Most people don’t think about Plano when they’re planning a serious dinner. That’s their mistake, and Jashan is the reason to correct it.
The restaurant opened quietly at 7401 Lone Star Drive in Legacy North a few months back, and what’s happening inside is unlike anything else in North Texas. The man behind it, Prasanna Singaraju, spent years in tech before he walked away from all of it to do this. He’d been standing in a parking garage near the Dallas North Tollway, staring at an empty retail space, imagining what it could become. That’s not a metaphor. He actually stood there and pictured the restaurant. Now it exists.
The name means celebration in Hindi. The concept is something closer to a pilgrimage. Jashan takes you through the regional cooking of India the way a great omakase takes you through Japan — methodically, reverently, with a story attached to every plate. Lucknow, Delhi, Hyderabad, the coastal south. Ancient royal kitchens and street food stands, dishes that date back centuries and have no business being this precise and this beautiful in a shopping center in Plano.
The Dil Se tasting menu — “from the heart” — is where it all comes together. You sit around an open demonstration kitchen and watch the brigade work while the courses come. Up to 23 of them, at $175 a person, with the menu rotating roughly every 45 days. From Lucknow comes a nihari, a whole goat shank slow-braised until the bone practically surrenders, served in a broth deepened with marrow. From Delhi, potato tikkis fried crisp with chutneys, and galouti kebabs so finely minced they barely hold their shape. A “taco” course arrives with saffron sheermal bread standing in for the tortilla, cradling slow-cooked goat leg with cilantro-mint chutney and slivers of pickled radish. The coastal plates go somewhere else entirely — buttery lobster draped in a sauce built from toasted coconut, red byadagi pepper, and kokum, a coastal fruit that reads somewhere between lime and tamarind. You won’t have had it before.
The pastry kitchen is serious. Raspberry-rose sorbet dusted with lemon powder shows up as a palate cleanser. The finale is a mango ganache with chocolate almond cake that tastes like it was designed by someone who takes dessert personally. The jalebi with rabri gelato has become something people mention by name when they talk about the place.
Chef Ramesh Thangaraj, who ran the last kitchen before this one to a Michelin special award for best new restaurant in Malaysia, is the reason the tasting menu moves the way it does — tight, timed, each course landing in the right order for the right reason. The service around the open kitchen is worth watching on its own terms.
For people who don’t want the full tasting, the à la carte menu is legitimate. Konkani seafood curry with scallops and cod in a coconut-tamarind broth. Goan lobster rassa. Malabar crab cakes with mustard seeds and curry leaves. The cocktails are worth ordering too — a tamarind margarita, a masala martini, a saffron spritz that sounds gimmicky and isn’t.
Indian fine dining at this level doesn’t really exist in DFW. That’s not a slight. It just hasn’t been done here, not like this, not with this much range and intention. Jashan is doing it now. Make the drive to Plano.
Jashan is open Monday through Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday and Sunday for brunch and dinner. Reservations at jashan.us.
Joey Stewart checked in at Jashan recetly.
