Ikk Panjab first opened in Rajouri Garden, a major Punjabi enclave in West Delhi, in 2018. Since then a number of shiny branches have opened all over the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) as well as in Chandigarh. I have been vaguely intrigued for some time by their proffer—the food of undivided Punjab—but not enough to ever make the trek from Gurgaon to Delhi. However, a location opened last year in Golf Avenue 42, an incredibly garish commercial complex not too far from my parents’ place in Gurgaon. And so on this most recent trip, I descended on it with my nephews, both of whom are aficionados of Punjabi food. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Category Archives: Delhi
Chak Khum (Delhi, July 2026)
Here is one of the backlogged restaurant reports I’d meant to post last week but didn’t end up having the time to get around to. It takes us back to Delhi, but closer in time to the present. After returning to Minnesota in mid-June from my extended sojourn in first Bombay and then Seoul, I remained at home for just over a month. A lot of world cup, a lot of time in my community garden plot, a lot of recharging. And then it was back to Delhi for two weeks to check on my mother. I ate out at my regular clip while there—roughly once every other day. This first report comes from the neighbourhood in South Delhi where I ate most of those meals and my very favourite place in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) to eat: Humayunpur. Four of my seven meals out on this trip were eaten there: two at Naga restaurants and two at Manipuri restaurants. Let’s begin with lunch at the first Manipuri place: Chak Khum. Continue reading
Mustard Madras (Gurgaon, March 2026)
Here I am with my fourth restaurant report of the week and my second from my brief sojourn in Delhi in March this year. I didn’t eat out very much on that visit and have already reported on both of those meals: at Bhansaghar in Humayunpur and at the newest location of Carnatic Cafe in Gurgaon. This report too comes to you from Gurgaon, and also features South Indian food. Though, unlike at Carnatic Cafe, the menu at Mustard Madras features a lot of meat and also has sections that feature North Indian and Indian Chinese favourites. I’d not heard of Mustard Madras before I looked for a place where I might find a South Indian thali in Gurgaon with meat on it. It turns out they are a mini-chain with one location in Noida and three in Gurgaon (none in Delhi so far and none anywhere else). Of the three Gurgaon locations, the one in the Cyber Hub complex was closest to me on the day and so it was there I went for an early lunch. Continue reading
Carnatic Cafe IV (Gurgaon, March 2026)
My first-ever visit to Carnatic Cafe was all the way back in 2014. At the time they had only the one location: a small restaurant in the Friends Colony Market. It’s hard to imagine that now as they’ve expanded dramatically. I’m not sure if they’re still under the original ownership but they now have multiple locations in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region), with the original location a thing of the past. I’ve reported previously on meals eaten in the GK-II Market and Lodhi Colony branches. They are inevitably also in Gurgaon. Their first location there is in the snazzy 32nd Avenue complex (whose future, I hear, is iffy). A more recent second location opened late-last year or early this year in the HQ 27 complex in Sushant Lok. This is located conveniently close to the part of Gurgaon in which my family lives and so in March a plan to go eat dosas etc. there for weekend brunch was hatched. Here’s a quick look at how it went. Continue reading
Bhansaghar II (Delhi, March 2026)
I’d said I would have another Delhi restaurant report from my considerable backlog on Sunday and, by god, it’s still Sunday in Minnesota! Not for very much longer, but it’s still Sunday!
This is not the Delhi restaurant report I’d planned to post, however. I’d hoped to get another of my long-delayed reports of a couple of meals eaten at the same restaurant across 2025 out. But as it turned out, the theme of this weekend was the endless processing of the massive harvests of tomatoes coming in from my community garden plot and I did not have time to process and resize the large number of photographs from those meals. And so I have for you instead a quick report on a quick lunch eaten with a friend in March. Nobody who reads my Delhi restaurant reports regularly (assuming any such people exist) will be surprised to learn that this lunch was eaten in Humayunpur. It was not eaten, however, in a restaurant specializing in the food of a state from India’s north-east. It was instead a Nepali meal, eaten at Bhansaghar. Continue reading
Indian Accent V (Delhi, July 2025)
Yes, you read that correctly: this is a report on a meal eaten in Delhi not this past July, but in July of 2025. That’s not even my record for a belated meal report/review; in fact, I have another Delhi report from 2025 in the wings that’s going to make this one look timely. More on that later.
