Project Otenga debuts studio
- Delhi's Project Otenga opened as a 'food studio' pairing Northeast fine dining with mental‑health programming. (theprint.in) - ThePrint reports the team explicitly calls the space 'not a restaurant', focusing on experiential, therapeutic dining. (theprint.in) - The concept reflects a trend toward hospitality that foregrounds wellbeing and narrative over conventional service models. (theprint.in)
Project Otenga has opened a new “food studio” in Delhi, framing itself as a space for dining, design and mental-health programming rather than a conventional restaurant. (theprint.in) The studio operates from Shaheedi Park on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in New Delhi, and founder Kabyashree Borgohain told ThePrint the project is trying to make “experiential” dining more deliberate. Borgohain conceived Otenga while studying Strategic Design Management at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in 2016. (theprint.in) On its website, Otenga says the Delhi studio works with food as a medium for “sensory branding,” design research and curated experiences, and says it is based out of its concept café in Shaheedi Park. The studio lists services including prototypes, workshops and event-led brand activations alongside dining experiences. (projectotenga.com) Otenga says the idea began as a student project focused on the mental health and “holistic well-being” of transient urban residents. The company’s own timeline says that work later expanded into supper clubs, immersive dinners and public programs across Ahmedabad, Goa, Assam, Nagpur, Kumaon and Delhi. (projectotenga.com) The Delhi launch extends a project that Otenga says started as a design research experiment founded in 2016 by Borgohain, who is from Assam, and Dayananda Meitei, who is from Manipur. On its “Story” page, the group says it evolved from a house café in Gandhinagar into a culture café at Ahmedabad University from 2017 to 2024 before expanding in Delhi and Ahmedabad. (projectotenga.com) That history helps explain why Otenga resists the restaurant label. The company describes itself instead as a mix of food lab, restaurant and design studio that uses contemporary Northeast Indian flavors as part of a broader collaborative and research-driven practice. (projectotenga.com) The design side is not a side project. Otenga Design Studio says it specializes in concept dining experiences, design research and educational workshops, and says the collective grew out of a graduation project in 2017. (otengadesigns.com) In Delhi, that leaves Otenga occupying a hybrid space: part dining room, part workshop site, part research lab. The point of the new studio is less table turnover than building a setting where food, memory and wellbeing are treated as the main event. (theprint.in)
