“GO ON, EAT IT,” Gabriella D’cruz says, holding out this brownish-green stuff, which had just been untethered from a sea-slapped rock. I’m out foraging for seaweed just off a beach in the western Indian state of Goa. D’cruz, our guide, is a marine conservationist and founder of The Good Ocean, an enterprise that advocates the sustainable harvesting of wild seaweed for use in the food industry. My co-foragers are Aditi Dugar, founder and director of the Mumbai-based restaurant Masque, and its head chef Varun Totlani.

Masque, currently the number one restaurant in India on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, number 16 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list, and India’s only Relais & Châteaux member restaurant, serves a 10-course tasting menu created exclusively with ingredients found in India. The seaweed of the sargassum species that I’m being fed is translucent and still dripping seawater. “Most species are edible,” D’cruz says, as I struggle to maintain my balance against a strong tide. “Not only are they nutritious, but they also grow sustainably in the wild and act as carbon sinks.” I take a bite. There’s a chewiness, and it oozes the taste of ocean brine. It’s an absolute revelation.

I’ve eaten plenty of seaweed in Japanese food. I’ve also seen various kinds grow along India’s coastline. But never has it occurred to me that this seaweed could be used in Indian cooking. Helping diners make this type of connection is part of Dugar’s mission at Masque. She hopes to use India’s abundant produce to create meals rooted in traditional Indian cuisine that are also irrefutably modern. “Ingredients and their provenance have always had a lot of focus in our home cooking. But even a decade ago, we rarely practiced it in an institutional setup,” she says. “Back then, gravies like chicken tikka masala were celebrated. But the individual spices were not,” adds Totlani, a Culinary Institute of America graduate. “Now times are changing. People understand that a dish is nothing without the right ingredients.”

Since opening in 2016, Masque has put regional and seasonal harvests not often seen in commercial kitchens on its menu. Morel mushrooms from Kashmir, cloudberries from Ladakh, and fiddlehead ferns from Himachal Pradesh are a few examples. At Masque, these items are sustainably sourced during expeditions like the one we’re on, which allows them to return to Mumbai with their freshness reasonably intact. Totlani and Dugar scout foraging locations by talking to home chefs, culinary researchers, and agricultural scientists across the country. And then there’s the chance discovery. On a trip to Ladakh’s remote Zanskar Valley, Totlani spotted what looked like Cape gooseberries, except he was told locals don’t consider them food; they’re worn as ornaments. Adventurous by nature, he bit into the berry, which he says tasted something “between a tomato and a gooseberry in the nicest way.” It went on to garnish one of his creations.