Bajra and Gundruk
A crisp of bajra, the pearl millet of Rajasthan's desert, with butter churned in house. Mustard greens ferment for 21 days into gundruk, a tangy preserve from Nepal and Sikkim, finished with timur, a Himalayan peppercorn. Food made to last through the lean months.
The Lean Months
Ananta Dining
Contemporary Indian cooking, one private table at a time, built on modern technique and on dishes the country itself has started to forget.
Begin
In India, food was never just sustenance. A meal marks a birth, a wedding, a harvest, a death, an ordinary evening made significant by who's at the table.
Recipes passed hand to hand for generations before they ever showed up on a menu: a region's climate, a household's memory, a grandmother's instinct, folded into a single dish.
Ananta Dining carries that same weight, plated differently. The technique is contemporary: precision cooking, restrained plating, ingredient-led menus that change with the season, treating Indian cuisine less like a fixed tradition and more like a living project still being written.
Alongside that, every menu makes room for a handful of dishes that have quietly disappeared from most Indian kitchens: regional preparations, forgotten grains, techniques that lost out to convenience. We bring them back on our own terms, reimagined, not roped off as museum pieces.
Chef & Owner
A kitchen built on history as much as technique.
Indian food carries centuries in a single dish: trade routes, empires, migrations, and the quiet, unrecorded decisions of home cooks who never wrote anything down. Apaar Verma grew up inside that history before he understood it as history, working alongside his father, a chef and restaurateur, and raised by Indian immigrant parents with two vocabularies for the same food.
He staged at Gaggan in Bangkok, then spent time in New York developing Indian-style Neapolitan pizza and Indian street food tacos, treating Indian flavor as a living language rather than a fixed inheritance. Ananta Dining is where that lands: a kitchen that cooks with the weight of the cuisine's past, not in spite of it.
Apaar Verma
Chef & Owner, Ananta Dining
The Table
The Harvest Menu
The farming year told in six chapters, from the lean months to the harvest festival. Built from Los Angeles fall farmers market produce and regional Indian dishes most kitchens have let go of.
01
02
Mitti and Chaas
Shaved Asian pear, fennel and radish over an earth crumble, finished with chilled spiced buttermilk called chaas, poured at the table. Mitti means earth, and the dish carries the smell of the first rain on dry ground. The buttermilk is what remains from churning the butter in the first course.
First Rain
03
Honeynut and Millet
A khichdi, the comforting porridge of Indian homes, made with foxtail millet, an ancient grain called thinai in South India. Topped with roasted honeynut squash in a sweet and sour glaze, pickled green chilis and toasted pumpkin seeds. The first squash of fall, cooked the way Punjabi and Uttar Pradesh homes do.
The Field
04
Gaad te Mujh
Gaad te mujh means fish and radish in Kashmiri, a winter dish from Kashmiri Pandit homes. River trout rubbed with Kashmiri chili and star anise rests on braised daikon, with a salad of mint, apple and walnut and crisp lotus root.
The River
05
Khad Lamb
Khad is a Rajasthani way of cooking lamb buried in a pit under glowing coals. Here the shank is sealed in dough, roasted for hours and cracked open at the table, served with a jus of Mathania chili, a deep red desert chili, and grilled chicory. It brings the meal back to the desert where it began.
The Fire
06
Nabanna
Nabanna is Bengal's harvest festival of new rice and new jaggery. A chilled payesh, the rice pudding, is made with fragrant Gobindobhog rice and nolen gur, a date palm jaggery found only in winter. Finished with warm roasted persimmon and moa, a puffed rice sweet from Joynagar.
The Festival
Six courses for 10 to 12 guests, October through December. Full menus, with sourcing and allergen notes, are shared directly with confirmed bookings.
How It Works
Three conversations before the first course.
01 · Invite
Tell us who's gathering
A meal starts with who's coming, not what's on the table. Share your date, guest count, and any region you'd like the kitchen to draw from. We'll confirm within two days.
02 · Cook
The menu follows the season
Each season has its own menu, built from what is best at the Los Angeles farmers markets and the regional dishes that belong with it. Chef Apaar walks you through the current menu before the date and adjusts for dietary needs.
03 · Gather
We bring the kitchen to you
The way a meal is meant to be eaten: together, in your space. We travel to your venue or home, or host in select private spaces, full service from first course to last.
Inquire
Reserve the table.
Private dining is booked several weeks out. Tell us a little about the seating you have in mind and we'll follow up directly.
- apaar@anantadining.com
- Service Area
- By arrangement
- Party Size
- 4 to 12 guests