Home - Marryam H Reshii

About Me...

I have been writing about food and travel for longer than I care to remember. I have written for magazines and newspapers about my twin passions: food and travel. My ‘best’ meals have been the ones in palatial surroundings cooked by Michelin starred chefs, but also those of bajra rotis and ground chillies under the stars in a village in Banni, Kutch. I hope this site fully captures the sheer sweep of life from 1987 to the present times. All published articles that date before 2000 are in Vintage. All reviews of existing restaurants as well as those that have closed, are in Reviews.
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About this site

Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.
― Ruth Reichl

I first started writing as a profession in 1987. For the last 15 years, I have written exclusively about food. It is a vast subject, and my weekly column in Times of India is just one aspect of food. Ingredients, spices, utensils, regional cuisines, grandma’s secret recipes, five star hotels and their chefs, the chaat-walas in the bylanes of Delhi’s Chandni Chowk and Lucknow’s Hazratganj – all are equal contributors to this impossibly rich medley. I hope this site does justice to all of them.

Recent Articles

Coriander: the Spice and the Herb
April 17, 2022

Bloggers’ Meat
April 17, 2022

Butter Chicken
April 17, 2022

China Kitchen, Hyatt Regency Delhi
April 17, 2022

Thai at Spectra

Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian and now Thai Serving Thai Atmospherics: The all-day dining at The Leela Ambience Gurgaon has a plethora of cuisines, all of which they manage to do with surprising panache. However, the pride of place must go to Chef Kanyaphat Faisai from Phuket. She is the latest chef to join the eclectic team…

Taiwan

About as large as Sri Lanka, this island is one of Asia’s easternmost outposts, wedged in between China to the west, Japan in the north and the Philippines in the south. Taiwan may be best known for its computer peripherals industry, but it’s a largely undiscovered gem for those who are looking for somewhere off…

Cibo

From being a place with great interiors and not so great food, Cibo has suddenly become a place with great food. They’ve just hired fresh blood in the kitchen, and the youthful chef, an Indian with international experience, is clearly set to break boundaries. In the last couple of weeks, Cibo has metamorphosed from an…

Rendezvous in Paris

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Another Fine Day

Home away from home Serves Café food Atmospherics: When Sidewok took over the present property next door, the space on the other side of the lift lobby was part of it: close by enough but not contiguous. So, in a stroke of genius, Another Fine Day was born, as a separate entity. One of the…

Chi

Chi is the latest restaurant to hit town. In the popular Safdarjung Development Area market, next to Masala Junction, it is a cool hangout place with a South East Asian menu serving meals and snacks. Noodles and noodle soups are what their claim to fame is, but there are starters and main courses too for…

Indian Food without Red Chillies

I wish I could count the number of times I’ve visited a restaurant and been discouraged to try Murgh Musallam or Meen Moilee. “Don’t have this one,” I’ve been urged. “It has no spice in it. It is white in colour.” In the Indian restaurant trade, there are a number of cardinal sins, but none…

The Ivy Comes to India

Marketing pundits who think they’ve cracked the code of consumer preferences throughout the length and breadth of the country, may just be in for a surprise. Alan Bird may not be a marketing pundit, nor The Ivy, Covent Garden, London, a marketing research organization, but during his ten day stint in India, there’s a lot…

Extra Virgin Territory

The first trip I ever made to the olive growing world was to Andalusia in Southern Spain around five years ago. It was an eye opener. Along with 11 other media people from Canada, USA, Russia, Serbia, China and India, I visited olive groves, travelled through Andalusia’s trademark low hills covered with neat rows of…

Kashmiri Food in Xinjiang?

I thought I was going for a Chinese food festival. Instead, what I got was Kashmiri food. It was all rather disorienting till I made the Silk Route connection. Chef Li Peng, the hugely talented Chinese chef of Vasant Continental in New Delhi had put together a food festival of the Xinjiang region of China.…

Tikka Shatrujit Singh goes on holiday

I caught up with Tikka Shatrujit Singh of Kapurthala just as he was about to set off for yet another trip to his favourite destination, Paris. In his choice of destination, Singh is merely following in the footsteps of his illustrious grandfather, Maharaja Jagatjit Singh (1877-1949), a well-known Francophile, whose palace in Kapurthala is modeled…

A Blast from Bali

“With the advent of Coca Cola into Indonesia, the entire population began calling it Chocha Chola” chortled my guide in Bali a few years ago. In Bahasa, the national language of Indonesia that has 8844 named islands and over 10,000 more that have not been dignified with a name, the letter C is pronounced as…

Knocking the bastard off

In 1953, a British led expedition to Mount Everest included a New Zealand bee-keeper and a Sherpa who had settled in Darjeeling. There was rather a lot at stake. Ever since the discovery and the naming of the mountain, it had been identified with the British. Or so the British themselves liked to think. They…

Tunisia

We were in the Dar el Jeld, but we could have been in a jewel box for all you knew. The most iconic restaurant in Tunisia filled up an entire mansion, with a plethora of rooms that led out one from another over two floors. Each room had walls that were decorated, in the Tunisian…

The Gullies and Kuchas of Melbourne’s CBD

I was prepared to be swept away by the walkway that hugged the Yarra River in Melbourne, by the sheer sweep of produce that is reputed to fill the markets of the city, or even by the coffee that even the most ordinary café next door is reputed to serve. In the end, it was…

God’s Footprint

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Manali

Foreigners on the luxury coach from Delhi to Manali outnumbered Indians 3:1. That, however, wasn’t the curious part. What was unusual was that all the foreigners appeared to know exactly where they were headed. The Indians, on the other hand, yours truly included, exchanged notes about hotels uncertainly. The first one off the bus was…