This is my fifth report on a meal at Indian Accent in Delhi, and the fourth on lunch at their current location in the Lodhi Hotel (our first meal there was a dinner when they were still in the Manor Hotel in Friends Colony). At the two lunches before this one, I was with the missus and we ate the non-vegetarian Chef’s Tasting Menu (here and here); at the meal before those, a friend and I had eaten the Express tasting menu. On this occasion, however, we were accompanied by our boys and we ordered from the a la carte menu. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Manipuri Chak-Shang (Delhi, December 2025)
On Sunday I posted the last of my restaurant reports from my truncated trip to Southern California in December (dim sum at the Cerritos branch of Lunasia). Here now is my last restaurant report proper from my trip to Delhi earlier that month. I say “last restaurant report proper” because I may post an odds and ends roundup at some point in the next few weeks.
This meal took me back to my favourite place to eat at in Delhi: Humayunpur, the South Delhi neighbourhood/village that has in the last decade and more become one of the major hubs of North East Indian life in Delhi. I had eaten there with a friend just a few days prior to this meal. That was an excellent Naga meal. As we were walking around after I noticed a place I didn’t remember seeing before: Manipuri Chak Shang (which literally means Manipuri restaurant or eating place). One thing led to another and I was soon eating lunch there as well. This time I was on my own. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Draavin Canteen (Gurgaon, Dec 2025)
Draavin Canteen opened in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi a couple of years ago under the name Dakshin Canteen and quickly made a name for their South Indian menu featuring both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. I read a number of enticing reviews etc. of it online but never managed to make it there. In the second half of last year, however, they opened a branch in Gurgaon, which has been my home base in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) since late-2021. With the new location a mere 20 minutes away from my parents’ flat, finding people to go eat there together with became a much easier proposition. And so on my trip in December it was high on my list. I descended on them in a party of five for lunch a few days after arrival. My expectations were high and I’m sorry to say they weren’t quite met. Here are some details. Continue reading
Dear Naga (Delhi, December 2025)
Alas, I completely whiffed on my posting plans for the weekend. I’d said I would post the last report from our Japan trip last summer and one more from Los Angeles at the end of December but I didn’t get around to either. Like I said, the World Cup has done a real number on my ability to get most things done. I will try my best to catch up with those posts this week but in the meantime I’m going to stick with the regular rotation for the summer which has reports from Delhi or Bombay going up on Mondays. The two previous weeks began with reports on two coastal meals from Bombay in April: at Pradeep Gomantak and Sarangaa; this week I go back a few more months to my first visit to Delhi in December. The cuisine featured here is one from a completely different part of the country: Nagaland. No surprise: the meal was eaten in one of Delhi’s most prominent Northeastern enclaves, Humayunpur, at a restaurant I had not previously eaten at: Dear Naga. Here’s a quick look at it. Continue reading
Sangeetha (Delhi, July 2025)
This was my first trip to Delhi with the family on which we did not eat a single meal at Cafe Lota. This is not because there’s been a decline in quality at Cafe Lota since I ate there in March. It’s because parental complications on the day we met the friend I/we always eat lunch at Cafe Lota with meant that we had to be back home not too late in the afternoon. And so rather than drive all the way to Pragati Maidan from Gurgaon, we shaved 40-60 minutes off the round-trip by driving to Green Park. Our destination? The first Delhi outlet of Sangeetha, a Chennai-based South Indian chain with a very strong reputation. Continue reading
Inja (Delhi, July 2025)
This meal represents one of the worst choices I’ve made in recent trips to Delhi. Not, I hasten to clarify, on account of the meal itself. No, the terrible decision was to make plans that needed us to drive from Gurgaon to Friends Colony on a weeknight. No one who lives in the Delhi NCR will be surprised to hear this but it took us more than two hours to get from DLF Phase 1 to Friends Colony. Total distance? 16 km or 10 miles. After this ordeal the dinner, at Inja in the Manor Hotel, would have needed to have been very good to not be disappointing. I am happy to say that it was indeed very good. Almost as happy as I am to say that the return journey took only 45 minutes. Read on for the details (on the meal, not the return journey, which was uneventful). Continue reading
Mizo Diner 2 (Delhi, July 2025)
I ate at Mizo Diner for the first time in March 2024 and I had it on my list of my favourite meals of the year. I’d hoped to get back there during my solo trip to Delhi last December but it didn’t end up happening. And it didn’t happen on my solo trip this March either. But in July I finally made it back again. I don’t think it will end up on my list of best meals of 2025—there’s a bit too much competition in the casual/affordable category from our Japan trip—but it was a very good meal again. Back in 2024 the missus and I had met an old friend there. This time we took the boys along with us, being more confident a year and a half later that their palates had expanded enough for them to enjoy what for them are the more unfamiliar flavours of North East Indian food. It was a good bet: they loved it too. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Moti Mahal (Gurgaon, July 2025)
