Tag Archives: Delhi

Chaat etc.

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There are few genres as tedious as that in which a middle-aged immigrant waxes nostalgic for the food of their youth/home country and tells you that you can’t get good versions of it where they live now. So I hope you’ll excuse this post.

I left India in 1993 to come to graduate school in the US. Through the 1990s Indian food in the US was an unmitigated disaster: like a bad analogue of Olive Garden’ish Italian food or airport Chinese food. Pretty much all that was available was a bad copy of North Indian Mughlai food made for the most part with pre-fabricated sauces and substitutable meats; with buckets of cream and nut pastes masking the lack of actual experience or care in the kitchen*. None of this was much of a loss for me. This genre of food is restaurant food even in North India–no one eats it at home; and what I mostly wanted to eat I could make for myself at home. I was a decent enough cook when I arrived in the US and necessity made me much better. The ingredients for home-cooking–in my case, Bengali cooking (Indian food is intensely regional)–at any rate were available in Indian stores in Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Indian Accent (Delhi, January 2014)

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Indian Accent Interior

Indian Accent, which opened in the boutique Manor hotel in Friends Colony three or four years ago, may or may not be Delhi’s most talked about fine dining restaurant but it is surely on the very short list of the most ambitious. Its reputation among Delhi foodies–at least among the subset in my group of friends–rests on Chef Manish Mehrotra’s nouveau/fusion take on traditional Indian food. A few things about my feelings about all this before I get to the meal itself:

1) I’m generally suspicious of all kinds of Asian fusion in the US because it seems to me that restaurants that try it are predicated on two things usually: a clientele that doesn’t actually eat/know Asian cuisines in their original contexts; and a bogus narrative in which Asian cuisines are seen as being “modernized” or elevated through whatever is being done to/with them. At best in the high end the use of Asian ingredients/flavours/techniques is seen as proof of the Euro/American trained chef’s openness of mind or creativity while they remain firmly grounded in the Euro/American idiom which remains the guarantor of their credentials. Continue reading →