Jaisalmer

If there’s one man in Jaisalmer who qualifies for the title of Mr. Jaisalmer, it is Jitendra Singh Rathore, Vice Chairman of Fort Rajwada, by far the best hotel in town. He has worked tirelessly to put Jaisalmer on the tourist map, an activity that has borne him bitter-sweet fruit. Bitter because as yet there’s…

La Riviera

Cuisines of the French and Italian Rivieras A well-appointed restaurant with touches of genius in the French and Italian menu A young Indian chef with international experience, a show kitchen with a Moltini range (the Lamborghini of kitchen equipment that costs around the same as the car) and contemporary style. Atmospherics: Off the lobby of…

Japanese at threesixtyone⁰

Quite simply, the finest Japanese chef in the NCR Serves Japanese (besides other cuisines) Atmospherics: Surrounded by a cerulean pool of water to cool even the most torrid temperatures, threesixtyone⁰ serves a variety of cuisines, but Japanese is your best bet. Chef Hiroshi Kagata is a powerhouse of talent. There is a work station of…

Arriba

For a spicy, gravy-based cuisine, it’s surprising that Arriba is only Delhi’s 3rd Mexican restaurant Cuisine: Mexican Atmospherics: For what must be a first in the restaurant industry, the major players who have owned the restaurants and bars in the Asiad Village have given a couple of eateries to others to run. This is an…

Yum Yum Tree

Ignore the decidedly non-serious name. This stylishly appointed restaurant in the heart of New Friends Colony Market has a first to it: the cuisine is Singaporean Chinese, one of the few types of Chinese food that is consonant with our palate, yet one that frequently gets overlooked in favour of classical Cantonese. One of the…

Sanadige

Coastal Karnataka Cuisine At last Swagath has a little brother Atmospherics: In the Malcha Marg Market, full as it is with eateries of all kinds, Sanadige can be said to have completed the bouquet of cuisines on offer. The décor is rather in your face and covers every inch of the floor, walls and ceiling.…

Earthen Oven

A wave of nostalgia washed over me when I visited Earthen Oven. Here is a restaurant (inside a Fortune Hotel, a sub brand of the ITC Welcomgroup) that is not trying to reinvent the wheel. It serves Punjabi food, it has an open kitchen and it even has a wood board with a modest-sized menu…

Muzaffar and Meera Ali

In the heyday of Lucknow, say a hundred and fifty years ago, nobles delighted in presenting their guests culinary quizzes. There would be a table-spread of dishes that appeared to resemble lamb qorma and biryani but would in actual fact turn out to be made of spun sugar. In days of yore, says Muzaffar Ali,…

The Elite Club of Chefs des Chefs

In the days before Google burst upon the scene, I used to have a Dutch friend who was the second violinist in the National Philharmonic Orchestra in The Hague. He once recounted a hilarious story of an elderly Russian conductor who came to conduct a concert with the Dutch orchestra and needed to rehearse for…

A Tale Of Two Cups

In which we juggle multiple cups of tea and coffee, just in time for the monsoon showers! Tea and coffee bars are a dime a dozen in this city of ours and most of us visit them because we want to set down our shopping bags or to cool off in the frosty air-conditioning. In…

State of the Art in Kashmir

The story of art in Kashmir is bound inextricably with that of craft. While crafts – and by extension, craftsmen – are thick on the ground, art in the Valley is confined to a tiny school in capital Srinagar, which operates out of a rented building in a housing colony. While craftsmen have, by and…

Chef Suman Kaul

Trust ITC Hotels to be on top of the game. This hotel chain has always been at the forefront of hiring chefs, researchers and caterers that few others in the hotel industry would have considered, but who have gone on to become pillars in the group’s quest for excellence in Food and Beverage. One example…

Rajni Jinsi: Kashmiri Food with a Magical Touch

I have a blind spot, as everyone who knows me will readily attest: I love the homeland of my husband: Kashmir and am completely unable to separate the strands of what is Muslim and what is Pandit. To me, they are interwoven with the silken fibres of a cobweb. You have to view the cobweb…

Vinita’s Kitchen Of Plenty

My children, like most children everywhere, get tired of the same food with dismaying frequency. One of the few exceptions — that is, besides the eternal Maggi noodles — are the kebabs made by a lady who operates from her kitchen at home. We first heard of Vinita’s Kitchen at a dinner party where bite-sized…

Zamozza

Blurb: A mixed bag of unbelievably good and ‘what the customer wants’ Atmospherics: It has much going for it, location-wise. On the ground floor of a building on Janpath, right next door to Shiv Sagar (same owner), it is down a narrow alley within the building itself. So the ceiling is a blaze of lights,…

The Kitchen

The Kitchen, Defence Colony, is a new branch of the original in Khan Market, but never was there more of a difference between two outlets of one brand. The Khan Market place is dark and cramped and serves oriental food as well as Indian and western; the Defence Colony branch is as peppy as it…

Baluchi: A Culinary Gem

If you are looking for a delectable spread of authentic Indian cuisine, Baluchi is just the place to be Okay, so it’s not fashionable – the live music at dinner-time is a conversation stopper and children run riot in its homely interiors, but Baluchi at InterContinental The Grand serves some real gems. I challenge you…

Choko La

I’m going to resist the temptation to write (yet again) about Choko la’s pastries, chocolates and chocolate drinks. They’re not only the best in the city, the chocolate drinks are more or less unique. However, I’ve always had a problem with the food that both branches of Choko la served – to me, the food…

Drift

Drift at Gurgaon’s Epicenter is several notches up from Habitat Centre. Both are run by the same person, yet Drift has an evolved modern European menu featuring duck, sea bass and salmon, all of which are notable by their absence at IHC’s outlets. What remains the same is the cultured, arty crowd; before long, Drift…