World's 50 Best

Aditi Dugar

Discipline: World's 50 Best

i. Biography

Coming Up

Portfolio hospitality, when it is built as craft rather than as brand spread, depends on format discipline: tasting restaurant, lab, catering, bakery, café and coffee program each ask for a different operating grammar. Aditi Dugar works across those registers through Masque Tasting Lab, Sage & Saffron, TwentySeven Bakehouse / Bakery Project Number 27, SEESAW Cafe and Araku Cafe / Araku Coffee. Fine dining is the anchor format here. Masque, where Aditi Dugar is founder / CEO of Masque (since 2016), holds the most concentrated expression of the work around food, craft and Indian ingredients. Masque Tasting Lab extends that work into a testing format; Sage & Saffron carries it into polished hospitality; TwentySeven Bakehouse / Bakery Project Number 27 shifts the register to pastry, bread and oven work; SEESAW Cafe translates the same attention into a more casual café model. Coffee and place-making add another operating layer through the role of partner / brand and culinary-program advisor of Araku Cafe / Araku Coffee. Taken together, the projects read as a set of related hospitality practices rather than a single restaurant story: each format has its own tempo, but the same concern for execution, guest experience and culinary identity runs through the system.

Where They Are Now

Current work includes Sage & Saffron and TwentySeven Bakehouse. The two formats sit at different points in the hospitality trade: one around composed, catered and carefully managed food service, the other around baking and the daily reliability expected of bread, pastry and cake. In both, consistency is the working value—the repeated decisions that determine whether a table, loaf, cake, meal or service holds its standard. Advisory work also continues through ARAKU Café. Through Masque, Aditi Dugar is a Relais & Châteaux member, placing the restaurant within a global hospitality network while keeping its work tied to Indian ingredients and local expression. Across the formats, the through-line is quality control, experimentation and the building of experiences that are considered from first contact to final course.

Career - Founder / CEO — Masque, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India (2016–present) - Founder / operator — Masque Tasting Lab, Mumbai, India - Founder / operator — Sage & Saffron, Mumbai, India - Founder / operator — TwentySeven Bakehouse / Bakery Project Number 27, Mumbai, India - Founder / operator — SEESAW Cafe, Mumbai, India - Partner / brand and culinary-program advisor — Araku Cafe / Araku Coffee, Bangalore, India

Signature

Signature dishes include vada pav swirls, dhokla doughnuts, and naan khatai and cream cones. In Aditi Dugar’s hands, the work is less about novelty than format translation: a street-food reference moved into a swirl, a savoury form recast as a doughnut, and the sweetness and memory of naan khatai carried into cream cones. The method signalled by those names is format-aware Indian cooking. Texture, shape and association do part of the work, allowing familiar flavours to arrive in altered forms without losing their reference points. The craft position is clear: keep the recognisable base, adjust the structure, and let the guest read both memory and construction.

In Their Words “In the food business, that would be unwavering commitment to quality, constant experimentation and the willingness to put in the hard work required to see the previous two through.” “It’s hard to pin down success to one particular key or secret. It is a combination of things that needs to work simultaneously to ensure success.” The working language is practical: quality, experimentation and labour have to operate together. Aditi Dugar frames success not as a single device or secret, but as simultaneous systems held to standard. For an operator, that means testing without letting standards slip, and building enough repetition into the work that care becomes procedure.