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
Tag Archives: Delhi
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
Cafe Lota VIII (Delhi, March 2025)
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
Fort City (Delhi, March 2025)
Here’s something a little different from my normal Delhi reports. Last week I met up with some old high school friends and they suggested a brewpub in South Delhi to hang out at. To be specific, Fort City Brewing, which is located in the Hauz Khas market. Now, I don’t generally drink a lot of beer or hang out in brewpubs back in the US, but I do have an anthropological interest in these developments in Delhi, and so I agreed readily to the location. Named for the large number of medieval forts that iconically dot the landscape of Delhi, Fort City is apparently the only pub/bar in Delhi that brews their own beer. I believe they opened for business in 2023. In less than two years they’ve acquired a strong reputation and a faithful local following. They were named the best microbrewery in India for 2024 by some publication or the other, and have picked up a number of other plaudits as well. They serve a range of their own beers and a range of food besides. What did I make of it? Read on. Continue reading
Shilloi (Delhi, March 2025)
In my most recent report on meals at Matamaal—the Kashmiri restaurant in Gurgaon—I noted that eating there has become a ritual on my/our recent trips to Delhi. So too has eating in Humayunpur Market, one of the major centers of North East Indian life in Delhi, especially of North Indian cuisine. The market is dotted with restaurants, small and large, that serve the cuisines of most of the states east of Bangladesh (I’ve not yet come across any references to restaurants serving the food of Tripura), along with Tibetan, Nepali, Korean and various East Asian cuisines. On my visit to Delhi in December I ate a Nepali lunch at Bhansaghar and an Arunachali lunch at Arunachali Sajolang. Both were excellent. Away from Humayunpur, I also ate an excellent Naga lunch at Dzükou in Vasant Kunj. I was hellbent on eating Naga food again on this trip and this time I fulfilled that desire in Humayunpur, at a small restaurant named Shilloi. Continue reading
Ping’s Bia Hoi (Gurgaon, March 2025)
When I am in India, the only food I’m really very interested in eating is Indian food—including Indian Chinese. The primary reason for this is obvious: Indian food in India is far, far superior to that available anywhere in the US, with many regional cuisines and categories not even available there at all. The secondary reason is that, contrariwise, far superior versions of most non-Indian cuisines available in India exist in the US. And so I don’t really see much point in wasting my eating out slots on short trips home on Italian or (non-Indian) Chinese or Japanese or Vietnamese or Korean or Mexican food etc. etc. in India. This doesn’t always mesh well, however, with the preferences of my friends and family here. While they do go out to eat at Indian restaurants as well, they’re often more excited to visit non-Indian restaurants. This is how we ended up at Gung in January 2023, for example. And this is also how I ended up on this trip at Ping’s Bia Hoi, a nominally Vietnamese but really pan-Asian restaurant at the swanky One Horizon Center in Gurgaon. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Matamaal III & IV (Gurgaon, Dec ’24/Mar ’25)
Eating at Matamaal has become a ritual on my/our trips to Delhi. We first ate there (twice) in January 2023 and then in March 2024. When I was in Delhi by myself in December, I dutifully went and ate there again by myself. And now that I’m in Delhi again by myself, it’s no surprise that I was back there again. That was yesterday. Here is a combined report on that lunch and my meal there in December (which I’d forgotten to previously report on).
