During the two weeks I spent in Delhi/Gurgaon at the end of July and beginning of August, I ate out seven times. I’ve previously reported on my meals at Chak Khum, Farmer’s Kitchen, Ikk Panjab, The Fusion Naga, Matamaal, and Hosa. Here now is a look at the last of the seven meal, eaten, like three of the others, in Humayunpur. As the few people who follow my Delhi restaurant reports know, the North East enclave of Humayunpur in South Delhi is my favourite place to eat at in the entire National Capital Region (Delhi/Gurgaon/Noida). I particularly love the food of Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram—all of which I know largely or only through restaurants in Humayunpur—and I am yet to eat at more than a small percentage of all the restaurants there. This is the only reason for my having gone back to so few of these restaurants for a second meal. I’m yet to have a bad meal there and so I am incentivized to keep trying new places. Today’s report, however, is of a restaurant I’ve written about before. The Categorical Eat Pham is one of the oldest Manipuri restaurants in Humayunpur—if not the oldest—and it was one of the first restaurants in Humayunpur that we ate at back in 2020. If not for the fact that other Manipuri restaurants have since opened up in the neighbourhood—both Chak Khum and Chak-Shang are just a hop, skip and jump away—I would have been happy just going back there over and over. And so I was very happy to meet some old friends for lunch there the day before my return to Minnesota. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Delhi
Matamaal V (Gurgaon, August 2026)
We first ate at Matamaal, the premier Kashmiri restaurant in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region), back in January 2023. This was when there was but the one location, in the City Court Mall in Sikanderpur/Gurgaon. We liked that meal so much that for a while I/we ate there on every subsequent trip (in March 2024 and in December 2024 and March 2025). As I said in my last report on a meal at Matamaal, I’m not sure when their branches—in Delhi and Noida in the NCR and also in Pune—opened. I’ve heard some mixed reports of the Noida location but I’ve still not been to it or any of the others. I think they might be franchisee-run, not operated by the owners of the original—this because the restaurant’s website seems to invite franchise partners. I can tell you though that the food at the original is still as good as it was on our first visit in 2023. This judgment is brought to you from a dinner eaten there this past August. Here’s a quick look at it. Continue reading
The Fusion Naga (Delhi, August 2026)
I said I’d have a review of a South Indian restaurant in Gurgaon this weekend but instead let’s go back to Humayunpur for another Naga meal. I was last seen there eating a thali at Farmer’s Kitchen. That was an excellent, if unplanned meal—by which I mean, that I’d gone with a plan to eat at a Manipuri place that turned out to be experiencing some monsoon-related problems (read: rain coming through the roof). This meal at The Fusion Naga was planned and was also excellent. This is basically the situation when you eat in a restaurant in Humayunpur: you have to try very hard to have a bad meal. Continue reading
Farmer’s Kitchen (Delhi, July 2026)
Let’s stay in Humayunpur. As I noted in my report on an excellent Manipuri lunch at Chak Khum on Thursday, more than half of my meals out on my two-week trip to Delhi/Gurgaon in late-July/early-August were eaten in Humayunpur. Humayunpur, as those who read my Delhi reports should know by now, is one of the major centers of Northeast Indian life in the city and its streets are lined by an ever-expanding number of restaurants from those Northeastern states. Some of my favourite places to eat at in Humayunpur serve the foods of Nagaland and it takes a great deal of effort to not just keep going back to Hornbill or Dear Naga or Shilloi (to name only three). But I am determined to eat at as many of the restaurants in Humayunpur as possible, and so on this trip I visited two Naga restaurants I had not previously tried. I have for you today a report on the first of these: Farmer’s Kitchen, a tiny place deep inside Humayunpur that serves Ao Naga food. I ended up here pretty much by chance after the place I had expressly left home to eat at turned out to be closed due to the monsoon rain coming in through the ceiling (!). I am happy to say it was a fabulous meal. Continue reading
Chak Khum (Delhi, July 2026)
Here is one of the backlogged restaurant reports I’d meant to post last week but didn’t end up having the time to get around to. It takes us back to Delhi, but closer in time to the present. After returning to Minnesota in mid-June from my extended sojourn in first Bombay and then Seoul, I remained at home for just over a month. A lot of world cup, a lot of time in my community garden plot, a lot of recharging. And then it was back to Delhi for two weeks to check on my mother. I ate out at my regular clip while there—roughly once every other day. This first report comes from the neighbourhood in South Delhi where I ate most of those meals and my very favourite place in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) to eat: Humayunpur. Four of my seven meals out on this trip were eaten there: two at Naga restaurants and two at Manipuri restaurants. Let’s begin with lunch at the first Manipuri place: Chak Khum. Continue reading
Bhansaghar II (Delhi, March 2026)
I’d said I would have another Delhi restaurant report from my considerable backlog on Sunday and, by god, it’s still Sunday in Minnesota! Not for very much longer, but it’s still Sunday!
This is not the Delhi restaurant report I’d planned to post, however. I’d hoped to get another of my long-delayed reports of a couple of meals eaten at the same restaurant across 2025 out. But as it turned out, the theme of this weekend was the endless processing of the massive harvests of tomatoes coming in from my community garden plot and I did not have time to process and resize the large number of photographs from those meals. And so I have for you instead a quick report on a quick lunch eaten with a friend in March. Nobody who reads my Delhi restaurant reports regularly (assuming any such people exist) will be surprised to learn that this lunch was eaten in Humayunpur. It was not eaten, however, in a restaurant specializing in the food of a state from India’s north-east. It was instead a Nepali meal, eaten at Bhansaghar. Continue reading
Indian Accent V (Delhi, July 2025)
Yes, you read that correctly: this is a report on a meal eaten in Delhi not this past July, but in July of 2025. That’s not even my record for a belated meal report/review; in fact, I have another Delhi report from 2025 in the wings that’s going to make this one look timely. More on that later.
This is my fifth report on a meal at Indian Accent in Delhi, and the fourth on lunch at their current location in the Lodhi Hotel (our first meal there was a dinner when they were still in the Manor Hotel in Friends Colony). At the two lunches before this one, I was with the missus and we ate the non-vegetarian Chef’s Tasting Menu (here and here); at the meal before those, a friend and I had eaten the Express tasting menu. On this occasion, however, we were accompanied by our boys and we ordered from the a la carte menu. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Manipuri Chak-Shang (Delhi, December 2025)
On Sunday I posted the last of my restaurant reports from my truncated trip to Southern California in December (dim sum at the Cerritos branch of Lunasia). Here now is my last restaurant report proper from my trip to Delhi earlier that month. I say “last restaurant report proper” because I may post an odds and ends roundup at some point in the next few weeks.
This meal took me back to my favourite place to eat at in Delhi: Humayunpur, the South Delhi neighbourhood/village that has in the last decade and more become one of the major hubs of North East Indian life in Delhi. I had eaten there with a friend just a few days prior to this meal. That was an excellent Naga meal. As we were walking around after I noticed a place I didn’t remember seeing before: Manipuri Chak Shang (which literally means Manipuri restaurant or eating place). One thing led to another and I was soon eating lunch there as well. This time I was on my own. Here’s how it went. Continue reading
Inja (Delhi, July 2025)
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
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