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
Tag Archives: Modern Indian Cuisine
Copra (San Francisco, June 2024)
Let’s keep the San Francisco meal reports moving. When last seen in the city, we were eating dim sum at Yank Sing in the Rincon Center—this after dinner the previous night at State Bird Provisions. I said in my write-up of said dinner at State Bird Provisions that we ate an even better meal the next day at a restaurant not too far away from it. That restaurant is Copra, from a chef with a long history of serving high-end Indian food in the Bay Area. Sri Gopinathan made his name at Taj Campton Place where he spent 15 years and earned two Michelin stars. He left that restaurant in 2020 and opened Copra on Fillmore St. in Japantown in early 2023—he also has another restaurant, Ettan in Palo Alto. I had wanted to eat at Campton Place in its heyday but a trip to San Francisco never materialized. And so it was a done deal that we would eat at Copra on this trip. And I am very glad we did. Halfway into the meal missus and I looked at each other and wondered when the let-down was going to arrive. It never did. This is, hands down, the best Indian restaurant we’ve eaten at in the United States. Here are the details. Continue reading
Indian Accent IV (Delhi, March 2024)
Lunches at Indian Accent’s New Delhi mothership were highlights of my eating out in 2022 and 2023. I ate the express lunch tasting there with a friend in March 2022 and in January 2023 the missus and I ate the full tasting menu at lunch. Both of those meals were excellent. And so it was a foregone conclusion that we would return for another go at the lunch tasting when we were back in Delhi for a bit last month. And so it came to pass. Well, it was another very good meal but the streak was finally broken: taken as a whole, it was not at the level of the previous two meals. There were some very good dishes but the second, heavier half of the meal didn’t really do it for us for a number of reasons; and the meal as a whole felt more than a little disjointed. Here are the details. Continue reading
Cafe Lota VII (Delhi, March 2024)
Cafe Lota is the one restaurant in Delhi that we/I may have eaten at on every trip to Delhi in the last 10 years. It’s certainly the restaurant we’ve eaten at the most. This is partly because it’s convenient to many of the places we visit in central-ish Delhi and for meeting up with friends who live in parts north and east; but it’s largely because we remain big fans of their menu of pan-regional Indian food, presented in contemporary’ish forms but without ever losing sight of their traditional anchors. We loved our first meals there in January 2014, not too long after they first opened, and we’ve continued to enjoy every meal we’ve had there since, even as the original chef departed and the restaurant’s own layout and menu kept evolving. Inevitable changes aside, many through lines remain from its beginnings; and so it’s no surprise that we enjoyed this meal very much as well. Here’s a quick report. Continue reading
Slink & Bardot (Bombay, February 2024)
Here, finally, is the long-promised last formal restaurant report from our time in Bombay. We were there from the middle of the first week of January to the middle of the second week of February. There was a lot of eating out, most of which has been chronicled already on the blog. Those who’ve been reading along know that the majority of those meals were in more or less traditional restaurants. The one exception in my reports so far was The Bombay Canteen, where I ate twice. The other was Slink & Bardot, a restaurant in Worli where I also ate dinner twice. This report is on the second meal. Continue reading
The Bombay Canteen (Bombay, January 2024)
Our eating out in Bombay was done mostly in places in the more traditional end of the culinary spectrum. Almost all the places we ate at prepare the foods of particular communities in ways that would be instantly recognizable to members of those communities who have never given much, if any, thought to food trends. There were two exceptions in this restaurant itinerary. I’ll post about the second next week. Here now is a very long report on two meals eaten at the first: The Bombay Canteen. We first ate there as a family and then a few weeks later I took the students whose birthdays fell in the Bombay portion of the program we’re on there for a celebratory meal. Both meals were good, on the whole, but one was far superior to the other. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Indian Accent III (Delhi, January 2023)
