Nandana Hazarika spent seventeen years as a software engineer and data analyst before she ever plated a dish for money. In 2022 she auditioned for MasterChef India and got cut before filming started. Most people would have called that the end of the detour. Hazarika enrolled in culinary school instead, then took an internship at The Oxford Kitchen & Gastropub's Lodi location. When the owner of that restaurant group later decided to sell the Sunnyvale outpost at 193 S. Murphy Ave., she took over the lease. That single transaction, an intern stepping into a departing owner's space, is the reason the Bay Area's first dedicated Northeast Indian restaurant now sits in the middle of Sunnyvale's Heritage District rather than anywhere else.
Khaar held its grand opening on September 12, following a soft launch on August 14. It seats 135 people inside with additional outdoor seating, which puts it closer in scale to a neighborhood anchor than a small storefront experiment. That matters, because what Hazarika is serving has never had a dedicated dining room in this region before.
A Cuisine the South Bay Hasn't Tasted
Most Indian menus in Silicon Valley draw from the north (Punjabi, Mughlai) or the south (Tamil, Andhra, Kerala). Khaar specializes in food from the Seven Sister States, the cluster of contiguous northeastern Indian states that includes Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura. Hazarika, who grew up in Assam, draws on all seven regions for the menu, and the cooking leans on a different set of building blocks than diners typically expect from an Indian restaurant: fermented mustard, cold-pressed mustard oil, fermented bamboo shoot, and black sesame, rather than the garam masala and paneer-forward profile that dominates the category locally. The cuisine also carries influence from Nepal, Myanmar, and China, a geographic reality of where the Seven Sisters sit on the map.
Hazarika has described the flavor profile as gentler than people expect from Indian food generally, closer to soothing than aggressive on the palate.
I think the most beautiful thing about Northeast Indian food is all these flavors are very soothing, it's not overwhelming
That's a meaningful distinction for a menu built around fermentation, which usually signals intensity. It's also the kind of detail that only makes sense once you've eaten the food, which is exactly the gap Khaar is trying to close for a region that, as Hazarika has pointed out, doesn't have much presence in American restaurant kitchens because the Northeast Indian community here is comparatively small and few from that community work in food service.
The Name Is the Menu's Thesis Statement
The restaurant's name comes from "khaar khuwa axomiya," a phrase that literally translates to "the khaar-eating Assamese people" and is used to describe someone native to Assam. Khaar itself is an alkaline extract made by burning sun-dried banana peels and filtering water through the ash, a traditional preparation that shows up across the region's home cooking. Naming the restaurant after that single ingredient is a statement of intent: this isn't a general Indian restaurant with a regional twist, it's a room built specifically to introduce a cooking tradition most Bay Area diners have never encountered under its own name.
What's Actually on the Table
The appetizer list opens with a signature Khaar croquette for $18, made from Assamese alkaline rice and filled with flaky fish, fermented mustard, fresh herbs, and aromatic spices, a dish Hazarika has compared to arancini for anyone looking for a reference point. The Bamboo Blaze ($18) tosses a choice of fried chicken wings, lotus stems, tofu, or paneer in a fermented bamboo shoot seasoning finished with honey chilli sauce. A mango pani puri ($13) and a savory tart set over yellow pea curry with purple potato fritters and tamarind gastrique ($19) round out the smaller plates.
On the main list, the Black Sesame Heritage pairs slow-cooked chicken ($27) or pork ($29) with a roasted black sesame curry and banana leaf-wrapped sticky rice. The Chef's Special Golden Blossom ($32) is fried and stuffed squash blossoms over a smoked bell pepper tomato sauce with cracked wheat pulao. Pan-seared branzino in an Assamese sour broth with mustard and poppyseed runs $39, slow-braised goat chops in an earthenware curry run $35, and a smoked Naga chili butter treatment shows up on both lobster ($35) and shrimp ($22). A full bar backs the menu with cocktails at $15, mocktails at $11, a California-focused wine list running $10 to $20 by the glass, and draft beer at $10 a pint.
The Timing Lines Up With the Block's Own Calendar
Khaar's grand opening landed three weeks before the South Bay moves into its heaviest run of fall festival programming. Between October 2 and November 8, the region hosts a stacked sequence of Navratri concerts, an open-air Diwali street festival, and the five-day Diwali sequence itself, which culminates in Lakshmi Puja on Sunday, November 8, with the sequence opening on Dhanteras on Friday, November 6. Downtown Sunnyvale's own festival programming includes an October 3 pairing of a street festival with a Garba night, close enough to Khaar's front door that a Murphy Avenue dinner reservation and an evening at the festival can reasonably happen on the same night. Residents who want a lower-key option have the Sunnyvale Hindu Temple & Community Center at 450 Persian Drive, which holds Lakshmi Puja every Friday at 7 p.m. year-round. Dussehra falls on Tuesday, October 20, and Karva Chauth on Thursday, October 29, both worth flagging if the fall calendar matters to your household.
None of that programming has anything to do with Assam specifically, but the practical effect is the same either way. A restaurant most of the neighborhood has never had a reason to visit now opens right as Murphy Avenue's foot traffic peaks for the season.
The Practical Details
Khaar sits at 193 S. Murphy Ave., in the space The Oxford Kitchen & Gastropub vacated, and can be reached at 408-212-4704. Current hours run Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 to 9:30 p.m., with Friday and Saturday extending dinner service to 10 p.m. The restaurant added that midday seating after the soft opening, once the kitchen had worked through its first month. Reservations and the current menu are posted at khaarsunnyvale.com.
The wider story here isn't that Murphy Avenue got another restaurant. Sunnyvale's downtown has absorbed plenty of new tenants over the past few years. It's that this particular one exists because a departing restaurant owner and an intern who used to work under him happened to want the same lease at the same time, and neither of them was thinking about downtown revitalization when they made the deal. The cuisine that resulted is one the Bay Area genuinely didn't have a version of before August.
If you're keeping track of what opens, closes, and changes hands in the South Bay neighborhoods you call home, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Sunaina Arora tracks block by block, long before any of it shows up in a market report.