By the way, as I’ve noted before, I use the name “Delhi” in my restaurant reports to refer more broadly to the National Capital Region, which includes the contiguous cities of Gurgaon (in the state of Haryana) and Noida (in the state of Uttar Pradesh). Matamaal is located in Gurgaon in the City Court mall. Or rather, that’s where the flagship location that we visit is located. At some point in the period since our first visit they’ve opened locations in Greater Kailash I in Delhi, in Noida, and even one in Pune. As to whether these locations are branches or franchise operations, I’m not sure. My reports shouldn’t be seen as indicative of the quality of the food anywhere other than at the flagship location. At that location I’m yet to have a bad meal, as my recent lunches in the last three months demonstrate. Continue reading
Carnatic Cafe III (Delhi, December 2024)
My first three meal reports from my recent solo trip to Delhi were of lunches at which I ate thalis: at Arunachali Sajolang, Bhansaghar and Zambar. There were, in fact, only two meals I ate out that did not involve thalis. One was my lunch at Dzükou, and the other was this lunch at Carnatic Cafe. This is my third report over the years of meals eaten at Carnatic Cafe. The first was from their original Friends Colony location (since closed); the second was from the Greater Kailash II location. This meal took me to yet another of their locations, this one in the Lodhi Colony market. I met a dear old friend for lunch here. Here’s a quick look at how it went. Continue reading
Dzükou, Eight Years Later (Delhi, December 2024)
My very first Naga meal in Delhi was eaten at Dzükou. That was in January 2016. At the time Dzükou was located in the Hauz Khas market. We loved that meal and resolved to return on our next visit to the city. On our next trip to Delhi, however, we were disappointed to learn that the restaurant had closed. Still later, I got word that they had reopened, not in Hauz Khas but in Vasant Kunj. We had hoped to get there in January 2023 but couldn’t make it work; and in March this year I just forgot about it. I’m happy to report, therefore, that I did make it there on my brief solo trip to Delhi this month and that I enjoyed this meal almost as much as I had the first—the gap arising not from some lower quality at this meal but from the fact that I’ve eaten more Naga and other North Eastern food in the intervening period and as such there was less of the excitement of the new. Continue reading
Zambar (Gurgaon, December 2024)
Another Delhi restaurant report, another thali-based meal. As I noted recently, I use the name “Delhi” a little loosely in my restaurant reports to refer to the NCR or National Capital Region, which includes Gurgaon and Noida, which are not just separate cities but are part of different states (Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, respectively). I bring this up because the meal I am reporting on today was eaten at a restaurant in Gurgaon: at Zambar in the Ambience Mall off of National Highway 48. Even by the gargantuan scale of modern Indian malls, Ambience is particularly massive and alienating. But there were some specific things I needed to shop for and some specific things I was interested in eating and that is how I ended up eating a thali at Zambar. Continue reading
Bhansaghar (Delhi, December 2024)
Let’s keep the restaurant reports from my recent trip to Delhi rolling. As I noted in the first report I posted—on a very good lunch at Arunachali Sajolang—I am not posting these in the order in which they were eaten. Indeed, today’s report is on a lunch eaten two days prior to the Arunachali Sajolang meal. On this occasion, I was on my own; I was, however, in the same neighbourhood, in Humayunpur. If you’ve followed my Humayunpur reports over the last few years, or if you know Delhi well, you know that this neighbourhood—an incorporated village in Safdarjung Enclave in South Delhi—is one of the centers of North Eastern life and food in Delhi. The market is dotted with restaurants that serve the foods of the North East as well as other businesses that cater to residents who hail from those states. Bhansaghar is technically not one of those restaurants as it is principally a Nepali and Tibetan restaurant. But North Eastern solidarity in Delhi extends to people from Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet as well (to say nothing of Sikkim) and so it is not surprising that they are located in Humayunpur. They were recommended to me by the food writer, Shirin Mehrotra and I am very thankful as I had a very nice lunch. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Arunachali Sajolang (Delhi, December 2024)
Okay, let’s get the Delhi reports underway. I was/am in Delhi by myself for this short trip (when this posts, I will be 12 hours from departure) and so the eating out situation was very different from when the missus and the boys are here with me. Thankfully, in India it is very easy for a single diner to eat a well-rounded meal and that’s because our ancestors were wise enough to invent the OG tasting menu: the thali. Almost all my meals out involved thalis. Indeed, even a couple of the meals I ate with other people involved thalis. This lunch, eaten at an Arunachali restaurant in Humayunpur, was one such. I was joined by an old friend who was coincidentally in town from Bombay to speak at a queer lit fest. It was the first Arunachali meal for both of us. Here’s how it went. Continue reading