Ranjan Dey Brings Four Decades of Royal Indian Cooking to Oxbow

Downtown Napa has a restaurant that changes its chef the way a theater changes its headliner. Rotation by Feast it Forward, at Oxbow Public Market, hands its open hearth to a different celebrated chef each month, and for October the name on the bill is Ranjan Dey, the chef and owner of New Delhi Restaurant in San Francisco. His residency runs from October 1 through October 31, which means the valley has less than two weeks left to eat from a menu built on four decades of royal Indian cooking.

Dey is not a television name passing through on a book tour. New Delhi Restaurant, which he founded in San Francisco in 1988, is described by Rotation as the city's oldest Indian restaurant and the only Indian-owned establishment on the San Francisco Registry of Legacy Businesses. The restaurant's own registry history is more specific: in 2020 it became the first Indian and South Asian-owned business listed on the registry. It still serves from its original Union Square location, a former hotel ballroom in a 100-year-old building, and in 2025 it was one of only 50 restaurants in the United States to receive a Backing Historic Small Restaurants grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and American Express.

A career that started at fourteen

Dey grew up in West Bengal and started in professional kitchens at 14, cutting vegetables at the Park Hotel in Calcutta while studying at the Institute of Catering Technology, Hotel Management and Applied Nutrition. He cooked at the Grand and Great Eastern hotels in Calcutta, then at the Akbar and Janpath hotels in New Delhi, then spent two years as a senior chef at the Maurya Sheraton. Hong Kong came next: a first New Delhi Restaurant in 1984, a second in the Bank of America Tower in Central in 1986, and the Indian Curry Club in Kowloon in 1987. San Francisco followed in 1988, when Mayor Art Agnos opened the restaurant, and it has stayed in the same room ever since.

The cooking he brought with him draws on royal Indian menus that the restaurant dates back 300 to 400 years, and on regional traditions from across the subcontinent rather than a single house style. In 1990 he launched New World Spices, six hand-blended spice blends created in the New Delhi kitchen after guests kept asking how to recreate the flavors at home. Those blends are the engine of the Napa menu: the October dishes name them outright, from a Bombay saffron spice blend on the samosas to a Madras curry blend in the cabbage salad.

What October tastes like

The October menu, published by Rotation, reads like a translation exercise between two places. A Bombay Vegetable Samosa, at $18, is filled with lightly spiced potatoes and served with mint and tamarind chutneys. A Punjabi Lentil Mango Soup, also $18, uses pink lentils and a sweet, tangy mango masala. The Madras Napa Cabbage, Grape, and Apple Salad, at $17, takes the valley's namesake cabbage and dresses it with tamarind and mint, while a Roasted Curry Cauliflower, at $15, arrives with purple cauliflower puree, lemon turmeric yogurt, and pickled red onions.

Dey has framed the residency as a pairing exercise as much as a cooking one. In his own announcement, he said each dish would be paired with a signature Napa wine, chosen to sit alongside classic Indian flavors, and that the menu would be built on Napa Valley's seasonal ingredients. Rotation, for its part, programs around the plate: intimate dinners, live performances, and storytelling are part of the residency format, so the room is closer to a small theater with a hearth than to a standard dining room.

A residency model only works if someone holds the room together between headliners, and at Rotation that person is Executive Chef Jeff Mosher. Rotation credits Mosher with more than 20 years of cooking in Napa Valley; he guides the kitchen through every residency, collaborates with each incoming chef, and anchors the menu in what the region is growing. The hearth is the constant, the cuisine is the variable, and October is the month the variable runs through West Bengal, Delhi, and Hong Kong before it reaches Oxbow.

How to go before the month turns

Rotation sits inside Oxbow Public Market at 610 1st Street in downtown Napa. Lunch is served daily from 11:30 a.m.; dinner runs Wednesday through Sunday, until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays and until 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, with happy hour specials on dinner days. Reservations are taken through rotationnapa.com, and the house also offers a Rotation Reserve Card membership built around first access to reservations and events with visiting chefs. Dey's residency ends on October 31; after that, the hearth passes to the next month's chef, and this menu leaves with him.

Why this residency matters for Napa is range. The valley's dining rooms are rightly known for French, Italian, and Californian cooking; a month of royal Indian cuisine, cooked by a chef who has been refining it since he was a teenager in Calcutta, widens the map without asking anyone to leave downtown. It also makes the case for the residency format itself: a legacy restaurant in San Francisco becomes, for one month, a neighborhood restaurant in Napa, and the neighborhood gets a cuisine it cannot otherwise order.

Details verified at time of publication. Photography courtesy of Rotation by Feast it Forward. ■