Category Archives: Delhi

Mahabelly (Delhi, January 2016)

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Mahabelly
I met an old friend at Mahabelly in Saket just a couple of days after our dinner at Dakshin. As it turns out, Mahabelly is located right behind the Sheraton that houses Dakshin, in the service lane at the rear of the DLF Place mall, one of several monstrous malls in a row in Saket.

Mahabelly serves the food of Kerala and the focus is on classic, often rustic preparations. It’s an altogether more easygoing affair than Dakshin: lighthearted decor, no heavy brassware in sight, no overwrought menu book etc. One long wall of the restaurant features playful cartoons which spell out the English alphabet via various self-deprecating Malayali stereotypes. The other wall sports a striking mural of a kathakali dancer—I believe performing the role of Mahabali. Yes, it’s true: the name of the restaurant is a terrible pun: Mahabelly/Mahabali.  Continue reading →

Rustom’s Parsi Bhonu (Delhi, January 2016)

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menu3
Once upon a time Delhi had no Parsi restaurants (that I knew of or anyone talked about, at any rate), now we ate at two of them in the course of three days. The first was Sodabottleopenerwala, a meal, you may recall, I was unenthused by; the second was Rustom’s Parsi Bhonu. This was a much better meal in every way. Now, I should reiterate that I am in now way an authority on Parsi cuisine. I’ve eaten at a couple of Parsi/Irani places in Bombay and at the homes of friends but none of this has added up to a basis on which to opine in any confident way on the “authenticity” of the food served at these places. I do have some sense though of when food is made well, and the food at Rustom’s was superior, the distinction most marked in the dishes we ate at both meals.  Continue reading →

Punjabi by Nature (Noida, January 2016)

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Punjabi by Nature: Tandoori Chicken
In my review of Dakshin yesterday I mentioned the rise in Delhi in the last decade and a half or so of what I called upper/middle class Indian restaurants: restaurants that filled the space between affordable places that were low on ambience and the super-expensive name restaurants in five star hotels. Much of this has coincided, as I noted last week, with the proliferation of restaurants specializing in regional cuisines. It is likely though that the restaurant that could be said to have led the way is one that serves the Punjabi cuisine most associated with Delhi—tandoori chicken, butter chicken, dal makhani etc.: Punjabi by Nature.  Continue reading →

Dakshin (Delhi, January 2016)

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chutneys
Once upon a time in Delhi, restaurants at five star hotels were pretty much the only option if you wanted to go out for a fancy meal. The pre-eminent restaurants in the category were the Maurya Sheraton’s Bukhara and Dum Pukht, and through the late 1980s and 1990s they set the tone for similar restaurants at the other five stars: meat-centric North Indian food with either a Northwest frontier or nawabi focus. The hotels usually also all had Indian Chinese restaurants (each of which pretended to be “authentic” Chinese) and 24-hour coffee shops, and some had one outlier restaurant: the Meridien had a French restaurant, for example, (Pierre, I think its name was—for all I know, it still exists.) and the Oberoi had an excellent Thai restaurant for a while: Baan Thai.  Continue reading →

Sodabottleopenerwala (Gurgaon, January 2016)

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Sodabottleopenervala: Bheeda par Eeda
Sodabottleopenerwala, which opened two years ago in Gurgaon and has since expanded to other locations in Delhi and elsewhere, may well have been named MaximumParsiSignifiers. Irani restaurant as theme park, it represents a weird yet representative moment in the packaging of regional cuisines for hyper-consumerist India in the early 21st century. Unpacking all of this properly is beyond the scope of a quick meal report written on the fly but I’ll give it a truncated shot.

