What Italian cuisine in India got right, even when its authenticity got diluted

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Italian cuisine in India did not arrive as a lesson in regional nuance. It arrived as comfort—carb-heavy, generous with cheese, and designed to please. From the 1990s onwards, restaurants like Little Italy in Mumbai’s Juhu and chains such as Nirula’s in New Delhi helped flatten a complex cuisine into something instantly legible. 

Thirty years later, pasta and pizza remain staples even at non-Italian restaurants across India, from cafes to sweet shops including chains like Haldiram’s, though they bear very little resemblance to what is served in Italy.  

Why Italian cuisine worked in India

Italian cuisine arrived with flavours Indians could immediately understand and adapt to. “Indians love carbs and have always found it easy to fall in love with cheese, given its umami quality,” explains archaeologist and culinary anthropologist Dr Kurush F. Dalal, unpacking why Italian food in India found early acceptance. 

India and Italy also share structural similarities: “The climate is similar as both have a hinterland and coast. Both have had the Columbian Exchange and both have adapted potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes to their respective cuisines,” adds Dalal. 

“Italian food showed up when India was opening up—both economically and culturally. Olive oil made sense to a culture raised on ghee. Even cheese felt indulgent, but intuitive,” says Divashri Sinha, co-founder, Bar Sogo in Goa. 

Italian and Indian cuisines overlap in food fundamentals too: garlic, milk, and chillies. “People think Italian cuisine doesn’t use chillies but we just don’t know about it. We also relate more to Italian cuisine because of wheat, especially in North India where it’s consumed often. Indians have their own versions of wheat paranthas,” says Dhruv Oberoi, head chef of Olive Bar & Kitchen group. 

Indians have been serving cassata for decades, an Italian dessert layered with ice cream and sponge. “Desserts are the cornerstone of building any cuisine. Unlike French desserts, which are more delicate, a tiramisu is a slap on the palate,” says Tanveer Kwatra, owner of the New Delhi-based restaurant Grammie. 

Italian cuisine in India got absorbed into Continental food culture

However, when the British Raj departed from India, it gave the country Continental cuisine—a genre largely unique to the Indian dining context. Old-school establishments reflected what colonial kitchens had introduced: dishes like chicken à la Kiev at Mogambo in Calcutta, Gaylord in Mumbai, or The Embassy Restaurant in Delhi. “Such dishes that have their own story and aura—they aren’t Italian or French, just Continental,” says Oberoi.

“It also gave birth to club food.  There were bits of Italian cuisine on Continental menus as well. Spaghetti Bolognese is an all-time favourite in most Continental restaurants. One still associates Italian food in India with it,” says Dalal. 

The ‘Continental’ tag helped Italian cuisine to grow in India because five-star hotels and airline catering services introduced pasta, pizza, and risotto as ‘Continental luxury’. “In the 1990s, Italian food felt aspirational yet familiar—something you could eat repeatedly, not just occasionally,” says Gupta. 

This labelling stripped Italian cuisine of its regional identity early on, a legacy it has struggled to shake off. “Once a cuisine gets labelled that way early on, it sticks. Also, because pizza and pasta became shorthand for ‘Continental,’ the deeper, more nuanced parts of Italian food did not get a separate identity. It became a category, not a culture,” says Sinha. 

How American fast food reshaped Italian cuisine in India

The mass popularisation of Italian cuisine was ultimately driven by American fast food. “Italians don’t classify dishes like the thin crust Romano-style pizza as their own but it is popular in India,” says Kwatra. “An Americanised style of any cuisine works for the Indian palate because the US doesn’t have its own cuisine—it’s primarily built on immigrants from across the world moving in, bringing their food with them. India has always looked up to the West,” he adds referring to chains like Domino’s. 

“That’s why Domino’s has a ‘30-minute delivery or free’ offer. Some might call it bastardisation, but it does bring the cuisine to the forefront,” points out Kwatra. 

“Pizza was centralised to South Italy. It got adapted when people from the region migrated for work and had to adapt to different ovens and cook differently. By the time it hit America, the country modified pizza to their taste. Hollywood made it even more popular,” says Dalal. 

“Italian food is often treated as ‘no-brainer’ meals because it’s made using simple mechanisms which can be adapted and stored. If you have pasta, cheese, and bottled tomato sauce, a meal can be ready in minutes,” adds Oberoi. Pasta’s popularity also coincided with the rise of dual-income households in India looking for quick meals. “People weren’t ordering ‘Roman’ or ‘Sicilian’. They were ordering cheesy, creamy, spicy,” says Sinha. “Once food gets flattened into moods and formats, nuance disappears.”   

