Downtown Dallas has never had much in the way of Indian food, and if you’ve noticed that too, you’re not imagining it. Most of the city’s best options sit out in Irving, Plano, Richardson, and Frisco, which makes sense given where a lot of Dallas’s Indian community has settled, but it’s always meant a drive if you wanted a proper curry after work. Gymkhana just changed that math.
It opened late last year at 1408-1410 Main St., in the space that used to hold a Which Wich and, before that, Birdguesa. Chef Praveen Prasannan is behind it, a Mumbai native who’s spent years building a small footprint of Indian restaurants around the city’s actual neighborhoods instead of its suburbs. He already runs Shivas Bar and Grill downtown and in Allen with his brother Prinu, along with Elephant Bar & Grill in East Dallas and Bishop Arts. Gymkhana is the fourth, and it’s the one he built to feel like an occasion.
He combined two old storefronts to get there, which gives the place room for about 150 guests, a real number for a downtown restaurant that isn’t trying to turn tables fast. The design leans hard into the idea of the Indian gymkhana clubs the restaurant is named for, those old social clubs built around conversation and lingering. Hand-carved wooden doors out front, some of them genuinely old and brought over from India. Royal blue banquettes inside, chandeliers, hand-painted murals of elephants and regal figures on the walls. Prasannan has said he wanted the antiques to give the room its own identity rather than leaning on the usual Indian restaurant playbook, and walking in, that effort shows.
The menu doesn’t play it safe either. Alongside a traditional Madras tomato soup, there’s a lobster bisque. Samosas share space with hummus served with garlic naan and mussels done Indian style in a velvet tikka sauce, a combination that shouldn’t work as well as it does. The tandoori dishes come out of a real clay oven, lamb and chicken kebabs with that particular smokiness you can’t fake with a regular broiler. Chana masala covers the vegan end of the menu, and it’s good enough that meat eaters order it too.
What Gymkhana really offers is a reason to stay downtown later than usual. It’s open until 11 p.m. on weeknights and 1 a.m. on weekends, hours you don’t usually get from a restaurant this dressed up, which makes it as much a late dinner option as an after-work one. For a part of the city that’s spent years figuring out what its dining identity even is, a place with this much detail put into it, and hours that respect a night that runs long, is worth paying attention to.
Gymkhana is located at 1408-1410 Main St. in downtown Dallas, open daily from 11 a.m., with Friday and Saturday service running until 1 a.m. and Sunday through Thursday until 10 p.m.
