About the restaurant
Located in the buzzing Keong Saik Road dining enclave, Ahāra is chef-owner Vikramjit Roy’s rock ballad to India. Through both food and art, Roy’s first restaurant in Singapore, is a reflection of his roots and culinary journey that has taken him across the seas from India to Japan.
The cuisine
“I came from humble beginnings and I had the privilege of learning from some of the world’s best chefs,” chef-owner Vikramjit Roy explains. “I wanted to bring all my experience into Ahāra.”
At Ahāra, the erudite chef draws from India’s rich diverse history, culture, traditions and creative arts to offer a luxe, unpretentious, yet studied experience of India’s overlapping regionalities and communities while blending the legacy of many lifetimes.
The experience
Ahāra occupies the 1,300 square-foot ground floor of a pre-war shophouse, an architectural style synonymous with the neighbourhood. The restaurant is designed in tandem with Chef Roy’s cuisine, to celebrate the multiplicity of India’s culture, tradition and community.
The 32-seater refined dining restaurant offers intimacy without pretension or formality. The eye is compelled to move along Singaporean artist Jason Wee’s visual poetry, rendered in a series of knots based on the dots and dashes of Morse code.
Wee calls for the viewer’s attention by carefully composed colours, a juxtaposition of textures and an oblique relationship with words, setting the tone for Ahāra’s revisionist definition of food as the root of all well-being.
The art
Art is part of the dining experience at Ahāra and a curated selection is displayed proudly throughout the restaurant. The second exhibition at Ahāra, put together specially for Art SG, is centered around the registers of poetry and the written word, repetition and a sense of rhythm.
The works are created by artists hailing from many regions across South and Southeast Asia, who weave stories, poems, narratives and experiences. Expect a slate of names known and upcoming like Jason Wee, Radhika Khimji, Astha Butail, Jong Oh and Heman Chong.
These pieces are part of an extensive collection belonging to The Eight Foundation, an institution that supports contemporary art practices and its community. The foundation was established by Vir and Simran Kotak to embrace the exploration of the cross-pollination of ideas between contemporary art practices, the worlds of design, architecture, food, beverage, the environment, politics and social sciences.
Find out more about The Eight Foundation here.