Udaipur’s new rooftop cocktail bar blends heritage, hospitality and highballs

Udaipur’s new rooftop cocktail bar blends heritage, hospitality and highballs

There is a particular paranoia reserved for early-morning flights. You set three alarms, wake before each of them, arrive at the airport aggressively punctual, and land feeling as though you have already lived an anxious lifetime. The promise of a dawn departure to any city is always the same — seize the day — but more often than not, you check in, draw the curtains with missionary zeal and collapse into a heavy slumber.

In Udaipur, I was determined to resist that script. I had come to preview a new rooftop cocktail bar, Dore (named after the local word for thread, which is built around the idea of connection, between past and present, story and flavour), at the Manuscript Hotel, helmed by Pranav Sharma, a second-generation hotelier who wears his inheritance lightly. The hotel looks towards the City Palace — still the largest palace complex in Rajasthan — its terraces rising above Lake Pichola like tiered stone confectionery. At dusk, the palace glows and the lake obligingly turns ink-dark, as if the city has adjusted its lighting for effect.

Dore by day | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

I had planned a virtuous nap before descending, restored, into mixology. Pranav intervened with breakfast, and while I was close to refusing, it felt faintly cowardly. It was at this point that a realisation hit: there comes a point in adulthood when discipline in a new city begins to resemble fear, so I went along.

Rajasthan does not believe in timid breakfasts. Its cuisine evolved in an unforgiving landscape; deep-frying preserves and spice asserts. Onion kachoris shattered to reveal hing-laced filling. Dal pakwan arrived crisp and even khandvi made an appearance, a reminder that culinary borders here are porous. We finished with jalebi, and somewhere between the sugar rush and the second kachori, I stopped feeling like a sleep-starved traveller clinging to an itinerary and more like a willing participant in local abundance.

The Peepli Bioscope highball | Photo Credit: Special arrangement