Burlingame's Michelin-starred Rasa returns

Discussion of their third, upcoming restaurant — Amara, which will combine Mediterranean influences at a Belmont location to open in winter — prompted conversation around returning Saffron Burlingame to its Rasa roots.

A relaunch would help customers avoid confusion about the two Saffron locations, Miglani said, as well as define each restaurant as its own brand and food experience.

“We just started to look at our portfolio, trying to figure out, what does each one stand for? And we wanted to make sure our customers understand, ‘I’m having this type of food. This is what I want to have, distinctively,’” she said.

Rasa was no stranger to the challenges the restaurant industry faced during the pandemic, struggling to transfer its fine dining model to the limitations of a takeout box.

Ultimately, a major factor in opening Rasa to begin with was creating space for special-occasion Indian food and dining, Miglani said.

“We always felt that, as Indians, whenever we were celebrating special occasions, going out for anniversaries or birthdays or any other milestone, we did not find our own cuisine to celebrate with, because most of the restaurants are very casual or even more mom-and-pop, hole in the wall,” she said.

Invigorated customer and staff enthusiasm about Rasa’s trailblazing model — receiving a Michelin star in its first year of operation and inspiring Indian fine dining across the West Coast — convinced the pair that it could once again work.

Now, its redesigned menu, helmed by Walia and Chef de Cuisine Vivek Tamhane, aims to take the cuisine away from majority sauce-based dishes and experiment and elevate with freedom.

“We’re challenging the entire notion of how we present the food, what we cook, and we don’t want to be typecast into ‘this is authentic, this isn’t authentic,’” he said. “It falls in the realm of great food with Indian sensibility, but it doesn’t really make it traditional.”

It’ll be challenging for customers to make a bad pick — “we only have great dishes on the menu, otherwise they don’t make it onto the menu,” Walia quipped — but his personal favorites are the rack of lamb, shrimp-stuffed mackerel and duck confit biryani.

Miglani loves the butter-poached lobster and the mussels, as well as Rasa’s redesigned dessert menu, which melds European execution and Indian spices and flavors, and the 2-foot white elephant butter paper dosa.

“White elephant is a rare animal, and so is this dosa, to well execute the dosa that size,” she said.

The husband-and-wife duo have seen both Rasa and Saffron through challenges together and are excited for their third restaurant, the upcoming Amara, to lean on the direct expertise and wisdom of the staff they’ve curated.

“Rasa and Saffron are like our two daughters, our kids that we reared together, and now our teams, that we put together, will rear Amara together. We will just shepherd it,” Walia said.

Rasa is located at 209 Park Road in Burlingame. Lunch hours are Tuesday to Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., dinner hours are Tuesday to Sunday from 5-9 p.m. and brunch hours are Saturday and Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Visit rasaindian.com for more information.