“We even colour-coded it—red, white, green, pink sauce. No one else does that. Italian food didn’t survive globally because of authenticity. It survived because it was useful,” adds Sinha. 

Why authentic Italian food struggled to translate in India

In Italy, however, pasta is part of a larger, structured meal, not a single-bowl comfort food. “The nuance of seasonal vegetables, restraint, and technique was lost—not because it wasn’t good, but because speed and familiarity took precedence,” observes Gupta. 

Authentic Italian food, argues Gupta , is about clarity, not complexity. “A dish like Aglio e Olio works only when the garlic is gently cooked, the olive oil is of good quality, and the water used to boil pasta is incorporated correctly. That level of restraint is difficult in markets where ingredients were once unavailable or inconsistent,” says Gupta. 

The distinction that often gets missed is pasta’s texture and format. Fresh, hand-rolled pasta, the way it is traditionally made in Italy, tastes fundamentally different from packaged dry pasta available elsewhere across the globe. “Pasta is not a main course but the first one,” explains Ritu Dalmia, chef and co-owner of the 25-year-old restaurant Diva in New Delhi. “Italian cuisine has multiple courses: antipasti, a small starter to whet your appetite, comes before the first course that comprises rice, gnocchi, crepes or pasta, catering to the body’s need for carbs. It’s a small portion. The mains are usually meat, fish or vegetables,” explains Dalmia, who has previously lived and worked in Italy, frequenting the country since the 1990s.  

“Fresh pasta is [more common in] northern Italy, [while] dry pasta dominates the southern regions. Authenticity lies in the technique, balance, and respect for the recipe—not just in the form of pasta,” says Davide Di Domenico, Chef de Cuisine, PREGO – The Westin Gurgaon, who is from Naples. 

For chefs cooking Italian food outside Italy, adaptation of the food is often unavoidable. “Italian dishes are made with high-quality, local ingredients, prepared using simple techniques that highlight their flavours,” says Davide Ciampi, a private chef and consultant born in Manfredonia and raised in south Italy’s Mattinata, now based in Auckland. 

Ciampi’s grandfather was Campano, his grandmother Pugliese, and Ciampi grew up serving local specialties and high-quality pizza at his uncle’s restaurant in Mattinata. “Abroad, chefs must often adapt recipes to the expectations of diners, by adding cream to Carbonara, for instance. This isn’t wrong; it’s survival. But with the right ingredients and trust, it’s possible to bring true Italian experiences anywhere, blending tradition and creativity. In Italy, tradition is scrutinised; abroad, the same dishes become innovative with a story, which elevates the dining experience,” says Ciampi. 

How Italian food adapted to Indian kitchens

Access to ingredients like Parmigiano Reggiano, Pecorino Romano, San Marzano tomatoes, fresh basil, and good quality olive oil was once limited. Substitutes soon followed. “Cream replaced emulsified pasta water, processed cheese replaced aged cheeses, and ketchup replaced tomatoes,”  says Gupta. 

What helped Italian food persist was flexibility. “We had our way with it—more garlic, more chilli, more richness—and it didn’t resist being Indianised. It just somehow fit. Italian food worked here because it respected the palate instead of trying to teach it. When food feels familiar, evolution feels easy,” says Sinha. So, Aglio e Olio became garlic-cream pasta. Pesto became a cashew-based green sauce. Carbonara lost eggs and guanciale and acquired mushrooms and sometimes corn. 

“You can’t do that with say, a Thai curry,” says Kwatra. “Italian cuisine is technique-driven [but Indians] want textures on their plates,” he adds.  Which is why when Oberoi sends out pasta al dante to diners, it often requires explanation. “If someone’s grown up eating pasta from Big Chill [in New Delhi] for 20-30 years, that’s what authentic Italian will be for them,”  he says. 

What ‘authentic’ Italian cuisine means today

Today Indian restaurants have greater access to a range of ingredients. Local cheesemakers now produce burrata, mascarpone, and ricotta. Grammie, for instance, uses 80 per cent locally sourced cheese for its Italian fare, while certain elements are still imported for technical precision, like milk powder to achieve the texture for gelato. But authenticity was never about proximity alone. 