One of my very favourite meals of 2022 was eaten in Delhi in March: lunch at Indian Accent. That was my second meal at Indian Accent, the first having been eaten several years ago, when they were still in their original Friends Colony location, long before the international acclaim and the opening of branches abroad. Now, Indian Accent is in the swanky Lodhi Hotel (not that the previous location was not swanky as well) and is a mainstay on all those stupid “Best Restaurants in X” lists. I am generally skeptical of those lists but there’s no denying the excellence of the food at Indian Accent. Eight years passed between my first and second meal there, but given how good that second meal last year was, there was no way I was not going back again in January, this time with the missus in tow. Continue reading
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
Bhawan (Gurgaon, 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
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
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 (Gurgaon, 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
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
The Bombay Bread Bar (New York, August 2019)
This was the third of three Indian meals I ate in New York in August. The Bombay Bread Bar was the latest of renowned chef, Floyd Cardoz’ Indian restaurants. I never had a chance to eat at Tabla, Cardoz’ most successful restaurant, in operation from 1998 to 2010. Along with Tamarind under Raji Jallepalli*, Tabla was one of the few restaurants in that period that attempted to move Indian restaurant food in the US past the established cliches. Despite its longevity, however, it did not really spark a movement. Now the zeitgesit has caught up to Cardoz. New York alone is full of restaurants serving modern and regional Indian dishes, in rooms that are trendy and playful (see Adda and Baar Baar, for example). It made sense then that in 2016, after several years helming non-Indian restaurants, he made a return to this culinary space with Paowalla. But it didn’t stick, and in 2018 the concept was switched to the more casual Bombay Bread Bar. This was apparently more successful but not successful enough to keep it in business. It was announced in July that the restaurant would close in September. Nonetheless, I wanted to eat there. Having tried Cardoz’ updated take on Goan food in Bombay (at O Pedro), I was curious to see what he had been up to here. Continue reading
Baar Baar (New York, August 2019)
Baar Baar is a recently opened mod Indian restaurant in the East Village in Manhattan. Its name means “again and again” but I have no desire to eat there again, which is a shame because there is real talent in the kitchen. But that talent is in service of taking what could be excellent iterations of more traditional dishes and marring them with unnecessary jhatkas or flourishes that must read well to those looking for novelty but which come across as trying too hard on the plate and palate. At least so it seemed to us at our table. I ate here two days after my dinner at Adda and here again I was sans the missus; I dined instead with more people who I know from the food internet. In this case, one person I knew in the heyday of Another Subcontinent (and her partner) and two others I’ve come to know more recently on Twitter but had not met until this meal. So as to not tarnish their reputations by association with me I will preserve their anonymity. Continue reading
Cafe Lota Again (Delhi, December 2018)
We first ate at Cafe Lota—the restaurant attached to the Crafts Museum in Delhi—in 2014, not too long after it opened. We loved our meal so much we went back a few days later. And on our next trip in 2016 it was one of the places we returned to. Since then the original chef has moved on—we ate in 2016 at his then-new Rustom’s Parsi Bhonu but I think at the time he was still attached to Cafe Lota as well. In the intervening period there’s also been a lot of uncertainty about the Crafts Museum as a whole. There was talk of the BJP government—which does not have much use for Indian culture that cannot be said to have emerged from a cow—shutting it down; but I’m glad to report that it hasn’t happened yet. I didn’t make it into the museum proper on this trip but I did meet an old friend at Cafe Lota for lunch. The restaurant looks much the same, but is the food still as good as it was? Continue reading
Café Lota, Two Years Later (Delhi, January 2016)
Café Lota was one of our favourite stops on our last trip to Delhi, silly name and all. We ate there twice and liked the food so much that it was the one place we knew for certain we would eat at again on this trip. And we did so, twice again. Neither meal quite rose to the heights of our 2014 experience but I still stand by my claim that this is one of the best and most important restaurants in Delhi. Alas, its future is not bright. This is not because of any problems with the restaurant itself but because the future of the Crafts Museum complex, of which Café Lota is a part is not clear. Nor is it entirely the extent to which this is a political matter. Continue reading