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

Sassy Begum

The flavours of Hyderabad delivered to your house Serves Hyderabadi cuisine Intro: Sassy Begum is as much about the micro flavours of one Hyderabadi family’s table as it is about the cuisine of the aristocratic families of Hyderabad. Sassy Begum refers to a particular lady who married into the well-known Hassan clan and who learnt…

Salt of the Earth

Hotels routinely have food promotions centering around ingredients that have usually been brought from the other end of the world and that have great intrinsic worth. Oysters, wild salmon, truffles – the list of precious ingredients is endless. But what would you say about a salt festival? As a nonplussed hotel guest from Germany asked…

100 years of Restauranting in Delhi

It was the year of the Great Darbar, 1911. A young man from the outskirts of Delhi thought he spied an opportunity to earn a living. He moored a push-cart near Gate Number One of the Jama Masjid, and served dal as well as meat and potatoes with freshly made rotis. Business boomed: he was,…

My Best Meals of 2016: Renowned Food Critic Marryam Reshii

Flip through Facebook, and you’ll see that the rules of the boasting game appear to have altered slightly. Instead of your friends crowing about the Sacher Torte they enjoyed in Vienna, now it is about a Sambalpuri Thali from Orissa or an incendiary meal from Rayalseema. 2016 must go down in history as the year…

Fairytale getaway

Srinagar’s heritage hideaway, Lalit The Grand Palace, has been made over by Bharat Hotels Once upon a time there was a king who lived in a palace. Not any old ordinary palace, mind you. It had a fairytale location, backed as it was by well wooded hills, with the finest location in the city, far…

Frontier

It’s neither hot nor happening, but Frontier at The Ashok has something that few other Indian restaurants in the city can boast of: a signature menu with dishes that have been more or less invented in its kitchens and served nowhere else for decades now. Like its distant country cousin, Bukhara, most of the food…

Bento Box

One of the most popular breakfasts in the ITC Sheraton, New Delhi is the Japanese bento breakfast. The brainchild of Chef Nakamura, he tells us about what these “Japanese thalis” stand for. Most bento boxes are rectangular and black, with a few being oval, square or crescent moon shaped. Red is an uncommon colour for…

Manish Mehrotra goes to Tel Aviv

Mustard oil Haakh Jaggery Banarasi aloo papad Sabudana papad Kolhapuri masala Whole aamchur Any guesses what these ingredients could be doing in Chef Manish Mehrotra’s diminutive office at Indian Accent? They’re getting ready to be shipped to Tel Aviv where Mehrotra is getting set to participate in a food festival. As festivals go, this one…

Coriander: the Spice and the Herb

Coriander and Cilantro I know, I know. All spices are equal, but you’ll never convince me that coriander is not more equal than the others. Here’s why: coriander seeds, stem, root, leaves – every part of the plant is not only edible, but is used in cuisine. In India, coriander leaves are used, in addition…

Canton Capers

Once upon a time, Chinese food meant chilli chicken and chicken Manchurian. Now, thanks to the growing tribe of chefs from China, it is possible to get a more authentic taste of what Chinese food is all about. By definition, Chinese food in India can never be really authentic: food in China is usually cooked…

Dishy Delhi

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The Austerity of Maharashtrian Food

Don’t underestimate Chef Prakash Pawaskar of Trident, Nariman Point, Mumbai. In the outwardly unassuming Executive Sous Chef lurks a connoisseur of the cuisine of Maharashtra in all its Spartan glory. Pawaskar’s links with the food of his home state go back to the time of Shivaji as a matter of fact: his father-in-law, from the…

Recommendations for Srinagar, Kashmir

Most trips to Kashmir are three or four days long: much too short to sift through a jumble of poor choices. This list is a recommendation of various possibilities in Srinagar, all in the realm of eating and drinking. Do bear in mind that meals in most restaurants are likely to be tailored to tourists…