First up, a little recommended reading for those who don’t know their Parsi from their Paris (all from Another Subcontinent): start with this brief essay by the late, great Sue Darlow that sketches the history of the Parsi community in India; then take a look at the first three links in this feature on a Parsi cookbook; finally, go take a look at Sue’s wonderful series of photographs, “Scenes from Parsi Life“. That should give you enough of a context to get started here.  Continue reading →

Dzükou (Delhi, January 2016)

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rajma-bamboo
As I noted in one of my write-ups of meals from our last trip to Delhi a couple of years ago, perhaps the major shift in the food scene in Delhi over the last decade and more is the proliferation of restaurants serving a larger range of regional Indian cuisines. It’s a different world now than when I was at university in the late 1980s and then working in advertising in the early 1990s. Then the options were largely south Indian vegetarian and, starting in the early 1990s, a few places offering food from Kerala. (I am not, of course, counting Indian Chinese here as that stopped being a regional Indian cuisine a long time ago—it’s now a pan-Indian thing much like “Mughlai” food.) Now, there’s a lot available: a lot of Malayali restaurants, Parsi/Irani restaurants, Goan restaurants, Rajasthani restaurants, Bengali restaurants, even Bihari and Oriya restaurants. The most pleasing development though in many ways may be the growing number of restaurants serving food from the states of the North East.  Continue reading →

Carnatic Cafe (Delhi, January 2014)

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I apologize for not having a whisky review on International Whisky Day, which marks the birthday of the late, great whisky writer, Michael Jackson. I do have news that will delight the majority of my whisky-focused readership: this is the last of my food reports from our Delhi trip earlier this year. (You could, of course, skip this and instead read the Aberlour A’Bunadh vertical I published last year on this day, when my blog was still very new.)

Anyway: this is a report on a very nice and very casual meal at Carnatic Cafe, a small restaurant in the Friends Colony shopping center in South Delhi that serves what has been for many decades now one of the most popular cuisines in India, and the only one that could rival the reach and popularity of Mughlai and Indian Chinese food. I refer, of course, to familiar South Indian vegetarian food: idlis, dosas, vadas and so forth. I apologize for being so geographically inexact–I am just trying to give a sense of the view from the not very culturally sensitive North. It is only relatively recently and still not particularly pervasively that this food has been identified in North India with more specific South Indian locations, and most specifically with the name “Udupi”. In my youth all of South India was contained in the descriptor “Madrasi” and this food generally had that or some other recognizable signifier of South Indianness slapped onto it. Continue reading →

Kababs etc.: Raas, Punjab Grill (Delhi, January 2014)

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This is my penultimate food report of our recent Delhi trip. And this may be the first one that covers food generally very familiar to the majority of my readership in the US and Europe: what in India is roughly known as “Mughlai” food–though what relationship many of the dishes that fall under that umbrella have to actual Mughal royal cuisine is not very clear. These days Mughlai refers to a pastiche of cooking styles and dishes from the the nawabi cuisine of Awadh, and that of Punjab and what used to be called the Northwest Frontier (Pakistan, Afghanistan)–and the Muslim food of Hyderabad is often thrown in for good measure as well. The names of many of the most famous dishes will be instantly recognizable: butter chicken, malai kofta, shami kabab, naan, korma etc. Continue reading →

Jakoi (Delhi, January 2014)

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You will be pleased to learn that unlike my Chaat opus this Delhi food report will not require you to set a few hours aside to read it. This is largely because this is a review of an Assamese restaurant and I know almost nothing about Assamese food. In this I am not very different from the vast majority of Indians who live west of Bangladesh. I don’t mean to suggest that this is a satisfactory alibi. The general indifference/ignorance of Indians from the rest of India to/of the peoples and cultures east of West Bengal is somewhat deplorable. Though it must be said that Assam is not as badly off in this regard as its neighbours even further to the east, who in addition to ignorance have to contend with flat-out racism and discrimination when they venture into the rest of India, and a fair bit of political and military repression when the central government ventures into their territory. Continue reading →

Chaat etc.

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There are few genres as tedious as that in which a middle-aged immigrant waxes nostalgic for the food of their youth/home country and tells you that you can’t get good versions of it where they live now. So I hope you’ll excuse this post.

