Beyond Butter Chicken, Australia’s Cooks Put India’s Regions on the Plate

Dinner at Enter Via Laundry starts at a washing-machine door, on a quiet stretch of Nicholson Street in Carlton North. Guests who land one of the 20 seats walk past the machines and into a room where chef Helly Raichura plates kangaroo pasanda scattered with riberries and pink peppercorn. The plates are hand-painted in Jaipur. The address is meant to be hard to find, and the cooking is harder still to pin to a single label. Every few months Raichura throws out the menu and builds a new one around one region or one period. Her most recent turn drew on the 17th-century Mughlai kitchens of northern India.

A narrow menu for a broad country

Australia eats a great deal of Indian food. The order rarely changes. Butter chicken, tikka masala and a stack of naan have become the national shorthand for a cuisine that runs across 28 states and dozens of separate regional kitchens.

That shorthand sits oddly against the numbers. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported on 29 April 2026 that people born in India numbered 971,020 as at 30 June 2025. That made them the largest overseas-born group in the country for the first time on record, narrowly ahead of the England-born at 970,950. In the decade to 2025 the India-born population grew by 522,000, the biggest increase of any country of birth.

The community has visible centres. In July 2021 the City of Parramatta gave three Harris Park streets, Marion, Wigram and Station Street East, the official name Little India. Close to 45 per cent of residents there claim Indian ancestry, and more than 20 Indian eateries and grocers trade within a few blocks. The council, said Lord Mayor Bob Dwyer, is home to the largest population of people of Indian descent in the country. Australian diners happily separate Tuscan from Sicilian, or Provençal from Lyonnais, when the talk turns to Italian or French. India’s regional kitchens have rarely earned the same fluency, among them Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Malabari, Punjabi, Hyderabadi, Goan and Rajasthani. A growing number of cooks want to change that.

Melbourne widens the map

Raichura came to Melbourne from Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, in 2007. She worked in human resources first, then cooked for a living. The restaurant grew out of dinners she hosted at home, strangers around her table for regional Indian food, in through the laundry. Word spread and the bookings ran months deep. A stint as guest judge on MasterChef Australia in 2020 pushed the waitlist into the thousands, and the permanent Carlton North room followed. Broadsheet has put Enter Via Laundry on its Hot List for service and hospitality. Raichura is now writing a book with Hardie Grant about how Indian cooking has changed in Australia. Her menus favour native produce and regional traditions that get less airtime, not the familiar curry-house canon.

A few minutes away, in the Melbourne CBD, Jessi Singh runs Daughter in Law under a banner he calls “unauthentic Indian”. Singh grew up in a farming family in Punjab. He cooked his way through Melbourne, then opened restaurants in New York and California, among them Babu Ji and Bibi Ji, plus Don’t Tell Aunty in Sydney. The food argues with itself on purpose. Butter chicken made without butter, ghee or oil. Naan folded into pizza. Pork-neck vindaloo. “Yes, I’m Indian, but I live in Australia and I’m also Australian,” he told SBS Food in 2019. The label needles, and it asks a real question about who gets to define a national cuisine.

Sydney’s regional turn

In Sydney, the clearest sign of the shift arrived on King Street in Newtown in March 2025. Kolkata Social is a Bengali restaurant run by Ahana Dutt, who took the kitchen after cooking at the wood-fire room Firedoor and at Raja in Potts Point. The menu follows Kolkata’s adda culture, the Bengali habit of long talk over food, through dishes such as moong dal er bora, radhabollobhi and slow-cooked goat kosha. It operates as a social enterprise under Plate It Forward, and every set menu pays for two meals, one in Sydney and one in India. Dutt has argued the point before, telling SBS Food that “Indian food is much more than their perceptions”. Bengali cooking runs on mustard oil and freshwater fish, a regional voice that seldom reaches an Australian menu.

