In December I broke my streak of eating at Cafe Lota on every trip to Delhi in the last decade or so. I didn’t have so much time on that brief visit, which included a sojourn to Coonoor for a few days, to eat at all my favourite restaurants; and since we’d eaten at Cafe Lota as a family last March, I gave it a miss. But when I returned this March for two weeks I made it a priority to get back there. I met a friend for lunch there who I/we usually meet for lunch there. As it was just the two of us, we couldn’t do a whole lot of damage. But that’s not to say that we did not have much to eat. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Central Delhi
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
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
Cafe Lota V (Delhi, March 2022)
Cafe Lota may be my favourite restaurant in Delhi. I’ve eaten there on every trip since we first ate there in 2014—in some cases more than once. Part of our affection for it is that it is attached to the Crafts Museum, one of Delhi’s less visited treasures—and the restaurant itself is beautiful. Part of is that we’ve eaten there with so many good friends over the years. And a large part of it is the food, which is always excellent, always interesting and always an object lesson in the fact that a restaurant specializing in contemporary Indian food does not have to run away from “tradition”. One of the still remarkable things about Lota is how easily and seamlessly they present traditional dishes from different parts of India—sometimes in traditional guises, sometimes in updated presentations—alongside more mod’ish takes. As I noted at the end of my review of my meals at Comorin on this trip, the kind of thing Comorin is doing was really pioneered by Lota, and I think I prefer Lota’s version of it. You can go eat a Himachali thali and you can go eat bhapa doi cheesecake or apple jalebis—all of which I ate on this trip with some of my closest friends and fellow Lota aficionados. Between the laughter and the food, it was a wonderful meal and I can’t wait to do it again in January. Continue reading
Cafe Lota IV (Delhi, Jan 2020)
We first ate at Cafe Lota in January 2014, just a few months after it had opened at the Crafts Museum. Since then we/I have gone back there on every trip (the one exception being in 2017 when I visited Delhi very briefly on account of a family emergency). We were enthusiastic about our first meals there in 2014; the two visits since then, in 2016 and 2018, yielded somewhat more uneven results with the departure of the original chef a possible reason. I still maintained, however, that it was one of the better and more interesting restaurants in Delhi and so there was not much question that we would go back there again on this trip. Continue reading
Bagundi 2 (Delhi, January 2020)
From the North East to the south and to a restaurant I first ate at on my trip to Delhi in December 2018. Bagundi, located in M block on the Connaught Place outer circle, features the food of Andhra Pradesh. The state in fact split into two in 2014, or rather a new state, Telangana was carved out of the north-western parts of the old Andhra Pradesh. As far as I can make out, Bagundi’s conception of Andhra food is not affected by these border re-drawings: their menu features most of the dishes I would have expected to see on an Andhra menu prior to 2014.
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Chor Bizarre (Delhi, December 2018)
Walking into Chor Bizarre is like walking into the past for me. I don’t know when it opened in the Hotel Broadway on Asaf Ali Road in Daryaganj but it looks exactly the same as it did when I first visited in the early 1990s (memory is unreliable, of course—especially at my increasingly advanced age). This was before the liberalization of the Indian economy and the upper/middle class restaurant boom that followed (along with so much else). At the time the kitschy decor of Chor Bizarre was quite unusual, if not entirely original. Well, the particular kitsch of Chor Bizarre (unchanged to the present day) was and is original—they bring together in their decor items from chor bazaars (or thieves’/flea markets) that can be found all over India; but the general genre of kitsch they occupy was not—the Dhaba at the swanky Claridges hotel, for example, evoked informal highway roadside trucker restaurants for moneyed Delhi-ites and tourists alike, right down to having a truck parked inside the restaurant. Nowadays, of course, high concept restaurants can be found all over Delhi but the other thing Chor Bizarre is known for is still a rare find: Kashmiri food. Continue reading
The Potbelly, Bihar Niwas (Delhi, December 2018)
This was my third state bhawan lunch in five days on my trip to Delhi in December, and it was at the far end of the spectrum from the first and quite a way away from the second too. That first lunch, you may remember, was at Samridhi, the staff canteen at Kerala House near Connaught Place. Samridhi is very much a staff canteen—prices are ludicrously low, the food is low-key (but very good) and no one has given a first let alone a second thought to questions of ambience. The second lunch, as you have memorized, was at Viva O Viva, the restaurant at Goa Niwas in Chanakyapuri. That is a formal restaurant but while someone has spared a few thoughts for interior design it does not, in sum, seem like it was the right person who did so. The food there was excellent, however. I was not expecting to eat another state bhawan lunch of that quality but was very happy to do so anyway a few days later at the Bihar Niwas which is right next door. The Potbelly is the restaurant there and is actually a branch of a restaurant by the same name in a now trendy part South Delhi. As such it’s a formal restaurant and very nicely done up. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Cafe Lota Again (Delhi, December 2018)
