How Guwahati's dining scene got a gourmet redo

While Terra Mayaa ruled the scene for nearly a decade, the new places are refining it. These new restaurants and bars cater to a diverse audience and offer contemporary menus with a focus on premium ingredients and innovative techniques, and double as live music spaces.

Also read: Stories of music from Meghalaya

They’re run by restaurateurs who spent years outside of Guwahati, gained exposure to culinary hot spots and aim to upgrade the dining scene at home. Apart from The Jolly Angler, the buzzy new places that have opened over the last few years include the duplex restaurant Typically Indian Bar & Grill and the premium Asian restobar The Maroon Room.

Chiranjeev Brahma, 40, runs The Maroon Room with his family. He studied in Delhi, worked in Gurugram and quit his job in 2019 to venture into the food business in Guwahati. A talented musician and a bassist for a band, his love for music is reflected in the superior acoustics at his 7,000sq. ft restobar. As for the food, the focus is on crowd-pleasing Asian. “For better dining, ingredients are a priority. The pork comes from Belgium and sticky rice from Bangkok," he says.

Pork is integral to most north-eastern cuisines and it comes as a surprise that he imports it. “The quality here is inconsistent," he observes. On the menu is a grilled tender pork appetiser, Moo Ping, best paired with a clarified Pina Colada. While the pork dish was ₹599, each drink is priced at nearly ₹900. In a city like Guwahati, this is expensive, but Maroon Room draws about 4,000 people a month with its line-up of musicians from across the country. “We had the iconic Lou Majaw from Shillong perform here when we opened," says Brahma.

He also runs Yoko Sizzlers, while his wife Jiyale Kath started Tribetown Kitchen, a cloud kitchen with Bodo and Naga food, in 2020 and turned it into a restaurant in 2022. A unique drink at Tribetown Kitchen, also served at The Maroon Room, is a sumac tea or tisane brewed with Naga sumac. It has an earthy sour taste similar to sun-dried lemon.

Souring agents are essential to Assam’s cuisine with ingredients like the elephant apple and thekera (Garcinia pedunculata), which The Jolly Angler champions in vodka-based libations. “We want to create fusion dishes and drinks to highlight local produce," says co-founder Fahim Anwar, 30. A chicken dish is infused with tea from the family-run Sonari estate near Sivasagar. Two of its managing directors, Samujjal, 40, and Samudra Baruva, 50, are also co-founders of The Jolly Angler. It has 80 covers and the average monthly footfall is 1,500; cocktails are priced at ₹350-400 and food, ₹400-500 per dish.

Typically Indian Bar & Grill is run by Vivek Anand Dharan and Bhargavi Bejboruah, both in their early 30s. Dharan attended college in Bengaluru, returned to Guwahati in 2015 and explored the food scene. He noticed that there were either clubs or music places for the young and restaurants for families, all mutually exclusive. He wanted to have a place that combined the two.

Typically Indian opened in 2022, spread out over two floors, with separate entrances and exits. The first floor has an Indian touch with cane lamps, while the second floor is a club-like live performance space. The latter hosts party nights with K-pop chartbusters and bands.

It is a testament to the formula that’s making these places tick—catering to diverse age groups and good food and drinks augmented by a music experience to remember.

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