At‑home fine dining rises

Indian restaurants are packaging multi-course tasting menus for delivery, turning dinner at home into a higher-priced, occasion-style order on Zomato and Swiggy. (etnownews.com) ET Now Luxe reported on April 11 that “chef’s table” delivery menus are moving beyond restaurant dining rooms and onto India’s two biggest food apps, with premium packaging and curated courses built for at-home service. Zomato says its app lists more than 1.5 million restaurants across 1,000-plus Indian cities, giving that format a national storefront if restaurants choose to use it. (etnownews.com) (play.google.com) Swiggy has been building the premium-delivery lane for years. It folded Scootsy into the main app in 2020, launched Swiggy Gourmet in February 2022, and expanded Gourmet to 31 cities by May 2023; in May 2025 it added “Drops,” a limited-time feature for chef-curated dishes. (blog.swiggy.com) (business-standard.com) (businesstoday.in) The shift is landing inside a restaurant market that is already large and still expanding. The National Restaurant Association of India says it represents more than 500,000 restaurants in an industry valued at ₹5.69 lakh crore, and its 2024 food-services report projected the sector would reach ₹7.76 lakh crore by fiscal year 2028. (nrai.org) (franchiseindia.com) Operators are also pushing beyond the biggest cities. A Grant Thornton Bharat and National Restaurant Association of India report released in September 2025 said 94 percent of surveyed restaurant operators were planning expansion into Tier-II and Tier-III cities, based on responses from more than 160 operators across 50-plus cities. (grantthornton.in) Behind the menu, restaurants are adding software to run the kitchen more tightly. Adgully’s recent industry coverage said artificial intelligence tools are being used for ordering, reservations, inventory, and back-of-house workflows, while restaurant-technology vendors describe the same push toward demand forecasting, waste reduction, and multilingual ordering. (adgully.com) (restaurantindia.in) (hotelierindia.com) Public filings show why delivery platforms and restaurant partners keep chasing higher-value orders. Swiggy’s 2024-25 annual report says the company now handles tens of millions of orders each month, while Eternal, the parent company formerly known as Zomato, said in its April 2025 quarterly results that food delivery remained a core business even as quick commerce grew faster. (swiggy.com) (b.zmtcdn.com) That leaves restaurants selling two upgrades at once: a meal that looks more ceremonial at the customer’s door, and an operation that runs more like software behind it. The result is a delivery order pitched less as convenience and more as an event. (etnownews.com) (adgully.com)