How Guwahati's dining scene got a gourmet redo

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₹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.