We first ate at Cafe Lota—the restaurant attached to the Crafts Museum in Delhi—in 2014, not too long after it opened. We loved our meal so much we went back a few days later. And on our next trip in 2016 it was one of the places we returned to. Since then the original chef has moved on—we ate in 2016 at his then-new Rustom’s Parsi Bhonu but I think at the time he was still attached to Cafe Lota as well. In the intervening period there’s also been a lot of uncertainty about the Crafts Museum as a whole. There was talk of the BJP government—which does not have much use for Indian culture that cannot be said to have emerged from a cow—shutting it down; but I’m glad to report that it hasn’t happened yet. I didn’t make it into the museum proper on this trip but I did meet an old friend at Cafe Lota for lunch. The restaurant looks much the same, but is the food still as good as it was? Continue reading
Viva O Viva (Delhi, December 2018)
Nobody expects Delhi to have better Goan food than Bombay and you don’t have to look further than geography and demographics to see why. And I’m certainly not going to make that counter-intuitive and provocative claim here. The fact is Delhi barely has any Goan restaurants. However, on this trip to Bombay and Delhi I ate better Goan food in Delhi than I did in Bombay. I hasten to add here that when I speak of Goan food I am doing so in the stereotypical sense of the Christian food most associated with Goa. After all, Highway Gomantak is also a Goan restaurant and I’m not making any comparison with my meal there. No, it is to my meals at O Pedro that I am comparing my lunch at Viva O Viva and ruling in favour of the Delhi establishment. And this too should probably not be a surprise as Viva O Viva is the restaurant at Goa Niwas in Chanakyapuri, the official (very large) guesthouse of the Goa state government in Delhi. Continue reading
Samridhi (Delhi, December 2018)
I have mentioned before that one of the great open secrets of Delhi’s food scene is that some of the best food from other regions of the country is available in the canteens or dining halls of the various state bhawans. Now, you may be wondering what a state bhawan is. Delhi, as you know, is the capital of India, and all the state governments have headquarters in the city that combine office space as well as lodging for state bureaucrats visiting the capital or attached to the central government. They also have staff canteens that feed the employees of the bhawans—drawn from the state—the food of home. Many of these canteens—though not all—are open to the public; at some—as at Samridhi, it’s more the case that nobody stops the general public from eating there. These canteens run the gamut in aesthetic. The Bihar Bhawan, for example, has a full-on restaurant, a branch of the popular Potbelly; Goa Niwas also has a restaurant (Viva O Viva) but it’s decidedly less fancy. At the far end of the continuum is Samridhi, the canteen of Kerala House, as basic a dining establishment as you can imagine. It is functional and cheap but serves very delicious food. Continue reading
Bagundi (Delhi, December 2018)
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
Sagar Ratna (Delhi, Spring 2017)
I had to take an unexpected side-trip from London to Delhi recently on account of a family emergency. Fortunately, everything went well and things seem to be returning to normal. I myself am now back in London (where we’ll be for another six weeks or so). I didn’t really have a whole lot of time in Delhi for things that didn’t rotate around hospital visits but did manage to find time to lunch with two old friends. The first was this meal, a quick lunch in Connaught Place. I was for some reason longing for idlis and vadas and the CP outpost of Sagar Ratna is where we went, Continue reading
Café Lota, Two Years Later (Delhi, January 2016)
Café Lota was one of our favourite stops on our last trip to Delhi, silly name and all. We ate there twice and liked the food so much that it was the one place we knew for certain we would eat at again on this trip. And we did so, twice again. Neither meal quite rose to the heights of our 2014 experience but I still stand by my claim that this is one of the best and most important restaurants in Delhi. Alas, its future is not bright. This is not because of any problems with the restaurant itself but because the future of the Crafts Museum complex, of which Café Lota is a part is not clear. Nor is it entirely the extent to which this is a political matter. Continue reading
Varq (Delhi, January 2016)
Varq, at the Taj Mahal hotel in Delhi, is said to be one of the most important restaurants not just in the city but in all of India. The force behind it, Chef Hemant Oberoi, is considered one of the most important and influential figures in Indian haute cuisine in the last 20 odd years. He retired last year but his newer restaurants Masala Art and especially Varq remain at the forefront of the movement to re-articulate classic high-end Indian restaurant food in a contemporary/modern idiom. Personally, I am not convinced of the need for this sort of thing because usually when people say “contemporary” or “modern” in this context they mean “Western” and I’m never quite clear on why that should be so. It’s not as though in fashion or film or even non-high-end food Indian modernity is reliant on Western cues. Continue reading
Jakoi (Delhi, January 2014)
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