Lunches at Indian Accent’s New Delhi mothership were highlights of my eating out in 2022 and 2023. I ate the express lunch tasting there with a friend in March 2022 and in January 2023 the missus and I ate the full tasting menu at lunch. Both of those meals were excellent. And so it was a foregone conclusion that we would return for another go at the lunch tasting when we were back in Delhi for a bit last month. And so it came to pass. Well, it was another very good meal but the streak was finally broken: taken as a whole, it was not at the level of the previous two meals. There were some very good dishes but the second, heavier half of the meal didn’t really do it for us for a number of reasons; and the meal as a whole felt more than a little disjointed. Here are the details. Continue reading
Category Archives: Delhi
Matamaal II (Delhi, March 2024)
One of our favourite meals out during our trip to Delhi in January, 2023 was at Matamaal, the Kashmiri restaurant that opened a few years ago at the City Court mall in Gurgaon. Actually, that’s wrong: two of our favourite meals out on that trip were eaten at Matamaal. We liked the first meal so much that we went back again. In my review of both I noted that we’d be back for sure on our next trip and that this time we’d bring our boys with us. And so it came to pass last month. On our last day in Delhi we went to Matamaal for lunch. And it was another fine meal, and a highlight of our eating out on this trip as well. Here are the details. Continue reading
Cafe Lota VII (Delhi, March 2024)
Cafe Lota is the one restaurant in Delhi that we/I may have eaten at on every trip to Delhi in the last 10 years. It’s certainly the restaurant we’ve eaten at the most. This is partly because it’s convenient to many of the places we visit in central-ish Delhi and for meeting up with friends who live in parts north and east; but it’s largely because we remain big fans of their menu of pan-regional Indian food, presented in contemporary’ish forms but without ever losing sight of their traditional anchors. We loved our first meals there in January 2014, not too long after they first opened, and we’ve continued to enjoy every meal we’ve had there since, even as the original chef departed and the restaurant’s own layout and menu kept evolving. Inevitable changes aside, many through lines remain from its beginnings; and so it’s no surprise that we enjoyed this meal very much as well. Here’s a quick report. Continue reading
Anardana (Delhi, March 2024)
Back to Delhi. Well, I should say clarify here—many years after beginning to review Delhi restaurants—that I use “Delhi” somewhat loosely as a place-name in my restaurant reviews. When I say “Delhi” I mean restaurants in Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon—in other words, in the NCR or National Capital Region. Today’s review, of the first meal we ate out on our recent short trip to Delhi, was eaten at a branch of Anardana. They do have branches in Delhi proper—and beyond—but we ate lunch with friends at the branch on the ground floor of the very shiny International Finance Center in Gurgaon. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Mizo Diner (Delhi, March 2024)
My Bombay food reports are done—see here for last week’s street/casual food round-up—but I still have quite a few to go from the subsequent five weeks we spent in Seoul. From Seoul we then went to Delhi for 12 days before returning to Minnesota this Wednesday. We didn’t eat out so very much in Delhi but I’m going to intersperse reports of those meals among the Seoul ones. First up, is a report on a lunch we ate at Mizo Diner in Humayunpur. In the unlikely event that you’ve been tracking my Delhi reports over the years, you’ll know that the North Eastern restaurant hub in Humayunpur in South Delhi has become one of my absolute favourite places to eat at in Delhi. Indeed, I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the city with such concentrated quality, regardless of cuisine. Our lunch at Mizo Diner only confirmed this view. I would go so far as to say that it might be the best of the meals we’ve eaten in Humayunpur, which is to say, it was very good indeed. It was also my favourite of our meals out on this Delhi trip, and the other places we ate at included some of our very favourite restaurants in the city. Here are the details. Continue reading
My Best Restaurant Meals of 2023
I was all over the map in 2023. Literally so. In January and early February, the whole family was in India, spending time in Delhi, Agra and Goa. In March, I went off to Seoul for a week. In late-April I was in New York and New Jersey for a few days. In the summer we all went off to Europe for an extended stint, spending three weeks on vacation in Italy and another six on work in Ireland. And then, finally, in October, the missus and I took a weekend trip to New York. That’s a lot of traveling and a lot of restaurant meals. And, of course, we ate out at our usual once-a-week clip while in the Twin Cities metro. So my selections for my best restaurant meals of 2023 draw from a wider geography than usual (the really unusual thing is that we did not get to Los Angeles at all this year). I’ve divided the list up first to separate more expensive/formal places from less expensive/more casual places but the top five list draws from both categories. A few more Twin Cities-centered lists follow after that. Continue reading
Gung, Gurgaon (Delhi, February 2023)
