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The road from Delhi to Mumbai now ends on MacArthur Boulevard

N.H. 48 Indian Kitchen is 26 seats, walk-in only, and already the most personal restaurant to open in the Palisades in years. Its owners come from the dining rooms of Rasika, Bresca, and Jônt. Its head cook is someone's dad.

The road from Delhi to Mumbai now ends on MacArthur Boulevard

The Palisades does not have a restaurant scene. It has a CVS, a beloved hardware store, a good wine shop, and a stretch of MacArthur Boulevard that gets quieter the further northwest you go. That's exactly why Prady Rana and Bhakti More chose it.

N.H. 48 Indian Kitchen opened September 3 at 4828 MacArthur Blvd. NW, in the former Momo's Cafe space. Twenty-six seats. Walk-in only. A patio that adds a few more when the weather cooperates. The whole thing fits in a room that most Capitol Hill gastropubs would use as a private dining annex. That is precisely the point.

A highway as a menu

National Highway 48 is a 1,744-mile road that links Delhi to Mumbai and cuts through the heartland of India along the way. It is also, as the restaurant's founders will explain without much prompting, the highway that passes through both of their home states. Rana grew up in Delhi. More is from Maharashtra. N.H. 48 is the road between them, literally, in geography, and less literally in the way two people who met through mutual friends and a shared itch to open a restaurant eventually built something together.

The menu reads that way too. Pani puri, vada pav, prawn koliwada, dahi ke kebab, mutton ghee roast, dal makhani, halloumi saag. Some dishes are roadside staples. Others are home-kitchen slow. None are trying to do the sleek, minimalist-plating thing that has become shorthand for "serious Indian food" in a certain tier of American restaurant.

That's a choice. Rana and More both have spent years in dining rooms where the plating is immaculate and the service training runs deep. Rana worked nearly every front-of-house position at Rasika West End, then moved through Del Mar, Osteria Mozza, and Fiola Mare. More spent time as a server at Chai Pani, assistant manager at Tamashaa, and maitre d' at both Bresca and Jônt. Between the two of them, they have logged time in some of the most technically demanding dining rooms in DC. They are 27 and 29 years old.

First-time owners, borrowed expertise

Neither has owned a restaurant before. That fact sits right on the surface at N.H. 48, and neither Rana nor More seems interested in hiding it. City Cast DC noted that as first-generation immigrants, the pair drew directly on their own experiences, building careers in unfamiliar restaurants, learning codes from the inside, to shape the restaurant's identity. The space, the neighborhood, the format: all of it is a deliberate rejection of the kind of high-overhead, high-drama opening that swallows first-time operators.

The kitchen runs under Suman Singh, who is Rana's father. Singh spent eight years cooking at The Bombay Club, the white-tablecloth Indian institution near the White House that has outlasted most of official Washington. His son runs the front. His presence in the kitchen is the kind of detail that sounds like a press release flourish until you consider what it actually means: the two anchors of N.H. 48 are a 27-year-old front-of-house veteran and his father, a decades-trained line cook, working together in a 26-seat room in a neighborhood most restaurant people don't bother thinking about.

Why the Palisades

The short answer is that Rana and More fell for it. They said the slower pace of the neighborhood just north of the Georgetown Reservoir felt right for what they wanted to build. They want regulars. They want to know people's names. A walk-in-only policy at 26 seats makes that easier, there is no reservation system putting distance between the kitchen and the person ordering.

The Palisades has long had one decent Indian option: Bistro Aracosia, which is technically Afghan but close enough to pull some of the same crowd. N.H. 48 is something different in register and in scope. It is not trying to serve the whole neighborhood in one sitting. It will turn some people away on a Friday. That is fine. The dining room is too small for a food runner who doesn't know your name.

The food, practically speaking

Hours are 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily. No reservations. The patio seats eight in good weather. On the menu: pani puri for the table, vada pav if you want to understand why Mumbai snacks at 11 a.m., dahi ke kebab that are less about heat than about the kind of yogurt-and-spice restraint that takes confidence to pull off. The mutton ghee roast arrives from the Mangalorean coastal tradition, not the Delhi mainstream, which is exactly the kind of subregional specificity the restaurant's name promises. Dal makhani is on the menu because it should be, but it does not dominate.

Rana and More told Washingtonian that they took care to hew more closely to the culinary traditions of their home states alongside the familiar dishes from the restaurants where they trained. The highway runs both ways.

There is no website yet. There is an Instagram. The restaurant is at 4828 MacArthur Blvd. NW, and on a Tuesday at noon in the Palisades, it is probably the most interesting thing happening on that block.

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