What's India eating now

We scanned more than 60 menus across 6 cities to see what trendy restaurants are serving. What we found: A new bird is flying in, pricing has a magic number, one fruit has had a veggie makeover, everyone wants local, seasonal, unusual. And one delicious word is forbidden. Dig right in

- Shirin Mehrotra, Tanisha Saxena and Rachel Lopez

MENUS ARE GRAPHIC AND CHATTY Some seem like a resume - everything's squeezed into two pages. Others go on for eight.

For new foods in a new city, art helps. The bubble-tea menu at Burma Burma, Bengaluru has colour-coded jar images to help tell berry matcha (purple, green) from Nutella (brown). Social Hauz Khas Delhi gives the eyes a break from the long list of dishes with a graphic pizza menu. Each slice bears the name of the dish. Mehico Kolkata has blurbs on how to pronounce antojitohs (ahn-tohhee-tohs) and other tongue twisters. There's also a glossary at the end for Mexican ingredients and seasonings, spice levels and flavour profile of various chillies.

Everyone wants a word. Slow Tide in Goa opens with a quote about food and identity by Anthony Bourdain. Romaania, in Kolkata, has a full-page essay about Greek life and food. In Mumbai, O Pedro's intro travels the world. AMPM Kolkata has a foreword about the timelessness of the city and a closing note about the founder. And almost every new menu comes with a This Is Us story, often bearing the chef's name, sometimes their photograph and, in the case of Cavatina by Avinash Martins in Goa, an anecdote about his time in Spain. Many menus try to blend prose with poetry. What to make of "serendipitous flavours" and "white stardust"?