There is a particular kind of Mumbai bar that wants to impress you within the first thirty seconds. The lighting arrives before the drink does. Someone mentions a centrifuge. A menu reads like a chemistry exam with tasting notes.
Adam & Eve, a new 25-seater in Khar, has other plans.
Adam & Eve starts with ingredients that sound more at home in a grocery basket than beside a bottle of mezcal – Ponzu, enoki mushroom, brie, beeswax, yerba mate. The idea, according to founder Pratik Gaba, is to build cocktails from the pantry outward, instead of beginning with the spirit and piling on effects later.
Which sounds serious. Potentially exhausting, even.
Instead, the room feels surprisingly loose. There are deep red interiors, low lighting and an exposed stainless steel bar in the centre of the room, though nobody seems particularly interested in performing expertise. The drinks carry the intellectual exercise lightly enough that you can enjoy them without needing a lecture halfway through.
A cocktail made with tequila, grapefruit and ponzu has the sharpness of a very good gossip session. Another folds enoki mushroom and truffle into whisky and somehow avoids becoming dinner in a glass. The cola-and-espresso drink tastes like the grown-up version of staying awake during a college submission night.
The most interesting thing about Adam & Eve may be that it understands a truth many ambitious bars miss: people want flavour before theatre.
Even the food seems aware of this. Chef Saurabh Udinia’s menu moves through chilli oil dumplings, grilled prawns, curry leaf wings and bowls of coconut rice with seafood that arrive with the kind of generosity rarely seen at bars trying this hard to be sleek. The broccoli, charred at the edges and dragged through burnt garlic chilli, was the sort of dish that cancels out any instinct to behave elegantly. I ate it with my hands, leaning over the table so the sauce would not land on my shirt, which felt like exactly the correct way to eat in a room this polished.
And then there is the khichdi.
I ate khichdi in a room where I would never have expected myself to eat khichdi. Not at a cocktail bar with projection art sliding across the ceiling and drinks clarified into crystal-clear precision. Yet there it was, warm and comforting in the middle of all this careful experimentation, reminding you that the city’s smartest new bars are finally learning how people actually like to eat and drink.
Mumbai has enough bars trying to look futuristic. Adam & Eve is more interested in appetite.
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