After three first-time reports from Bombay restaurants (Pradeep’s Gomantak Bhojanalay, Sarangaa, and Maaslli) from my five-week sojourn in the city in March and April of this year, here is the first repeat. As I’ve mentioned before, I eat at Swati Snacks every time I am in Bombay (see my previous reports here and here) and, indeed, I ate at the Tardeo mothership on my second day in the city in March. Two of the students on my program had arrived a few days before the others and I took them along with me to introduce them to this great Bombay institution. I’m glad to report that they enjoyed it very much. Here are some details. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Indian Food
Maaslli I & II (Bombay, March 2026)
The first thing I did after settling into my flat in Bombay in late March was fire up Google Maps to see if there were any interesting restaurants within easy walking range. It turned out there were very few. One, however, caught my eye: Maaslli. I looked it up and discovered that it is a seafood restaurant specializing in the food of the GSB (Gaud Saraswat Brahmin) community—yes, in India even restaurants have caste-specific identities. And all the reviews I read of it were raves. And what’s more, of the two locations the one within 15 minutes walk of me was the original. And so that is where I ate dinner on my first night in Bombay on this trip. And it was such a fantastic meal that I went back there for dinner again a couple of nights later. And then for two lunches later in the trip. Here first is an account of the first two meals—I’ll post a report on the two lunches in a few weeks. Continue reading
Draavin Canteen (Gurgaon, Dec 2025)
Draavin Canteen opened in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi a couple of years ago under the name Dakshin Canteen and quickly made a name for their South Indian menu featuring both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. I read a number of enticing reviews etc. of it online but never managed to make it there. In the second half of last year, however, they opened a branch in Gurgaon, which has been my home base in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) since late-2021. With the new location a mere 20 minutes away from my parents’ flat, finding people to go eat there together with became a much easier proposition. And so on my trip in December it was high on my list. I descended on them in a party of five for lunch a few days after arrival. My expectations were high and I’m sorry to say they weren’t quite met. Here are some details. Continue reading
Dear Naga (Delhi, December 2025)
Alas, I completely whiffed on my posting plans for the weekend. I’d said I would post the last report from our Japan trip last summer and one more from Los Angeles at the end of December but I didn’t get around to either. Like I said, the World Cup has done a real number on my ability to get most things done. I will try my best to catch up with those posts this week but in the meantime I’m going to stick with the regular rotation for the summer which has reports from Delhi or Bombay going up on Mondays. The two previous weeks began with reports on two coastal meals from Bombay in April: at Pradeep Gomantak and Sarangaa; this week I go back a few more months to my first visit to Delhi in December. The cuisine featured here is one from a completely different part of the country: Nagaland. No surprise: the meal was eaten in one of Delhi’s most prominent Northeastern enclaves, Humayunpur, at a restaurant I had not previously eaten at: Dear Naga. Here’s a quick look at it. Continue reading
Sarangaa (Bombay, April 2026)
Alright we’re back in Bombay. When last seen, I was at Pradeep Gomantak in Fort eating a Goan seafood thali. This week’s report also involves a seafood thali but this report comes to you from Prabhadevi, from a less-storied restaurant than Pradeep. Indeed, until we ate there, neither I nor my dining companion—a long-time resident of the city—had ever heard of it. We had set out to eat Malvani dinner at Chaitanya but had arrived to find a projected wait of 90 minutes or longer. Chaitanya’s food is outstanding but we weren’t about to stand around for 90 minutes. So we checked Google Maps to see what else was around and found another Malvani restaurant, Sarangaa just a few minutes walk away. There was no wait at Sarangaa and so we quickly got down to business. Continue reading
Pradeep Gomantak Bhojanalay + Ideal Corner (Bombay, April 2026)
Call off the celebrations: I’m back.
I was not expecting to be gone this long from the blog when I announced a hiatus in January. My father had just passed away at the end of December and I had come back to Minnesota physically and mentally exhausted. And then the ICE assault on our state began. Even though we were not as badly affected in our town as people were in the Twin Cities, we were not insulated from it. With a low hum of worry at all times—especially for our boys—sitting down to blog in detail about whisky and food was not high on my list of priorities. Especially as I was also teaching and preparing for a 10-week off-campus program in the spring. By the time things eased in Minnesota I was off on that program and that kept me busy (and exhausted) through the first half of June. Through it all I kept meaning to get back to the blog but I couldn’t get the energy together. But I’ve been back now for 10 days and—the World Cup notwithstanding—am trying to get back into my old routines. And so, I’m back. Continue reading
Spice Village, Restaurant & Grocery (Apple Valley, MN)
I’ve speculated before on the likely growth of the Indian population in the South Twin Cities metro. In recent years there’s been an explosion of new home construction along the Cedar Avenue corridor extending from Apple Valley down to Lakeville; and this has been accompanied by an uptick of Indian restaurants and groceries in the general vicinity. Most of this has been concentrated in Eagan but now Apple Valley appears to be on the move as well. Kumar’s opened right before the pandemic in the massive strip mall at the north-west corner of the intersection of Cedar and 140th St (I think it might be called Times Square), as did Mantra Bazaar, the grocery run by the restaurant’s owners. Mantra Bazar has expanded quite a bit from its original store (which I reported on a while ago). This in itself is evidence of the growth of the desi population in the area that it feeds. Now, both Kumar’s and Mantra Bazar have competition in their immediate vicinity. Spice Village opened this summer on the other side of the strip, with a restaurant and grocery adjacent to each other. I finally made it there this past weekend and here is a look at both. Continue reading
Sangeetha (Delhi, July 2025)
This was my first trip to Delhi with the family on which we did not eat a single meal at Cafe Lota. This is not because there’s been a decline in quality at Cafe Lota since I ate there in March. It’s because parental complications on the day we met the friend I/we always eat lunch at Cafe Lota with meant that we had to be back home not too late in the afternoon. And so rather than drive all the way to Pragati Maidan from Gurgaon, we shaved 40-60 minutes off the round-trip by driving to Green Park. Our destination? The first Delhi outlet of Sangeetha, a Chennai-based South Indian chain with a very strong reputation. 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
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