Across the harbour in Cremorne, Nilgiri’s has been making that argument for far longer. Ajoy Joshi trained with the Taj hotel group and reached Sydney by way of Hyderabad. He runs the place with his wife, Meera, and moves its focus around India’s regions instead of settling on a fixed card. In 2024 the Restaurant and Catering Awards named it Best Indian Restaurant in Australia, according to North Sydney Living. Joshi also teaches monthly cooking classes that work through Punjabi, Goan, Kashmiri and Kerala repertoires. “Come with an open mind,” he has said, promising to shift how the city thinks about Indian food. None of this is new for him. Regional cooking held ground in Sydney for decades before it turned fashionable.

Back in Harris Park, Chatkazz has pulled crowds to Little India for more than a decade. Owner Dharmesh Rangparia and his team cook vegetarian Mumbai snacks, with Gujarati and South Indian additions, most of it for less than 12 dollars a plate. Chhole bhatura, pav bhaji, dabeli, papri chaat, dosa, khaman dhokla. “We are all from Mumbai. It’s Mumbai street food. That’s what we tried to replicate here,” Rangparia told Broadsheet. The room is unlicensed and plain, and it treats chaat, the snacking culture of India’s streets, as a reason to make the trip. Out on footpaths lined with saris, bangles and spice shops, the food reads as part of a wider cultural centre.

From detention to the dinner table

Community sits underneath some of Melbourne’s most distinctive cooking. Tamil Feasts runs out of the Merri Cafe at CERES in East Brunswick, serving Sri Lankan Tamil banquets of curries, vadai, dahl and chutney on Thursday and Friday nights. The menu changes each week, so no two sittings are alike. The cooks are Tamil asylum seekers. Several fled Sri Lanka’s civil war and spent more than six years in Australian detention before their release in 2015. The meal doubles as support for recently settled asylum seekers, through food and culture. A shared table costs 35 dollars a head, and the kitchen decides what everyone eats.

Television and the critics catch up

Television has done its share. Sashi Cheliah won the tenth season of MasterChef Australia in 2018, taking the finale with a record 93 points out of 100. Cheliah, a Singaporean-born Australian chef of Indian descent, cooked from Malay, South Indian and Sri Lankan traditions, and his win put that heritage in front of one of the country’s biggest audiences. He later opened Gaja in Adelaide, where the menu ran from Thai to South Indian. It closed in 2026. His win told a national audience that Indian-heritage cooking goes well past the takeaway curry.

Food media has moved the same way. In 2021 SBS ran India Unplated, a 10-episode series that followed three chefs across the country’s regions. It opened in Gujarat, Raichura’s home state, then travelled through Hyderabadi biryani, Bengali fish curry and Gujarati dal dhokli. Raichura hosted alongside Sandeep Pandit, a former MasterChef contestant, and Adam D’Sylva, a Melbourne chef of Goan-Indian and Italian parentage. D’Sylva co-founded Coda in 2009 and opened the modern Indian dining room Tonka in 2013, then left the group in March 2023 for other work. His mix of Indian technique and Italian instinct went out nationally, and it carried regional Indian cooking to a mainstream audience.

Critics have started naming the gap out loud. An SBS Food feature in May 2024 argued that India’s 28 states hold distinct culinary traditions, long buried in Australia under a handful of North Indian restaurant staples, and it lined up a generation of chefs pressing the same point. One was Shashank Achuta of the Sydney Tiffin Room. His method, in his own words, was to “keep the essence intact, and then change everything else about it”. The same month, Broadsheet ran a Melbourne guide under the heading Go Beyond Curry. In July 2025 Time Out told Sydney readers to drop the idea that Indian food means “creamy sauces, soft breads, and two-note spice blends”. The words are catching up with the kitchens.

The long menu

The cooks share a refusal. With roots in Gujarat, Punjab, Bengal, the Tamil regions and the south, they decline to flatten their food for a market that met Indian cuisine through a single dish. Australia has the numbers, close to a million India-born residents with more arriving each year, and it has the appetite to tell a Chettinad kitchen from a Kashmiri one as easily as Tuscan from Sicilian. The recognition is already there. A MasterChef trophy. A national restaurant title. Prime-time television, and a suburb officially renamed for its community. What is left is for the ordering to widen and match the country doing the eating. The menu was always longer than the takeaway let on.

Images in this article are AI-generated illustrations.