I left India in 1993 to come to graduate school in the US. Through the 1990s Indian food in the US was an unmitigated disaster: like a bad analogue of Olive Garden’ish Italian food or airport Chinese food. Pretty much all that was available was a bad copy of North Indian Mughlai food made for the most part with pre-fabricated sauces and substitutable meats; with buckets of cream and nut pastes masking the lack of actual experience or care in the kitchen*. None of this was much of a loss for me. This genre of food is restaurant food even in North India–no one eats it at home; and what I mostly wanted to eat I could make for myself at home. I was a decent enough cook when I arrived in the US and necessity made me much better. The ingredients for home-cooking–in my case, Bengali cooking (Indian food is intensely regional)–at any rate were available in Indian stores in Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Café Lota (Delhi, January 2014)

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exterior
Okay, so in my last Delhi restaurant review I noted of Indian Accent that it must surely be on the short-list of highly talked about and ambitious restaurants in the city and environs. It has recently been joined on this list by a restaurant very far away from it in price and ambience, though not, as you will see, in culinary scope. I refer here to the new(ish) restaurant at the Crafts Museum in Pragati Maidan, the unfortunately named Café Lota. We ate two wonderful meals there, but before we get to them let’s take a bit of a necessary detour first. Continue reading →

Indian Accent (Delhi, January 2014)

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Indian Accent Interior

Indian Accent, which opened in the boutique Manor hotel in Friends Colony three or four years ago, may or may not be Delhi’s most talked about fine dining restaurant but it is surely on the very short list of the most ambitious. Its reputation among Delhi foodies–at least among the subset in my group of friends–rests on Chef Manish Mehrotra’s nouveau/fusion take on traditional Indian food. A few things about my feelings about all this before I get to the meal itself:

1) I’m generally suspicious of all kinds of Asian fusion in the US because it seems to me that restaurants that try it are predicated on two things usually: a clientele that doesn’t actually eat/know Asian cuisines in their original contexts; and a bogus narrative in which Asian cuisines are seen as being “modernized” or elevated through whatever is being done to/with them. At best in the high end the use of Asian ingredients/flavours/techniques is seen as proof of the Euro/American trained chef’s openness of mind or creativity while they remain firmly grounded in the Euro/American idiom which remains the guarantor of their credentials. Continue reading →

Swagath (Delhi, January 2014)

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Swagath
I mentioned Swagath briefly in the intro to my review of Kerala Express. It opened in Defence Colony about ten years ago and was a sensation with its southwestern/coastal menu, with an emphasis on Konkani food. This kind of thing is all over Bombay, of course, and is far superior there but it was, by and large, new to Delhi. I can’t remember when Dakshin at the Sheraton opened but that was, of course, both far more expensive and also served a broader South Indian menu than Swagath did/does.

This is not to say that Swagath’s menu only or predominantly features food from the Konkan coast and environs. As is often the case in Delhi, it has been a “multicuisine” restaurant from the start, and you’ve always had to leaf past the Mughlai and Chinese sections of the menu to get to the interesting stuff. And that, in short, is a good illustration of what I said a while ago about the state of regional dining options in Delhi (and elsewhere): once they did not exist; now they do but the gods of butter chicken and chicken chowmein must still be appeased.  Continue reading →

Kerala Express (Delhi, January 2014)

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I began my reviews of Golconda Bowl Express and Oh Calcutta by noting that back in the day there weren’t any Hyderabadi or Bengali dining options in Delhi as such. This is not exactly true of Malayali/Kerala food. In the early 1990s there was a restaurant by the name of Malabar in Hauz Khas that we used to eat at from work quite regularly and it had some Kerala stuff on the menu. And then there was the excellent Coconut Grove in the Ashok Yatri Niwas (a budget hotel in the Janpath/CP area). Then came the infamous tandoor murder case wherein a Youth Congress leader shot and killed his wife and tried to dispose of her chopped up corpse in the tandoor of the Baghiya restaurant in the same hotel. This understandably put a lot of people off the idea of eating in the hotel, and the Coconut Grove migrated to the nearby Hotel Janpath for some time and then disappeared (at least I think it’s gone–I haven’t really looked for it in a while)–its place in the Hotel Janpath being taken by another outpost of the now ubiquitous Swagath. The Ashok Yatri Niwas itself is also gone (it changed its name and was completely renovated and may have turned into a Ramada or something). Continue reading →

Golconda Bowl Express (Noida, January 2014)

