Ivy: Creeper Capers - Marryam H Reshii

This brand new eatery is probably the glitziest looking restaurant in the NCR — as opulent as Veda, if not more so, and a lot more user-friendly: you can actually read the menu without peering at it in the available light, the chairs are supremely comfortable and you don’t have to shout over the music to make yourself heard, though approximately half of it is a bar. It is a genuinely good experience, whether you want to visit the bar or the restaurant: few places manage to combine both elements successfully, that too on the same floor.

Ivy is a modern European restaurant and it caters to today’s smart casual

crowd rather than to the formal end of the market. You can opt for a number of appetizers and fill yourself up with them, as we did a few nights ago, or proceed course by course. I’m partial to appetizers — and Ivy does them well. The best of them is the Cheese Fondue, which, for Rs 495, offers you your money’s worth. Ivy is probably the only restaurant in the city to offer this dish; the cheese is gloriously sludgy and stringy and is flavoured with cognac instead of the usual white wine. It is accompanied by squares of toasted bread that are meant to be dipped into the sea of cheese, whether you use the dainty but devilishly difficult prongs or a fork, this is perhaps the only do-it-your-self dish that is fun: most Delhiites baulk at working hard in a restaurant, and usually leave operations like making Peking Duck pan-cakes to restaurant staff.

In comparison, the Cheese Platter is a slightly sterile juxtaposition of imported supermarket cheeses, most of them hard. To be fair, we are not a nation of cheese-eaters and ripe, runny cheeses would probably put off not only the diners themselves, but everyone at nearby tables as well. The Cheese Platter and the slightly better Cold Cut Platter are accompanied by addictive dried figs simmered in-house with red wine.

Melted taleggio flat-bread with toppings, bruschetta with spring vegetables or pancetta, hot or cold oyster platter are other options for starters that sound interesting. One observation I have is that Ivy would do well to think about Spanish cold meats; every restaurateur in the city thinks no further than Italian processed meat products, but Spanish hams and salamis are outstanding.

I wish I had the appetite for some of their salads, which sound extremely interesting: Mini Quail Scotch Egg Salad and Prosciutto with Seared Scallop salad!

Instead, I ordered a Lobster Thermidor, at Rs 1,200, the most expensive item on the menu. It was pleasant, but far from fabulous, and to my mind, not particularly good value for money.

Where Ivy excels is in its appetizers and its surroundings, both of which make it a good choice for an evening out.