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
Tag Archives: Delhi
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
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
Comorin (Delhi, March 2022)
Comorin flashed on my consciousness just as we were leaving Delhi in early February, 2020 (a month before you-know-what). It is the new-er, more casual restaurant from Chef Manish Mehrotra of Indian Accent. It opened late in 2018 in Gurgaon—at the swanky Horizon Centre, where it sits on the plaza level alongside a number of other flashy places aimed at Gurgaon’s young, professional elite. Given how much we loved our meal at Indian Accent in 2014 I was hellbent on eating at Comorin on this trip, especially as my parents have now moved from Noida to Gurgaon. As it happened I ate there twice in my first week here. Continue reading
Punjabi By Nature II (Delhi, Jan 2020)
We enjoyed our buffet lunch at Made in Punjab at the start of our stay in Delhi but, as I said at the end of my review, we liked the Punjabi lunch we had the next week even more. That lunch was at Punjabi By Nature, the OG upscale new wave Punjabi restaurant. We last ate there in 2016 and that write-up has some background information on the restaurant and the larger phenomenon of the rise of fancier Punjabi restaurants in Delhi in the era of liberalization. I won’t go into all that again in this report—you can go read the first few paragraphs of the earlier one if you’re so interested. I am happy to be able to tell you, however, that this meal was as good as our previous, which is to say, it was very good indeed. Indeed having now eaten at most of the major contenders I would say that Punjabi by Nature may still be atop the category. 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
Made in Punjab (Delhi, Jan 2020)
My reviews so far from our sojourn in Delhi in January (we have been back in Minnesota for a week now) may have given you the impression that we did not eat any North Indian food on this trip. Now, it’s true that we ate far less North Indian food on this trip than we usually do but we did eat some. In fact, our very first meal out was at a Punjabi restaurant, the aptly named Made in Punjab. We were at the NOIDA Mall of India for some wedding present shopping for later in the trip and of the many restaurant options the boys selected this one. I didn’t put up too much resistance either. I have very little interest in North Indian curry houses in the US but the genre is a very different proposition in Delhi. The boys were motivated by the promise of tandoori chicken and naans—it’s somewhat pathetic just how much better these basic dishes are at pretty much any halfway-decent North Indian restaurant in Delhi than anywhere in the US. I hoped there might be other kababs that might also be pleasing. I am happy to report we were all happy with our meal. Continue reading
Jamun (Delhi, Jan 2020)
We ate at Jamun—located in the Lodhi Colony market—the night after our dinner at Eat Pham. We met a different set of friends here. I’d suggested Cafe Lota but one member of the party nixed it on the grounds of the absence of alcohol and suggested we try Jamun, which had apparently been recommended highly to her. Being of a generally agreeable disposition, I put aside my misgivings—she is the notorious fantasist I’ve had cause to mention before—and we showed up for what in Delhi is a very early dinner reservation, at 7.30. The restaurant was fairly empty but not quiet for long. This because another member of the party—in from New Jersey—can normally be heard from two states away and that when she is not excited. On this occasion she was highly excited even before she got to the restaurant (was there alcohol involved? I don’t like to speculate). With ear plugs fastened we got down to perusing the menu. Continue reading
Nimtho (Delhi, January 2020)
Sikkim, which became an Indian state in 1975, is counted as one of the eight northeastern states of the country. It is not, however, contiguous with the other seven northeastern states, being separated geographically from them by parts of northern West Bengal that lie further east than Sikkim. The population is of largely Nepali origin with the Lepchas and Bhutias among the other major indigenous ethnic groups (there are also Bengali and Marwari communities). My family lived in northern West Bengal in the early 1980s and I went to boarding school in Darjeeling in the mid-1980s. We went on many hiking trips to Sikkim and I had Sikkimese friends in school. Sikkimese food is, therefore, not largely a blank space in my culinary map as is the case with most of the other northeastern states (the other exception is Assam). Unlike Manipur—whose food I know only from our recent meal at Eat Pham—or Nagaland—whose food I know only from meals at Dzükou and Hornbill—I’ve eaten a fair bit of Sikkimese food in my adolescence, though not a whole lot of it since then. As on this trip to Delhi we were trying to eat a greater regional variety of food than we usually end up doing, I was pleased to learn that there is a well-regarded Sikkimese restaurant in Greater Kailash-1: Nimtho. We ate lunch there in between our dinners at Eat Pham and Hornbill. Herewith some details. 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.
Continue reading
Hornbill (Delhi, January 2020)
Back to Humayunpur, back to another restaurant featuring the food of a North Eastern state. On Sunday I reviewed a dinner at the Manipuri restaurant, Eat Pham—a dinner we really enjoyed. A few days later we went back to the same market and embarked on a very similar hunt for another restaurant, Hornbill, which serves food from Nagaland. While our Eat Pham outing was our first encounter with Manipuri food, Hornbill was our second Naga meal in Delhi in as many trips as a family. We were last here all together in January 2016 (I’ve come on my own in between a few times) and on that trip one of our favourite meals was at Dzükou in Hauz Khas. Dzükou has since closed in that location. I’ve heard tell it has reopened in Vasant Kunj, but we didn’t need to go quite that far from Noida when there are a number of Naga places in Humayunpur and environs, and Hornbill particularly well-reviewed among them. We descended on them with the same friends we’d eaten at Dzükou with four years ago. Here is what we found after we found the restaurant. Continue reading
My Annoying Opinions 