Johnson Ebenezer, the chef-patron of Bengaluru-based restaurant Farmlore, which recently won the American Express One to Watch Award and was named one of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025, speaks with Garima Sadhwani about food, sustainability, & more
What is it like to be named one of Asia’s 50 best restaurants?
Asia’s Best 50 and World’s Best 50 are platforms that chefs always look up to for inspiration. To get featured as one of those 50 restaurants is an encouragement for our work in itself.
When I got the call, it was a bit of a surprise for me because we don’t have a fancy profile. We’ve always put ourselves out there very organically, while finding an ethical footing, having a philosophy, and telling stories through food.
But maybe my past experience in opening a restaurant in Malaysia back in the day helped. And we were on the award’s radar as well for the past four years— with them keenly following our work—because we participated in different competitions.
But none of this would have happened without Farmlore’s founder and owner Kaushik Raju, who actually gave me the freedom of expression to execute my ideas. He helped us put our philosophy first so that we could let the food do the talking.
Your restaurant is cuisine-agnostic.
When you use the word cuisine, you restrict yourself into a format or a label. I wanted to be completely devoid of that. What we do is we derive inspiration from all around us. We use ingredients from this part of the world and create dishes, so the ingredients are the star always.
Earlier, we used to change the menu every other day pretty easily. Now, though, we change it every month, and with that, the ingredients change too. Seasonality plays a big role here.
Farm-to-table outlets have been around for a while now, with different restaurants playing around with their own interpretations. How are you interpreting it differently?
To be honest, when we started, we never wanted to make farm-to-table a concept at all for our restaurant. I needed a space to express through food and Kaushik had this 37-acre farm that he encouraged us to use.
Here, we have a lot of mango trees that we pruned and we now use mango wood to cook the food over. We don’t use any gas in our kitchen. We also have solar panels for the roof and we are completely off the grid. We have a hydroponic setup here. We grow vegetables in a controlled environment so as to not waste anything and be able to control the amount of water as well. We have 24 cows on the premises, whose milk we use for our food, and they graze in the farm itself.
So, we are not interpreting anything as a concept. We are just a restaurant situated on a farm literally, where the environment dictates what we cook, what we serve, and what we eat.
Sustainability has become a keyword in the past few years. But I think every business should operate in a format where we can help and protect the future. It’s something we deeply value and feel is ethical to do. It’s the way we’ve always wanted to operate as a business.
What new offerings are in the works at your restaurant?
At Farmlore, we ask people to come with an open mind. We don’t disclose much of what we are offering, but when they try it, it’s thankfully always received well. And we do have something new every month. So we want to keep doing that and maintain our surprise quotient as well.
Do you plan to expand across India?
Since we started, Farmlore has been a quiet place that very few people knew about, and there were even fewer who knew about the impact we were trying to bring. With this award and with this recognition, I think we could now take this philosophy around India or even around the world if we get fortunate enough. We could do pop-ups, events in other places, and slowly build it up. We are not looking to expand, though. It’s the philosophy that we hope travels everywhere.
The only expansion happening at the moment is that so far, we’ve been an 18-seater restaurant, and now we’re adding a private dining area of 14 more seats. We simply want to keep doing what we do and tell stories.
