingredients' way.

From the Grill

The baked brie and bread came out before the grills and served as a kind of pause in the meal: rich, yielding, uncomplicated in the best possible way. It disappeared quickly and nobody felt any shame about it.

What followed from the grill section was the meal's busiest and most satisfying stretch. The barbecue sweet potato had the kind of smokiness that makes you briefly forget you are not eating meat. The chicken wing gyoza was the cleverest thing on this part of the menu: all the sticky, glazed, slightly charred pleasure of a good chicken wing, but delivered inside a dumpling with a properly crisped bottom. The charred black cod was exceptional, its surface carrying that lacquered sweetness that is very difficult to fake and very easy to ruin. Grilled shrimp were well seasoned and confident. The Mediterranean meatballs, herby and tender, were the dish on the grill section that required the least explanation and delivered the most comfort.

Pizza, Pasta, Bowls

The pepperoni and pickled peppers pizza with agave honey provoked a genuine debate at the table, of the pleasurable kind. The dough had proper fire blisters, the kind you can only get from a very hot oven and some actual technique. The pickled peppers cut through the fat of the pepperoni with precision. The agave honey arrived last on the palate, pulling everything into a balance that was simultaneously sweet, sharp and savoury. This is a pizza worth coming back for specifically.

The bowls section rounded out the savoury eating with three very different personalities. The fettuccine arrabbiata was straightforward and correct, the sauce properly spiced and the pasta given the respect of not being overcooked. The udon pesto was the one that needed the most convincing on paper and earned the most admiration on the plate: the thick, chewy udon carried the pesto with a richness that regular pasta would not have managed. The tofu and bok choy donburi was the lightest of the three, clean and umami-rich and the kind of dish you are grateful for by the end of a long meal.

Desserts That Actually Matter

GRAMMIE's gelatos are made in-house and it shows in every spoonful. We went through all four. Smoked almond was the one worth talking about the most: the smoke present but not theatrical, sitting underneath the nuttiness like a warm note held just long enough. Dark chocolate was properly bitter and not sweetened into submission. Spicy guava was the most playful, the chilli building behind the fruit in a way that kept you coming back to check if you had imagined it. These are gelatos for people who have eaten a lot of bad gelato and know the difference.

The dark chocolate mousse cake with honeycomb closed the evening with real intention: moussey and light in texture, with the honeycomb adding crunch and a caramel sweetness that the chocolate needed. A good ending is its own kind of skill and GRAMMIE has it.

The Cocktails: The Bar Earns Its Place at the Table

Storm Evans' programme here is working with flavour combinations that are interesting without being gimmicky, which is harder than it sounds.

The passionfruit vanilla, built on vodka and prosecco, was the most immediately accessible of the four we tried: bright, a little floral, the kind of drink that works from the first sip to the last. The lychee and sesame tequila sour was the standout, a combination that reads oddly on paper and tastes completely right in the glass, the sesame adding an earthy, savoury depth to the lychee's sweetness that turned it into something genuinely complex. The miso and caramel highball was the drink for the later part of the evening, slow and layered, the kind of thing you nurse while the conversation goes somewhere interesting. The grapefruit and makrut lime was the most theatrical: a mound of kala khatta flavoured shaved ice resting on top, melting slowly into the drink and reshaping its flavour as it goes. It is the drink equivalent of a dish that keeps changing on you, and it was the one the table talked about most on the way home.

These are drinks that have been thought about. They reward the same kind of attention the food does.

Worth Your Evening?

Straightforwardly, yes. GRAMMIE is a restaurant where the kitchen, the bar and the room are all operating at the same level of care and intention, which is rarer than it should be. Kwatra's cooking is technically sound and generous in spirit, never showing off but never coasting either. The space is beautiful in a way that serves the people inside it rather than the photographs taken of it. And the pace, genuinely unhurried, never rushed, never hovering, is the thing that will bring you back most reliably.

It is a meal that costs money, but spends it well. Sangam Courtyard has earned a reputation as a destination worth crossing the city for, and GRAMMIE is a significant part of why that reputation holds.

Go with people you want to talk to. Order more than you think you need. Let the evening do what it wants to do.

📍 Sangam Courtyard, RK Puram, New Delhi. Open noon to 1 AM, daily.