Every hotel vies with its competitors to host the most innovative food festival. There are a couple of variables. Though the cuisine has to be bold and novel – and of course memorable – it also has to appeal to the taste-buds of the public and be as popular as possible. There are a few…
Shilarna Vaze, Gaia, Mumbai, A former restaurateur and caterer, 30-year-old Shilarna Vaze runs a gourmet catering service called Gaia with her Swiss-French husband Christophe Perrin. Vaze trained at Paris’ Le Cordon Bleu, while Perrin acquired his culinary chops from his father, a retired chef in the alpine village of Leysin in Switzerland. As Vaze’s longstanding…
The lines between one eatery in Hauz Khas Village and the next are beginning to blur. Just about every restaurant concept on the planet has been done here. American grills, however, are being attempted for the first time at this location. Atmospherics: Dark and dimly lit, the ceilings are exposed cement for an industrial feel,…
It was an Upper Crust initiative from the start. When young Chef Murtaza Saifee joined The Park, New Delhi as an Executive Sous Chef, Upper Crust got after his case to hold a food festival showcasing the food of his community. You see, Saifee is from the Bohra community, virtually unknown in Delhi. It was…
Amaranth or Ram dana, is the most ancient of all Indian cereals. By calling their restaurant Amaranta, The Oberoi Gurgaon pays obeisance to the age-old grain and gives Amaranta a contemporary spin in one fell swoop. Taken in conjuction with the interiors, you would not guess that it is an Indian coastal restaurant that serves…
I have been to Istanbul, Prague and Iran and seen chinars or plane trees. Within India, even Nainital has them. But nowhere do they grow as majestic and spectacular as they do in the Kashmir Valley, where they dominate the landscape with their height, girth and the changing colour of their leaves with the passing…
“But where’s the dal?” wail a distressingly high proportion of customers to Tarami in Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village. Tarami is one of the many new Kashmiri restaurants that have cropped up in the capital in the last six months. And though there are a modest number of takers for Kashmiri cuisine, first-timers expect it to…
No two more dissimilar cuisines could be found than Portuguese and Kashmiri, yet they have a common link: haakh. Known as collard greens, this member of the vast brassica family has a distinct personality and an even more pronounced taste, with its trademark crinkly blue-green leaves along a central stem. Collard greens, along with its close…
My journey from freezing Madrid, where the weather forecast kept predicting snow, to warm, sunny Valencia took exactly two hours, but it was like going to another country altogether. The skies in Valencia resolutely remained fiercely blue, orange trees lined every street; one end of the city was bound by a beach, along which ran…
The middle-aged gentleman in the seat next to me on the plane to Srinagar was waxing eloquent about a single line in a song in Mission Kashmir. “Do you know,” he boomed in a voice that easily outdid the roar of the aircraft we were in, “that rind poshmal gindini drai lo lo is taken…