The Korean restaurant presence in the greater Delhi region has been building for a while. I’m sure the craze for Korean dramas and K-Pop has a lot to do with its growing popularity but it’s also true that there’s a decent Korean population in parts of the capital now, what with a number of large Korean corporations having big offices there. On past trips we’d been curious about trying some of these restaurants, but somehow never got around to it. This January we finally did. A good friend wanted to take us out to dinner and she suggested a Korean place she really likes, out of interest to see what the missus (who is Korean) would make of it. This was the Gurgaon branch of a restaurant named Gung: The Palace. They also have branches in Delhi, Noida and Neemrana. We were not expecting very much and our expectations were handily surpassed. Here are the details. Continue reading
China Club (Delhi, February 2023)
This is not my last restaurant report from our trip to Delhi earlier this year (we were there most of January and returned in early February) but it is a report on our last restaurant meal there. It’s in a genre that is not really my favourite to go eat out in India: fancy Chinese food. I do very much enjoy classic Indian Chinese food (though even that is not very high on my list of priorities in Delhi, usually) but I enjoy the putatively more “authentic” fancier places a little bit less. This because, in my limited experience, they tend to end up neither here nor there. If you have access to better Cantonese or Sichuan or whatever restaurants elsewhere, their Indian counterparts fall very short; and nor do they offer the pleasures of more masala-fied Indian Chinese cooking. That’s been my experience anyway. We ended up at China Club in Gurgaon anyway for complicated reasons—we were taking my parents out to lunch and wherever we went needed to be close to their place and easily navigable with my father’s mobility issues. Here’s what we found. Continue reading
Indian Accent III (Delhi, January 2023)
One of my very favourite meals of 2022 was eaten in Delhi in March: lunch at Indian Accent. That was my second meal at Indian Accent, the first having been eaten several years ago, when they were still in their original Friends Colony location, long before the international acclaim and the opening of branches abroad. Now, Indian Accent is in the swanky Lodhi Hotel (not that the previous location was not swanky as well) and is a mainstay on all those stupid “Best Restaurants in X” lists. I am generally skeptical of those lists but there’s no denying the excellence of the food at Indian Accent. Eight years passed between my first and second meal there, but given how good that second meal last year was, there was no way I was not going back again in January, this time with the missus in tow. Continue reading
Kwality (Delhi, January 2023)
On Friday I posted a report on our most recent lunch at one of our new(er) Delhi favourites, Cafe Lota. New(er) in the sense that it opened only a decade ago. Today I have for you a report on a much older Delhi favourite, Kwality, located in the Regal Building in Connaught Place. Often said to be Delhi’s oldest restaurant—though this doubtless depends on how you define a restaurant—Kwality opened in 1940 as an ice-cream shop. The ice cream, of course, went far past the shop and the borders of Delhi. Indeed, Kwality ice cream—and the men selling it from hand-pushed carts—was a major part of my childhood and that of many other Indians in cities and towns far from Delhi. The iconic ice cream business was sold off in the early-mid 1990s but the original location remains, if not in its original form. Continue reading
Cafe Lota VI (Delhi, January 2023)
As I noted in my review of Bhawan a couple of weeks ago, we’ve eaten at Cafe Lota in Delhi on every trip since right after it opened just about a decade ago. Indeed, it might be fair to say that in many ways it has been our favourite restaurant in Delhi over that span of time. This even though the original chef whose vision shaped the restaurant, Rahul Dua, left the restaurant a while ago (he’s now one of the people behind Bhawan, which is sort of in the Lota’esque mold). When our home base in Delhi was Noida, Cafe Lota was a fairly convenient place to meet friends. And part of our love for the restaurant does stem from the fact that we’ve eaten there with so many friends over the years. Now that our home base is quite a bit further away, in Gurgaon, you’d think we’d be less likely to choose it as a rendezvous point; but I ate there with friends on my solo trip to Delhi a year ago, and we ate there again with friends on our family trip this January. Herewith, the details of the most recent outing. Continue reading
Jamun, Again (Delhi, January 2023)
We ate at Jamun in Lodhi Colony with good friends on our last family trip in January 2020. We enjoyed most of that meal fine but didn’t think it was anywhere we needed to get back to in a hurry. But we did go there again on this family trip as another set of good friends picked it as ideally situated between them and us, both of us being located at different ends of the vast Delhi NCR (National Capital Region). This time we were there for lunch, and on a Sunday. This meant that the traffic was not nightmarish getting there, and that the restaurant was not very full when we arrived (we were eating on American time). How was the meal? Read on. Continue reading
Bhawan (Delhi, January 2023)
