In my review of Dakshin yesterday I mentioned the rise in Delhi in the last decade and a half or so of what I called upper/middle class Indian restaurants: restaurants that filled the space between affordable places that were low on ambience and the super-expensive name restaurants in five star hotels. Much of this has coincided, as I noted last week, with the proliferation of restaurants specializing in regional cuisines. It is likely though that the restaurant that could be said to have led the way is one that serves the Punjabi cuisine most associated with Delhi—tandoori chicken, butter chicken, dal makhani etc.: Punjabi by Nature. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Delhi
Dakshin (Delhi, January 2016)
Once upon a time in Delhi, restaurants at five star hotels were pretty much the only option if you wanted to go out for a fancy meal. The pre-eminent restaurants in the category were the Maurya Sheraton’s Bukhara and Dum Pukht, and through the late 1980s and 1990s they set the tone for similar restaurants at the other five stars: meat-centric North Indian food with either a Northwest frontier or nawabi focus. The hotels usually also all had Indian Chinese restaurants (each of which pretended to be “authentic” Chinese) and 24-hour coffee shops, and some had one outlier restaurant: the Meridien had a French restaurant, for example, (Pierre, I think its name was—for all I know, it still exists.) and the Oberoi had an excellent Thai restaurant for a while: Baan Thai. Continue reading
Sodabottleopenerwala (Gurgaon, January 2016)
Sodabottleopenerwala, which opened two years ago in Gurgaon and has since expanded to other locations in Delhi and elsewhere, may well have been named MaximumParsiSignifiers. Irani restaurant as theme park, it represents a weird yet representative moment in the packaging of regional cuisines for hyper-consumerist India in the early 21st century. Unpacking all of this properly is beyond the scope of a quick meal report written on the fly but I’ll give it a truncated shot.
First up, a little recommended reading for those who don’t know their Parsi from their Paris (all from Another Subcontinent): start with this brief essay by the late, great Sue Darlow that sketches the history of the Parsi community in India; then take a look at the first three links in this feature on a Parsi cookbook; finally, go take a look at Sue’s wonderful series of photographs, “Scenes from Parsi Life“. That should give you enough of a context to get started here. Continue reading
Dzükou (Delhi, January 2016)
As I noted in one of my write-ups of meals from our last trip to Delhi a couple of years ago, perhaps the major shift in the food scene in Delhi over the last decade and more is the proliferation of restaurants serving a larger range of regional Indian cuisines. It’s a different world now than when I was at university in the late 1980s and then working in advertising in the early 1990s. Then the options were largely south Indian vegetarian and, starting in the early 1990s, a few places offering food from Kerala. (I am not, of course, counting Indian Chinese here as that stopped being a regional Indian cuisine a long time ago—it’s now a pan-Indian thing much like “Mughlai” food.) Now, there’s a lot available: a lot of Malayali restaurants, Parsi/Irani restaurants, Goan restaurants, Rajasthani restaurants, Bengali restaurants, even Bihari and Oriya restaurants. The most pleasing development though in many ways may be the growing number of restaurants serving food from the states of the North East. 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
Chaat etc.
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)
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