Masque is in a mill, which is the fact a Mumbai week has to start from. Aditi Dugar opened it in 2016 in the old Laxmi Woollen Mills on Shakti Mills Lane, off Dr E. Moses Road. Varun Totlani is on the pass. Number 15 on Asia's 50 Best in 2026, the best restaurant in India on that list, plus the hospitality award. Ten courses. I would not plan this as a stroll from the Taj lobby. In Mumbai the traffic is the plan.
Marine Drive in daylight: the curve, the sea wall, the towers along the Arabian Sea. The Taj and the Gateway are around the point. Masque is in a mill in Mahalaxmi.
Marine Drive in the middle of the day is a long curve, a sea wall, and not much else, which is why it photographs so well. People talk about it as if it were the Gateway. The Taj faces another piece of water, around the point. The mill is a car from both.
Indian Accent is the other reason to cross the city, and it is a campus, not a lane. Manish Mehrotra's room started in Delhi in 2009 and in New York in 2016. The Mumbai kitchen has been open since 2023, on the ground floor of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre at the Jio World Centre in BKC, with Rijul Gulati running it. Dinner at Indian Accent, Mumbai is how the service actually goes. Rush hour to BKC is grim. I would pick one of these dinners. Both of them, plus the Gateway at dawn, is a day spent looking at the back of a driver's head.
The Taj is still where I sleep if that dawn matters. Jamsetji Tata opened it on 16 December 1903, at Apollo Bunder. The Gateway came about twenty years later, which surprises people who assume the arch came first. Say whether you want the Palace wing or the Tower. They feel like different hotels. Three Nights Facing the Gateway is the longer stay. The Oberoi, at Nariman Point, is the hotel that actually sits on the curve in the picture. From either lobby, Masque is a car and Indian Accent is a longer one. Kyani & Co., the Irani café on Jer Mahal Estate, is the breakfast that keeps you in Colaba: chai, bun maska, someone reading the paper at the next table. Have that. The crossing can wait until dinner.
If you slept at the Taj, the museum morning is a walk. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, the old Prince of Wales Museum, is in Kala Ghoda. It keeps the day in South Mumbai. Mahalaxmi in the evening, or BKC. Not both.
The city across the water at night. The lit curve again. The mill and the BKC campus are inland.
Practical notes
The airport to Colaba is about an hour when the road is kind. Monsoon rain and the evening rush make a fiction of that hour. A prepaid taxi or the hotel car is the arrival I trust. A ride-hail will get you to BKC, and then it will sit. November through February is comfortable. June through September is dramatic, which is a polite word for wet.
The Taj survived the attacks of November 2008 and rebuilt the public rooms. It is a working hotel. Book Masque, or Indian Accent, before you book the feeling of being near the sea.
The Asian Grand Tour carries the harbour if Mumbai is one stop. If the next stop is a palace, The Banquet Guide to Jaipur is about how far you sleep from the old grid.