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mirchi-ka-saalanIn my review of Oh Calcutta last week I noted that when I lived in Delhi in the late 1980s and early 1990s there weren’t any Bengali restaurants around. Well, there was no Hyderabadi or Andhra food to be had either—not outside of the canteen (or cafetaria for you Amreekans) of the Andhra Bhavan (the Andhra Pradesh state government’s center of operations in Delhi). The Andhra Bhavan canteen is still in operation and still very popular–I ate there on my last trip to Delhi (and it’s still very cheap and good). But now there are plenty of other options. Of these on my last trip I also ate at a place named Poppadum (in the Ambawatta complex in Mehrauli) with comical service but pretty good food. But Mehrauli is a long way from my parents’ place in Noida, and in any case I remember Poppadum being all but impossible to find (in fact, it may no longer be in business—perhaps because no one could find it). And so when an old, close friend of mine drove over to pick us up for lunch we decided to stay local and head to the Noida outpost of Golconda Bowl (the main one is in the nightmare that is Hauz Khas village—more on this nightmare in a later post). Continue reading →

Oh Calcutta (Delhi, January 2014)

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Once upon a time if you wanted to go out to eat in Delhi your options in terms of cuisines were Punjabi/Mughlai (the kind of stuff that’s on offer in most dire Indian restaurants in the West), Chinese or South Indian vegetarian food of the idli-dosa-vada variety. There were the odd exceptions, of course, but by and large this was the restaurant scene. Well, unless you had a lot of money to spend to eat dodgy “continental” food in five star hotel restaurants. At the time that I left Delhi for graduate school in the US in 1993 this was slowly beginning to shift and twenty years on the situation is completely different. I don’t really want to go into all that in this post as it would take a lot of time–I may devote a separate post in the coming week to a broader, impressionistic survey of the changes I’ve seen in Delhi on regular trips “home” over the last twenty years. For now, here’s a review of a meal at a Bengali restaurant, Oh Calcutta (in Nehru Place behind the Intercontinental hotel). Continue reading →

Delhi Food Teaser (January 2014)

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As I noted a couple of days ago, there’ll be a fair bit of food on the blog this month. We ate out quite a lot in Delhi in our 3.5 weeks here (we return to Minnesota tomorrow) and ate a few excellent meals, some interesting meals, some good meals and some indifferent meals. Almost all of them will be covered. In the meantime here’s a little something to whet the appetite.

Chaamp Taajdar: Lamb chops that are braised and then finished in the tandoor. This was not bad but more attractive than tasty.
“pomegranate & churan kulfi sorbet” Okay, so this was one instance when even my stony heart was won over by the cutesy presentation. It helped that the pomegranate kulfi was dynamite as well. I wish I could eat this regularly. This was the palate cleanser before the mains arrived.
“chicken ghee roast” We got this on the second occasion, which is a shame because I missed the chance to eat it twice. The chicken was perfectly tender and the spicing was very balanced, and the appam, made with roasted coconut, was divine. One of the best things I ate on the entire trip.
Bhetki, a type of Barramundi, is very popular in Bengal (Maach just means fish). Paturi refers to dishes steamed in banana/plantain leaf parcels. This sort of preparation is very common in eastern India (and probably elsewhere in India too) just as it is in other parts of East Asia. Oh Calcutta’s version is not bad but they only steam the fish with a piquant mustard paste which makes it kind of one-dimensional. Just a day before we’d had the version made by one of my aunts (an incredible cook) and her version which includes shredded coconut caused this one to pale in close proximity/comparison.
This was the dish that first sold us on Swagath a decade ago. Very fiddly to eat if you get it with whole crab as we did on this occasion but very good. There is also a less fiddly shelled crab option and looking back, I think in the past I may actually have preferred the version with squid. To mop this up we got some neer dosas (soft, white and nothing like the crisp dosas most people in the West, or North India, for that matter, are familiar with); but I unaccountably did not photograph them.
A Malabar Porotta wot to mop the redundant mutton chilly fry up with. This is a Malayali version of the ubiquitous paratha, and this was excellent: soft, layered and crisp and flaky all at once.