We’ve been following Chef Rahul Dua around for a while. We first encountered his food as relatively early adopters of Cafe Lota at the Crafts Museum. This was back in early 2014. We loved the approach there of bringing dishes from different regions of India together, sometimes in traditional, sometimes in less traditional guises and preparations. We’ve stuck with Cafe Lota ever since. I think it may be the only restaurant we’ve eaten at in Delhi on every single visit since. Chef Dua, however, had left Cafe Lota by the time of our next visit to Delhi in 2016. Along with his partner, Kainaz Contractor, he was now operating Rustom’s Parsi Bhonu in Qutab Enclave. From there we lost sight of him for a bit as Rustom’s moved to the Parsi dharamshala near Daryaganj. We were hoping to finally eat there on this trip but it shut down last summer. But during the pandemic they opened Bhawan, a delivery operation centered on sweets and snacks. And then in the summer of 2022 it opened as a sit-down restaurant in Gurgaon, just about a 15 minute drive from my parents’ place. It was a cinch that we were going to visit. And so it came to pass. Herewith, the details. Continue reading
Matamaal (Delhi, January 2023)
We ate one meal out almost every day that we were in Delhi in January. Across all those meals there was only one restaurant that we went to more than once: Matamaal. This is partly because their location in the City Court mall in Sikanderpur is a scant 10 minute drive from my parents place in Gurgaon; but it’s mostly because they serve excellent Kashmiri food. Indeed, they may be serving the best Kashmiri food I’ve eaten in Delhi over the years. It helps too that it’s a very nice space and the prices are very reasonable. There’s also a small shop adjoining the restaurant where you can buy ingredients, baked goods and more. Continue reading
Sagar Ratna, One Horizon Center (Delhi, January 2023)
I’d said my next Delhi meal report would be of a Kashmiri meal—two of them, in fact—but, yet again, I am a liar. Instead I have for you a report of a South Indian meal, an Udupi meal to be more exact. This was dinner on a day that had featured a blowout lunch at an aunt’s home . That was an excessive meal, and in true Bengali fashion, lunch was served close to 2 pm—and so we wanted to eat something relatively light for dinner. The friends we were meeting suggested an outpost of Sagar Ratna, located more or less halfway between them and us in Gurgaon, and that is where we went. Continue reading
Oh! Assam (Delhi, January 2023)
Okay, let’s get the Delhi restaurant reports started, and unlike with the reports from December’s southern California sojourn, let’s begin at the beginning: with our first meal out, at Oh! Assam in Humayunpur.
No prizes for guessing what kind of cuisine the restaurant serves. Even as the foods of the North Eastern states have become more visible in Delhi, there aren’t that many places to eat Assamese food. Back in 2014, I reported on a lunch at Jakoi, the restaurant in the Assam Bhavan in Chanakyapuri. That meal, I said, was more interesting than good. I was therefore curious to see what things would be like at an Assamese restaurant in Humayunpur, which is now the major centre of North Eastern food (and life) in Delhi. And so we arrived at the restaurant on our first full day in the city, determined to go out into the weak January sunlight in an attempt to synchronize our body clocks with the local time. Herewith, the details. Continue reading
Indian Accent II (Delhi, March 2022)
Sorry for the whiplash but we’re going back to the food reports from my trip to Delhi in March. I posted reports on most of those meals at a steady clip in March and April and then ran out of steam before getting to the last two. That’s not because these were the least memorable of the meals. Well, this one at Indian Accent certainly was not—and I’m not just saying this on account of a piece of high-concept unintentional comedy involving a napkin that was almost the highlight of the meal (more on this below). No, it was one of the best restaurant meals I’ve eaten in a while. Indeed, though this meal was not quite as extensive as our first dinner there in 2014, I may have liked it even more. And it made me rue the fact that we/I had not gone back to eat there in the eight years following. Continue reading
Bukhara (Delhi, March 2022)
After a break last weekend it’s back to my restaurant reports from my two-week visit to Delhi in March. I’ve previously reported on meals eaten out at Comorin, Cafe Lota and Carnatic Cafe—and also on a takeout biryani blowout. I now have three reports to go and the first of them is of what was once the most celebrated high-end restaurant in Delhi: Bukhara at the ITC Maurya hotel. I last ate there more than 20 years ago. There was a time when eating there (or at its Awadhi sibling, Dum Pukht) was a highly aspirational thing for me but as the Delhi restaurant scene has exploded in the intervening period it hasn’t really felt like a return to Bukhara (and its very high tarifffs) was very urgent. However, when we were in Calcutta in January 2020 we ate at Peshawri at one of the ITC hotels there and it was truly a fabulous meal. (In case you’re wondering, to preserve the Bukhara branding, names like Peshawri are used for restaurants at ITC’s other properties that present that menu.) And so when I reminded my strapping young nephews that despite having become working professionals they were yet to buy me a fancy meal, it was at Bukhara we ended up. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
My Annoying Opinions 