When I heard the name Odd Culture, the first thing that came to mind was something eccentric, experimental, and perhaps a little unexpected. The new all-day café and bar in Sector 26’s Emaar Capital Tower, founded by siblings Himanshu and Sunaina Makhija, moves from breakfast and specialty coffee in the morning to sharing plates, cocktails and vinyl by night. Himanshu spent two decades in Australian hospitality before deciding to bring that experience home. Himanshu tells me, “I always felt the industry is growing, but someone has to come and level it up a little bit.” He ran a vegetarian café called Holi Crop in Sydney before moving back. “I thought, instead of opening in Sydney, I want to go back to India. Gurgaon was the right spot for me.”
The name, he says, comes from an instinct that odd is putting things together that are not meant to be together. It’s a neat description of the food, too, where the umami arrives from an unexpected place, and you only clock it after the fact.
Mid-Century Meets Street Signage
The Gurgaon café-bar takes a playful approach to familiar dishes, using unexpected ingredients and flavour combinations
Metanoia Designs has built the interiors around a mid-century modern base, then layered in colour, art and collected objects. The ice-blue and red palette, Makhija says, draws on painted signage found across Indian shops and streets. The space unfolds in three moods: an alfresco courtyard, a dining room, and a bright red, art-filled lounge for something more intimate.
Vinyl plays through the day, and the light shifts with it, brighter through breakfast and softer by the time the evening crowd settles in. It’s a room that backs up the name before the food even arrives. The furniture is individually designed, nothing matches on purpose, and yet none of it feels forced.
One Bun Steals The Show
Miso, fermentation and house-made breads are central to Odd Culture’s approach to food and coffee
We started with the Fish Burger, with crumbed sea bass playing off a sharp sambal matah and tartare, before moving into a Caesar Salad built on a creamy miso-dashi dressing instead of the usual anchovy base. Crispy bacon and shaved parmesan keep it grounded even as the dressing pulls it somewhere more umami-forward than a classic Caesar has any business being.
The Poke Bowl and the Rangoon came next, and this is where Odd Culture’s Asian-Australian throughline really shows itself. The Rangoon, kimchi, and mushroom cream cheese parcels topped with avocado and chimichurri read Tex-Mex on the menu and taste like something else entirely. Then came the Bang Bang Prawn Doughnuts, choux pastry prawn doughnuts finished with bang bang sauce, which were exactly as playful as they sound.
The larger plates settled the meal. The Prawn Tagliatelle, made in-house, comes with seared prawns in a shellfish-tomato bisque, rounded out with parmesan. A Persian Pilaf, meanwhile, is built around vegetarian meatballs and a miso butter rice pilaf with eggplant and currants. It was the dish Makhija had flagged earlier without me realising it. “We’re doing things like Persian Pilaf, but the umami is coming from the miso in it, and people won’t realise it,” he says.
But the dish I’d send a first-timer towards without hesitation is the Mushroom & Cheese. Forest mushrooms, melted gruyère, truffle mayo and a rocket salad are stacked into a soft, house-baked bun. It sounds familiar on paper and isn’t. The mushrooms carry real depth, the truffle mayo is subtle rather than overpowering, and the bun itself, made in-house as part of the same fermentation programme running through the rest of the menu, holds its structure without turning dense.
It’s the clearest example on the table of Makhija’s whole philosophy: familiar on the surface, working harder beneath the surface.
Texture Over Theatrics
Dessert closed things out with two strong options: a Tiramisu layered with hazelnut praline and miso caramel, and a Brûlée Basque Cheesecake with blackberry compote. The cheesecake is worth ordering for texture alone. It has that burnt-top, custardy-centre contrast that a proper Basque cheesecake needs, cut through nicely by the tartness of the blackberry. Both desserts are well-balanced, letting the flavours and textures speak for themselves.
A Latte That Doesn’t Shout
Odd Culture draws on two decades of Australian hospitality experience
Coffee is clearly non-negotiable here, and the drinks list backs that up. Kalita manual brews and cold brew on rotation sit alongside a full espresso programme and a run of playful signatures. Of everything on offer, the Miso Brown Butter Iced Latte with oat milk was the one that stayed with me. The miso reads as a faint savoury note beneath the brown butter rather than a gimmick, while the oat milk keeps the whole thing rounded rather than sweet. It’s a drink that trusts you to notice the detail rather than spelling it out.