“‘Authentic’ is a bad word,” argues Dalal, because it assumes a single, fixed version of a cuisine that has always been pluralistic. One of the biggest misunderstandings around Italian cuisine, including Italian cuisine in India, is the way it is flattened into a shorthand of pizza-pasta-tiramisu. “Italy, meanwhile, is made up of 20 distinct regions, each shaped by a unique geography, produce, climate, and history. “In Italy, food is ingredient-driven, rooted in simplicity, balance, and respect for produce rather than overpowering seasoning or heavy sauces,” says Domenico. 

“Sicily saw the Arabs invade and hence, use a lot of saffron and nuts. The desserts in the Sicilian region are also a lot sweeter than those in northern Italy. Meanwhile, the southern regions use more butter in their food. The cooking time for pasta reduces as you go from north to south Italy, even though they are both al dente,” says Dalmia.

“The Lombardia region shares borders with Switzerland, and the Piedmont region borders France. Then there are multiple cities near the Austrian border—all regions where the food has more of a European finesse as compared to that in southern Italy. The cuisine depends on the territory, the main crops of the region, and hence, the climate. Rice is the main crop in Venice, so risotto is consumed more there,” adds Dalmia. 

Across regions, ingredients dictate structure. Southern Italy leans on fresh seafood and local produce, while northern cities like Milan developed faster meals with fewer courses. Meats and offal are part of this heritage too, rooted in cucina povera, Italy’s working-class food culture. “But we also have extraordinarily rich vegetarian traditions,” says Domenico. “Pasta, risotto, minestrone, eggplant parmigiana, beans, lentils, chickpeas, Roman artichokes, Sicilian caponata—vegetarian food is deeply celebrated in Italy.”

Even dessert varies by region. Naples has pastiera, Sicily cannoli, Rome maritozzo, Tuscany cantucci.  “Tiramisu and gelato became universally popular simply because they are approachable,” adds Domenico. 

What remains consistent, however, is structure. Pizza is not an everyday meal in Italy. “Mostly it’s eaten on Sundays because it’s an easy meal to make on a day when no one wants to cook,” says Dalmia. “Also, pizza is eaten as a snack in Italy, not as a full meal.” 

Additionally, even pizza in Italy changes from region to  region, reflecting different doughs, fermentation styles, and textures. “Roman pizza is not as yeasty as other pizza. The most famous is the fluffy, thin Napolitani, which flops and shouldn’t be overtly crispy—it shouldn’t break into bits when folded and only have crispy edges,” says Dalmia, though the recipes of the dough have evolved over the years with different fermentation methods to give Pizza al Taglio, focaccia-style pizzas.

“Even in South Italy, the traditional pizza is changing because industrial flours and yeasts make it hard to get the same results as what our grandmothers achieved. Many young people, however, continue to make pizzas and baked goods at home, sharing them with friends and family,” says Ciampi. 

Domenico believes global perceptions of pizza began shifting once conversations around authenticity, culinary tourism, and Italian chefs working internationally gained momentum. “Pizza is no longer seen as fast food—it is craftsmanship,” he says. A UNESCO  recognition of the art of the Neapolitan 'Pizzaiuolo' (pizza maker) as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017 further reinforced this shift, positioning pizza as culture, history, craftsmanship, and technique rather than mere convenience. 

Italian cuisine itself was formally recognised as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in December 2025. In cities like Florence, strict regulations protect heritage restaurants and traditional practices. “[These] measures ensure these cultural treasures endure,” says Ciampi. 

As Indian diners become more informed about Italian food, expectations are changing. Dishes are increasingly associated with their regions of origin. Arancini with Sicily, risotto with northern Italy. Technique, texture, and naming now matter in ways they didn’t before. 

 “While Indian diners recognise the structure of Italian food, they want more flavour and more personality, because they are used to certain flavours. So restaurants meet them halfway. That’s why burrata gets paired with chilli oil or citrus. Pasta gets tossed with harissa, miso butter, or seafood broths,” says Sinha who has shrimp tortellini at Bar Sogo in Goa that’s Italian in technique, but the flavour is coastal, using Italian cuisine more as a framework.

Italian cuisine has long been shaped by the discipline of making the most of what is available. “This comes from our history of using humble ingredients like tripe—adapting to limited resources, surviving wars, and turning simplicity into art,” says Ciampi. 

This ethos extends beyond technique to how food is positioned socially. Italian cooking was never designed for a specific class or occasion. “Conviviality and communal eating are at the heart of our culture, making cuisine not just about taste, but also about social connection and family. In my village, bartering is still commonplace: a neighbour gives me fresh orecchiette, and I share mandarins from my garden with them. This human connection and respect for ingredients is at the heart of true Italian cooking,” concludes Ciampi.