On Tuesday I posted a brief report on lunch at one of the Gurgaon outposts of the North Indian restaurant, Daryaganj. Most of the post was in fact taken up with their battle with the more established restaurant, Moti Mahal, specifically over the ownership of the claim to have originated butter chicken and dal makhani. You can (re)read that post to catch up on the saga but the key facts are these: Moti Mahal was founded in 1947 by three partners, one of whom, K.L Gujral was long-identified with the restaurant and credited as the inventor of butter chicken. The grandson of one of the other partners, K.L Jaggi, opened Daryaganj with a partner a year after his grandfather’s death (and 27 years after he’d exited Moti Mahal) with the marketing claim that it was in fact his grandfather who’d originated butter chicken and dal makhani, thus claiming that history for his new restaurant. A court case later both restaurants are now claiming to have done so. At the M3M IFC complex in Gurgaon they’re doing so within a few hundred feet of each other and 10 days after eating at that branch of Daryaganj we went back to M3M and ate at Moti Mahal. Revisionist/competing historical claims aside, which did we like better? Read on to find out. Continue reading
Daryaganj (Gurgaon, July 2025)
Revisionist history has been rife in Indian politics for some time now; and so it seems only fitting that it should now also be present in the restaurant world. I am referring not to the many lies Indian restaurants put on menus about village recipes and chefs’ grandmothers but to a very specific and high profile controversy between two Delhi restaurants: Moti Mahal and Daryaganj. The name Moti Mahal may be familiar to you if you have read up on the history of North Indian restaurant food. It was founded in Daryaganj in Old Delhi in 1947 by three friends who had left Peshawar for Delhi during Partition. This is the restaurant at which the previous night’s tandoori chicken was recycled into a rich tomato gravy, thus giving birth to butter chicken (they also lay claim to dal makhani). This has been accepted history for some time now. Well, until 2019 anyway. That’s when a new restaurant named Daryaganj opened, which also claims to be the inventor of butter chicken and dal makhani. Now, you may be wondering how a restaurant that opened in 2019 can lay claim to dishes that everyone agrees another had been making since 1947. That’s where things get spicy. Read on. Continue reading
Chaat, Thrice (Gurgaon, December 2024, March/July 2025)
Okay, let’s jump from Seoul to Delhi but let’s keep the casual market vibe going. No, Delhi doesn’t have anything quite like Gwangjang Market but casual food in markets abounds. This report is of some casual food eaten in a market in Gurgaon (technically a separate city in a different state but part of the Delhi NCR or National Capital Region) across my three most recent trips home: in December last year, earlier this year in March and again this July. All of the meals center on chaat and all were eaten at Galleria, a popular outdoor mall in Gurgaon, some by myself and some with my nephews, who love chaat as much as I do. Continue reading
NCC (Delhi, March 2025)
Here, in an effort to get done with my reports on meals eaten out in Delhi in March, is a quick look at another meal I ate on this trip in Humayunpur. If you’ve been following my Delhi reports over the years—or if you know Delhi well—you know that Humayunpur, a village incorporated into South Delhi, is one of the major hubs of North Eastern Indian life in Delhi. It is home to a large number of people from the North Eastern states and it also contains stores that serve them, and an ever-growing number of restaurants that serve their foods. It has become my very favourite part of Delhi to eat in. When I lived in India, I knew very little of the foods of North Eastern India beyond Assam, and now I feel like I am making up for lost time. I ate lunch by myself in Humayunpur in the first week of this trip. That was an excellent Naga lunch at a tiny restaurant named Shilloi. The next week, just a couple of days before my return to Minnesota, I was back to eat another Naga lunch, this time with a friend at NCC. Continue reading
6 Ballygunge Place (Delhi, March 2025)
About two and a half decades ago a wave of high’ish end traditional Bengali restaurants opened in Calcutta/Kolkata. This was a significant development for a number of reasons. For one thing it was a marker of how regional Indian food was beginning to be marketed to wealthy Indians as they looked for more ways to spend the greater disposable income they had in the era of the liberalization of the economy. Rather than foreign or Mughlai or Chinese food, it was now regional food that began to become a viable market proposition. For another, it was also a sign of transformations in the domestic sphere for Bengalis in the middle class and above: more and more younger women were in the workplace, the grip of the joint family was loosening. Among the effects were breaks in the transmission of traditional cooking and recipes in the patriarchal household. The new restaurants increasingly became the places where the Bengali leisure class went to eat dishes that a generation prior would have been made at home, either on special occasions or more regularly. Continue reading