Murphy Avenue, Sunnyvale: A New Restaurant for Fall 2026
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
According to Palo Alto Online, Nandana Hazarika spent close to eighteen years writing software before she wrote a menu. She grew up in Assam, one of India's seven northeastern states, then built a career in the Bay Area as a software engineer and data analyst. Four years ago she auditioned for "MasterChef India." She got cut before filming started, but the process taught her she needed real kitchen discipline, so she enrolled in culinary school and took an internship at The Oxford Kitchen & Gastropub in Lodi. When the owner of that gastropub's Sunnyvale location decided to sell, Hazarika bought the space instead of walking away from it.
That space, at 193 S. Murphy Ave., is now Khaar. It soft opened August 14 and held its grand opening September 12. The same report identifies it as the Bay Area's first restaurant built entirely around Northeast Indian cuisine, the food of India's Seven Sisters states, a region whose cooking almost never shows up on Bay Area menus dominated by Punjabi and South Indian staples.
Downtown Sunnyvale has spent the past year absorbing a wave of new restaurants, and nearly all of them share a resume. Zareen's, the Pakistani restaurant led by James Beard semifinalist Zareen Khan, opened its fourth Bay Area location at 135 S. Murphy Ave. this year, following an original in Mountain View and expansions in Palo Alto and Redwood City. Moods Wine Bar & Bistro is a former Palo Alto tenant that relocated onto the block. Meyhouse brought a second location of its Turkish menu down from the mid-Peninsula. Khan told The Almanac she chose the block because she loves "the vibe of the historic Murphy Street, which has this old downtown feeling," and that instinct has played out again and again: an operator proves a concept somewhere else on the Peninsula, then brings it south once the block has the foot traffic to support it.
That foot traffic is real. The Sunnyvale Downtown Association's Summer Series Music + Market, now in its 27th year, pulls roughly 1,300 people a night to the pedestrian stretch of Murphy between Washington and Evelyn every Wednesday through the summer. It is the kind of number that makes a restaurant group in Palo Alto look at a vacant Sunnyvale storefront and see an easy bet.
Khaar is not an easy bet. It is a first restaurant from a first-time restaurateur, serving a cuisine that has no local comparison to lean on. It broke the pattern the rest of the block has been running on for a year.
The restaurant takes its name from khaar, an alkaline liquid extract made by burning sun-dried banana peels and filtering water through the ash, a preparation used across Assamese cooking for generations. Much of Northeast Indian food built around this tradition is naturally gluten-free and dairy-free, leaning on rice-based grains with minimal use of dairy. It does lean on meat and fish, but Khaar's menu covers vegetarian and vegan diners too.
The dishes on offer are unlike anything else within walking distance. Black sesame chicken runs $29. Claypot goat chops arrive with sweet pulao for $35. Golden coconut curry shrimp is $28. For appetizers, Hazarika points people toward the signature Khaar croquette at $18, which she compares to an Italian arancini, a rice ball built from a completely different pantry but landing in a familiar shape.
Khaar is open Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 to 9:30 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m. It's closed Mondays.
Khaar's regular service overlaps with something else on Murphy Avenue that has nothing to do with restaurant openings. The Sunnyvale Mid-Autumn Festival returns October 3 and 4, with the street closed in front of the AMC theater and Whole Foods on Murphy Avenue for two days of pan-Asian street food and culture. Vendors are set up for daikon cake, sugarcane juice, aguas frescas, fresh soy milk, coconut pudding, grilled skewers, and boba alongside craft and handicraft stalls and stages of traditional and modern dance and music. Admission is free, with pay-as-you-go food and drinks.
The festival is a two-day event, not a season-long fixture like the summer concert series. It closes out the same stretch of Murphy Avenue where the year's programming began back in June with the Art & Wine Festival's 50th anniversary. But this year, festivalgoers can carry the food-focused weekend into dinner at Khaar, a few doors away.
A short list of what's actually confirmed for the weekend:
Most of what has opened on Murphy Avenue this year rewarded people who already knew the names: Zareen's, Moods, Meyhouse. Those are safe recommendations because they're proven quantities imported from somewhere else. Khaar is the opposite kind of recommendation. Nobody on the Peninsula has eaten this menu before, because until August, nobody in the Bay Area could.
That makes the first weekend of October a genuinely unusual stretch of days on this block. A festival built around food from across Asia is closing down the street on the same weekend that a restaurant serving food from a part of India almost nobody in the region has tasted is still finding its rhythm a few doors away. Neither event depends on the other, and neither one is a repeat of what ran through Murphy Avenue all summer.
If you've been meaning to walk the block again since the Wednesday concerts wrapped up in late August, this is the week that gives you an actual reason.
Murphy Avenue keeps changing shape, and so does the rest of downtown Sunnyvale around it. If you're curious how a block like this one factors into a home search or a sale timeline, Amy T Le has spent years reading Santa Clara County street by street. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what a stretch like Murphy Avenue actually means for your next move.
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