How Trèsind Studio Became the World’s First Three-Michelin-Star Indian Restaurant
On a Thursday evening in May 2025, at Dubai’s Address Sky View hotel, the Michelin Guide did something it had never done in more than a century. International director Gwendal Poullennec announced that Trèsind Studio, a 20-seat Indian restaurant on Palm Jumeirah, would receive three stars. The room erupted. For the first time, an Indian restaurant anywhere in the world had been given the guide’s highest honour.
The award was not a surprise to everyone who had been watching the kitchen. Trèsind Studio already held two stars. What was historic was the ceiling it broke. Three Michelin stars are reserved for restaurants judged “exceptional,” destinations worth a special journey. Only a little more than 150 restaurants on the planet hold that rank. Until that night, none of them served Indian food as their identity.
From a Delhi courtyard to Palm Jumeirah
The chef behind the restaurant is Himanshu Saini, then 38. He grew up in Sui Walan, in Old Delhi, in a joint family of nearly fifty people. The kitchen was the centre of the house. Spices were ground at home. Wheat was cleaned by hand. Papads and pickles were made in bulk. Food was not a profession; it was how a crowded household expressed care.
Saini trained at Banarsidas Chandiwala Institute of Hotel Management in Delhi, then spent formative years at Indian Accent under Manish Mehrotra, the chef who helped invent modern Indian fine dining in the capital. He later helped launch Masala Library and Farzi Café before a call from Dubai changed the path. In 2014, restaurateur Bhupender Nath of Passion F&B hired him to open Trèsind. The brief was ambitious: progressive Indian food that kept the flavours honest and the techniques contemporary.
Trèsind found an audience. In 2018 Saini opened Trèsind Studio as a smaller, more experimental sibling—an intimate room with an open kitchen, built for a tasting menu rather than a conventional à la carte service. Early years were hard. Bookings were thin. The pandemic emptied dining rooms. The concept looked niche. Then the Michelin Guide arrived in Dubai in 2022 and gave the Studio one star. A second followed in 2023. The third, in 2025, completed a climb that had taken seven years of service, not a sudden leap.
Saini has said the night felt heavy as well as joyful. “Today I realised what the word ‘only’ means,” founder Bhupender Nath remarked after the ceremony. The restaurant was no longer just successful. It was the first of its kind.
Rising India, not fusion
The menu that won three stars is called Rising India. It is a long tasting sequence—typically 15 to 17 courses over about three hours—organised around four landscapes rather than the usual North-South split of Indian restaurants: the Thar Desert, the Deccan Plateau, the coastal plains, and the northern plains and Himalayas.
The point is not fusion for its own sake. Saini and his team insist the flavours stay Indian. What changes is the architecture of the plate. There is often no rice and no bread as a default. Dishes arrive as one- or two-bite compositions, plated with leaves, flowers, shells and handmade ceramics. A Kerala sadhya might appear as a condensed course on a banana leaf. Ghee roast crab has been served with burnt cinnamon and a curry-leaf crisp. Other plates have included shiso papadum with yogurt crémeux, medu vada with peanut mole and parmesan saaru, and desserts that treat khandvi or ghevar as fine-dining material.
Michelin’s own language after the award was unusually warm. The guide called the menu “a masterpiece of originality, intrigue and precision” and said the restaurant highlighted Saini’s “limitless levels of imagination and creativity.” Inspectors praised the way traditional dishes from different regions had been “re-imagined and superbly crafted into vibrant, eye-catching, and flavoursome creations.”
The room matches the food. Guests sit around an open, lab-like kitchen. Service follows the old idea of atithi devo bhava—the guest is god—without the stiffness that often comes with three-star dining. The chef and his team present many of the courses themselves. Reservations are scarce. With only about twenty seats and a single evening service, tables are booked weeks or months ahead. The tasting menu has typically sat in the region of AED 900 to 1,300 per person before pairings.
The question India keeps asking
The celebration in Dubai immediately raised a sharper question at home: why does India itself have no Michelin-starred restaurant?
The short answer is bureaucratic, not culinary. The Michelin Guide does not operate a city or country edition in India. Stars are awarded only where the guide inspects. Chefs in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and elsewhere cook at a level that would be competitive in many starred cities, but they are not being scored. Indian-led restaurants have collected stars in London, New York, Chicago, Singapore and the Gulf. None of those kitchens is in India, and until Trèsind Studio none had reached three stars.
That gap has long frustrated cooks and diners. Indian food is one of the world’s great culinary systems: regional, seasonal, technically demanding, and built on spice craft that takes years to master. Fine dining in India has matured quickly in the last fifteen years. What it has not had is the red guide’s infrastructure—inspectors, a published city book, and the tourism partnerships that usually accompany a Michelin launch.
The Dubai award does not close that gap. It does change the argument. If an Indian restaurant can sit at the very top of the Michelin scale outside India, the old claim that the cuisine itself is “too rustic” or “too spicy” for three stars looks outdated. The limitation is geography of inspection, not quality of cooking.
What three stars actually change
Three stars do more than decorate a signboard. They alter demand, prices, staff recruitment and a chef’s working life. They also rewrite a cuisine’s status. For decades, the global fine-dining conversation treated French, Japanese and, later, Nordic cooking as the languages of three-star kitchens. Chinese, Korean and other Asian traditions have slowly joined that list. Indian food had reached one and two stars in several cities. Three was the missing step.
Saini has been careful not to treat the award as an ending. After the ceremony he said the job was to keep pushing and not get comfortable. That is the unglamorous truth of Michelin: stars can be lost as easily as they are won. Consistency, product, and a kitchen that does not coast are what keep a three-star restaurant in the guide the following year.
The award also arrived in a city that is itself new to the top of the list. The same 2025 Dubai ceremony gave three stars to FZN by Björn Frantzén. For the first time the UAE had restaurants at the summit. Dubai’s dining scene, built on capital, tourism and a large Indian diaspora, had produced the first three-star Indian restaurant the guide had ever recognised. There is an irony in that. The breakthrough did not happen in Mumbai or Delhi. It happened in a Gulf city that has spent a decade betting on destination restaurants.
A first, not a last
Trèsind Studio remains, for now, the only Indian restaurant with three Michelin stars. That “only” will not last forever. Other Indian kitchens in London, the United States and Asia are already on one- and two-star tracks. A future India edition of the guide, if it ever arrives, would change the map again.
What the 2025 decision settled is narrower and more important. Indian cuisine, cooked with regional memory and modern technique, can meet the strictest standard the industry still uses. The flavours did not have to be diluted. The plates did not have to pretend to be French. The restaurant that proved it seats twenty people on an artificial island in Dubai, and it traces its palate back to a crowded house in Old Delhi.
That is the real story behind the headline. Not that Michelin finally noticed Indian food, but that a chef who learned to cook in a family kitchen of fifty people built a menu precise enough, personal enough, and consistent enough to stand with the smallest group of restaurants on earth.
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