Gunpowder, London: A Bib Gourmand Tour of India in One Sitting

There is a version of "Indian food" that exists mostly on menus built for people who’ve never been asked to be more specific — a butter chicken, a garlic naan, a mixed grill, all filed under one flattening label. Gunpowder doesn’t serve that in their restaurant. It never has, which is exactly why it’s held a Michelin Bib Gourmand for years running: not the star system’s spotlight, but the quieter, more useful recognition — exceptional food, honest prices — that I’ve always found a more honest way to point people toward a kitchen than a numbered countdown ever could.

We dined there on our last full day in London, lunch timed loosely around a third trip with my wife to Liberty — which had, by that point in the trip, become her favourite store in the city, and she’ll tell you so unprompted. The table wasn’t just the two of us, either: Melody, who’d been with us in London, since before the cruise, through San Sebastián and all the way back to London, and Eugene, an old friend from a Vietnam tour we took years ago who flew in from Dublin just to spend a couple of days with us before we all flew home. That’s the kind of table you don’t waste on a mediocre plate, and Gunpowder has never once given me reason to worry it might be.

What Gunpowder actually serves, if you let it, is a tour. Not of India as a country, but of India as the dozen-plus distinct culinary regions it actually is — Chettinad and Karwar and Kashmir and Nagaland and Goa, each with its own grammar of spice, technique, and pantry, showing up on the same table in the space of one lunch. It’s the same instinct I keep coming back to with Chinese food: the specific version of something is almost always more interesting than the generic one, and it’s usually one menu section away from where everyone else is ordering.

We started with a Gin Wala Negroni — a spiced riff on the classic that leans into gin’s own botanical kinship with a spice cabinet, rather than fighting it. It’s a smart opening move for a menu built on chili heat and layered spice: bitter, aromatic, and just cooling enough to reset the palate before the food started arriving in earnest.

And arrive it did — this was very much a small-plates, order-everything kind of lunch, which with four of us at the table and a flight to say goodbye to the next day was really the only honest way to eat here. Okra Fries came first, the kind of dish that sounds like a side and eats like a thesis statement: okra’s grassy snap held intact under a genuinely crisp shell, nothing soggy about it, which matters more than it sounds like it should.

The Venison and Vermicelli Doughnut followed — one of the kitchen’s signatures, and deservedly so: a savoury doughnut built around game and fine noodles, the kind of dish that shouldn’t work on paper and entirely does in the mouth, sweet-bready exterior giving way to something rich and gamey underneath. Alongside it, a plate the menu just calls the CPC Prawn Toast — I never did work out what the initials stood for, and honestly, I liked that it stayed a small mystery rather than over-explaining itself.

From there the table started to feel less like a menu and more like a map, which is easier to enjoy with four people passing plates than it would be alone. The Chettinad Pulled Duck Oothappam pulled from Tamil Nadu’s fiercely peppery, black-pepper-and-star-anise Chettinad tradition, spooned over a fermented rice-and-lentil oothappam base that’s usually built for vegetables, not duck — a genuinely interesting swap.

The Karawari Soft Shell Crab reached further south down the coast, into Karnataka’s Karwar-style spice crust, all rust-red and crackling, the kind of dish where the crunch does as much talking as the flavour.

Goan-Style Grilled Prawns brought a different coastal register entirely — coconut and vinegar-forward, brighter and less punishing than the Chettinad plates, a reminder that "coastal Indian" isn’t one flavour any more than "coastal Chinese" is.

Then north, hard: Maa’s Kashmiri Lamb Chops, built on the dried-chili-and-fennel warmth of Kashmiri cooking rather than raw heat.

And the Tandoori Chicken Chop with Butter Masala Sauce, which is exactly the rich, tomato-cream comfort you want it to be, done properly instead of as a default.

The Tandoori Sea Bass with Samphire Pakora was the most technically composed plate of the meal — clean char on the fish, a genuinely inventive use of samphire, which I don’t often see paired this way.

And then, last and loudest, the Nagaland Pork Belly — smoky, funky with the fermented bamboo shoot and Naga chili that define that part of the northeast, about as far from a generic curry-house plate as Indian food gets on a London menu.

We had a window table, which gave the room excellent natural light for the whole meal. The space itself is small — just twenty seats — dark wood panelling, an open bar running along one side wall, taking up about half the room’s depth, and tables close enough that passing plates never took much of a reach. I never did manage to photograph it, an oversight I still regret. The service matched the room: sharp about pacing four of us through eleven dishes without ever rushing the table, the kind of hospitality that quietly outranked most of what we found elsewhere in London that trip.

It’s a lot of ground to cover over one lunch, and that’s rather the point. Michelin’s own Bib Gourmand write-up on Gunpowder has stuck for years for the same reason a wine list built around specific villages beats one organized by grape alone: specificity rewards attention. We left having tasted an argument, not just a meal — that "Indian food" was never one thing to begin with, and the kitchens that treat it that way are worth seeking out on purpose, especially when the company at the table has come as far as Melody and Eugene did to share it with us.

Order this: the Venison and Vermicelli Doughnut and the Nagaland Pork Belly if you only get two dishes — one is Gunpowder’s own invention, the other is the clearest single bite of a region most London menus never touch. Start with a Gin Wala Negroni, and go in prepared to share everything.