This Raleigh restaurant was named one of America’s most beautiful. Here’s why

Wrapped in glass, the new North Hills restaurant Tamasha is known to sparkle.

Silvery pinwheels are strung from the ceiling by threads, catching the light in an effect that brings to mind a river caught in the moon’s glow.

That glow may be shining brighter these days, as Tamasha has caught a sparkle of the national culinary spotlight.

Only three months old, it was the North Carolina pick for Open Table’s 50 most beautiful restaurants in America list, published last month with People Magazine.

Tamasha is the first restaurant of married couple Manoj “Mike” Kathrani and Tina Vora, who also own a nail salon and an IT staffing company. With Tamasha, the couple aimed to create an ambitious and upscale Indian restaurant, which they said was largely missing in the Triangle’s food scene.

Kathrani, who calls himself a foodie and said owning a restaurant had always been a dream, handled operations and Vora took on the design herself, believing Tamasha’s trappings and ambiance was the first part of a meal.

“People eat through their eyes,” Vora said. “The design is inspired by the name, which means grand performance. We wanted to design a restaurant that was mind-blowing. When people walk into the restaurant, we wanted them to be awestruck.”

Tamasha packs a punch in a small footprint. Vora said she is a self-taught designer and filled the dining room with green velvet booths topped by gleaming metal arches, with each table looking something like an ornate birdcage. There are walls of artificial greenery studded with candles and a private dining room lined with wine bottles.

“It does have earthy elements, an earthy color scheme,” Vora said. “It’s a pure labor of love. We’re very proud. We wanted to create something that’s intimate, with those metal arches there.”

A ‘mind-blowing’ honor

Vora said the Open Table list came as a surprise, particularly for such a young restaurant.

“It was mind-blowing,” she said. “We didn’t expect that, to be honest....It means the world to us.”

Tamasha opened in February in a new restaurant space in North Hills, serving dinner six nights a week, with brunch expected in the future.

Kathrani said Tamasha hoped to offer glimpses of India’s vast culinary offerings and modern preparations.

“Our intention was to bring a modern, progressive, elevated Indian concept to Raleigh,” Kathrani said. “Then we went on the hunt for the best chef. Tina was telling me, can we get a Michelin-starred chef? I interviewed over 70 chefs to be part of this restaurant.”

Bhavin Chhatwani is the chef who emerged from that search and had indeed spent time in a Michelin-starred restaurant, at one point working as sous chef at the two star Taj Campton Place in San Francisco.

Chhatwani’s career has mostly been spent in the kitchens of luxury hotels in India, but in Tamasha, he said he has the most control he’s ever had over a dining experience, from writing the menus to sourcing every ingredient. The kitchen is staffed with four cooks Chhatwani previously worked with in India.

Beautiful flavors: The Tamasha menu

The Tamasha menu includes familiar dishes like butter chicken, here made with skewers of chicken roasted in a blistering hot tandoor oven.

But most of the menu uses Indian spices and flavors to seek out something new. There’s a pork belly bao that takes two says to dry age and then sous vide before charred on a grill, and a mushroom risotto, where large puffs of lion’s mane mushrooms are roasted in the tandoor and served with oyster and beach mushrooms and topped with truffle.

In an ode to his new home, Chhatwani created the Oyster 65, a nod to the popular gobi and chicken 65 dishes, but with fried oysters.

“I had never had fried oysters before in my life until I came here to North Carolina,” Chhatwani said. “The first time I had the oysters in my life was at Ricky Moore’s joint The Saltbox. I loved the oysters.

“My cuisine is my perspective from wherever I travel, wherever I go and what I see,” Chhatwani said. “Why can’t I create an Indian version of the fried oyster which is inspired by the Indian spices.”

Chhatwani said he was drawn to cooking as a child and tried to recreate the movements and ingredients he saw others make in the kitchen. The closest dish to a childhood favorite on Tamasha’s menu is the Dal-e-Tamasha, a dish of stewed lentils cooked for 24 hours until broken and creamy.

“It’s very soulful, at the end of the day when I don’t know what to eat I just take some lentil and have it with some bread and it’s really, really, very authentic,” Chhatwani said.

The dessert, North Meets South, which references regions in India where Tamasha’s chefs grew up, is one of the restaurant’s most dramatic visual flourishes. The base is a single ghewar, a round pastry that’s practically pockets of air stitched together by fried dough. To create the texture, the liquid dough is poured in drops from a squeeze bottle about 10 inches above a pan of hot oil, the pastry slowly building over a few minutes in suspended splashes. The ghewar is topped with diced pink young coconut, cubes of coconut gelee, rose and hibiscus dust, edible violets and flecks of gold leaf. A rice custard is poured from a lamp tableside.

“(The food) has to play with your senses,” Kathrani said. “Food-wise it has to have beautiful flavors.”