From Bombay to Delhi; from one city with horrendous traffic to another. But how do the food scenes compare? Bombay’ites will be appalled to even find this question being posed but it’s a fair one. It’s true that Bombay has southwestern coastal food of a quality that has never been available in Delhi as well as far better Gujarati and Parsi food, and it probably has better western-ized restaurants. But is that enough? My friend Paromita, with whom I ate out in Bombay a lot, holds some heretical views on the subject. She says that Delhi may in fact be a more cosmopolitan city than Bombay—Bombay-ites will register a claim like this as might New Yorkers being told that Los Angeles is a more cosmopolitan city than New York. But certainly, a seemingly non-intuitive case could be made for this on the food front. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Andhra Food
Golconda Bowl Express (Noida, January 2014)
In 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