QUICK ANSWER Palaash is not a resort restaurant with a chef attached to it. It is the creation of Amninder Sandhu, a nationally awarded chef known for pioneering gas-free, wood-fire cooking in India, the only Indian chef selected for Netflix’s The Final Table, and a Founder Partner at Tipai itself. Her work at Palaash extends a career built on reviving regional Indian recipes through open-fire technique, applied here to ingredients sourced from the forest and land around the resort.

Key Takeaways

• Amninder Sandhu is a Founder Partner at Tipai, not an outside chef brought in to run the kitchen, which shapes Palaash’s menu as a direct extension of her own culinary philosophy.
• She won India’s National Award for Best Lady Chef in 2016 and was the only Indian chef selected to compete on Netflix’s The Final Table.
• She founded Arth, widely credited as India’s first gas-free restaurant, built entirely around wood-fire and charcoal cooking using ancient Indian methods.
• Chef Marco Pierre White called her the girl with gold in her fingers, and she has cooked at Michelin-starred Cafe Boulud in New York among other international stages.
• Palaash continues her long-standing focus on reviving regional and heirloom Indian recipes with sustainably sourced ingredients, now applied to a forest setting.

Not a Chef for Hire

Most resort restaurants work the same way: a hospitality group builds the property, then recruits a chef to run the kitchen. Palaash was built the other way around. Amninder Sandhu is a Founder Partner at Tipai, which means the restaurant is not a service she was contracted to provide but a project she helped create from the ground up. That distinction matters more than it might first appear. A hired chef executes a brief. A founding chef builds the brief itself, and Palaash’s menu reflects a career’s worth of conviction about how Indian food should be cooked, not a set of instructions handed down by a hospitality brand.

A Career Built on Fire

Sandhu trained in the kitchens of Delhi’s Taj Mahal Hotel before building an independent career defined by a fairly radical idea for modern Indian dining: cooking without gas at all. She founded Arth, widely recognised as India’s first entirely gas-free restaurant, where every dish is prepared over wood or charcoal using techniques rooted in ancient Indian cooking, copper vessels, earthen pots, and open flame in place of a modern stove.

The throughline across two decades of work is consistent: technique borrowed from history, ingredients sourced regionally rather than generically, and a refusal to treat modern convenience as an improvement on methods that have fed people well for centuries.

Why Palaash Is the Natural Next Chapter

A restaurant built around wood-fire technique and regional Indian ingredients was always going to find its truest setting somewhere with an actual forest attached to it, rather than a five-star kitchen in a city. Palaash gives Sandhu’s long-standing philosophy a literal source: ingredients drawn from the land immediately around Tipai, including produce from the property’s own food forest, cooked using the same open-fire methods she has spent her career refining. The dinner-only format reinforces the idea that a meal here is an event built around the day’s ingredients and the evening’s fire, not a fixed menu reheated on demand. That same forest setting is what makes Tipai’s own food forest worth a mention on any visit, safari or not. 

What This Means at the Table

For a guest, the practical result is a kitchen led by genuine culinary conviction rather than resort-standard hospitality training. Menus built around a milestone celebration, referenced elsewhere in Tipai’s guest experience content, draw on this same philosophy: real technique applied to a specific occasion, not a template dessert with a candle added. A meal at Palaash carries the weight of a chef’s actual body of work, which is a different kind of luxury than simply eating well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Amninder Sandhu the head chef at Palaash, or does she just consult on the menu?
She is a Founder Partner at Tipai and the creator of Palaash, meaning the restaurant was built around her culinary vision directly rather than through an outside consulting arrangement. Day-to-day kitchen leadership should be confirmed with current operations.

What is Chef Sandhu best known for?
Pioneering gas-free, wood-fire cooking in India through her restaurant Arth, winning the National Award for Best Lady Chef in 2016, and being the only Indian chef selected for Netflix’s The Final Table.

Does Palaash use the same wood-fire cooking style as Chef Sandhu’s other restaurants?
Palaash continues her established focus on open-fire technique and regional Indian ingredients, adapted to ingredients sourced from the forest and land surrounding Tipai.

What other restaurants has Chef Sandhu founded?
She founded Arth, India’s first gas-free restaurant, and Bawri, which opened in Goa in 2023 and expanded to Mumbai within six months.

Can guests request a personalised menu at Palaash?
Yes, particularly for occasions such as anniversaries and milestone celebrations, where the kitchen builds courses around the specific occasion rather than serving a fixed menu.