Sweet Valley

In Khayyam Chowk, a couple of kilometres from Dal Gate, there’s a row of no-frill, basic dhabas that are fairly clean and respectable. Here you can try the mutton seekh kebabs or tikkas, served on a plate with six kinds of chutney. The best one is Imran Café, misleadingly named because you certainly won’t get…

Indonesia

“Hardly any of us visit the islands of Indonesia, and that’s the only reason why the cuisine is relatively unknown in India. What other explanation can there be?” This is Suddha Kukreja’s take on Indonesian food, which has a resonance with Indian food. Both cuisines depend on long cooking times, plenty of spices and relatively…

With love, for Kashmir

I was delighted when a shopkeeper in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul called me Hema Malini. Not, I hasten to add, because I am a fan of that actress, nor indeed because I have any pretensions of looking like a star, but because it was one more point to chalk up on my ‘Kashmir’ board.…

A Century of Ahdoos

Round up a motley gathering of people in Srinagar – locals from all walks of life, tourists and outsiders who have made the city their temporary home for work or business – and ask them to name a few Kashmiri brands, chances are that not many will be able to remember any beyond the most…

What’s Cooking in Kerala

With 360 miles of coastline and over a thousand miles of backwaters, Kerala is something of a paradise for seafood aficionados. There are reminders everywhere: Rows of giant Chinese fishing nets are poised at the edge of the water near the port of Kochi and fishing boats with foamy piles of drying nets idle at…

Chicken Plaza

Don’t go looking for a gourmet treat. At Rs 100 per head, on a Daryaganj pavement just under the overhead footpath, Chicken Plaza won’t give you a five star meal, but you will have a surprisingly tasty snack at laughably low prices. Chicken Plaza is right by a tiny mosque, which makes it less than…

Rara Avis

No sooner than Chez Nini opened its doors, in another part of South Delhi is Rara Avis, with three partners, two of them French. Simple, fuss-free food without pretentious flourishes. Atmospherics: The second floor restaurant is approached by a typically Parisian lift with two grill doors that have to be opened and closed manually and…

Diva

This empress of Greater Kailash II periodically undergoes extensive renovation, but this time around, it has become a new restaurant altogether. The ground floor with its wood-fired oven and semi open kitchen has turned into a café, in the style of Café Diva in Greater Kailash I, N Block Market. Visibly less formal than Diva…

Fat Butterfly

Serves Western-style café Utterly charming, owner-run space Atmospherics: What do you get when you cross a home baker with a gal who is obsessed with butterflies? You get a cosy café on two floors that excels at cakes and waffles, called FatButterfly. Vidyun Tewari has transferred her joie de vivre from the customized cakes created…

Lahori Shah

Blurb: Pakistani food as close to the real McCoy as possible Intro: LahoriShah is the closest thing we Delhiites have to a pop-up restaurant. It changes its name and cuisine every winter, but this time it appears to have hit the jackpot. Atmospherics: Into a car parking lot, right by auto workshops, while you’re wondering…

Good Food at Urban Nomads

Urban Nomads in Nehru Place has three factors to recommend it: a well thought-out menu, astonishingly large portions at modest prices, and the excellent system of half portions. The restaurant also doubles as a store for high-fashion garments, but that may be to stand up and be counted among the rash of theme restaurants in…

Chef Keisuke Uno

This young man, still unmarried, has sixteen years of experience in cooking. He passed out from cooking school in Osaka where he was required to study Japanese, European and Chinese food for one year, before specializing in one area. Uno decided to specialize in Japanese, French and – hold your breath! – vacuum packed food.…

Fat Guyy

The genial patissier, Chef Nitin Upadhyay, was always pleasantly plump and when he thought of opening his very own patisserie, the obvious name he thought of was Fat Guyy. It does call to mind a roly-poly baker, surrounded by couverture, croissants and cookies all wafting delicious fragrances from the oven. However, so stressful was the…

Indians – good, bad and ugly

On the whole, we’re a warm and hospitable bunch of people. Whether it’s a Sardar taxi driver in New York or a village woman living in a mud hut in Kutch, no stranger need fear that he’ll be dealing with an inscrutable oriental. There is, however, the flip side of the coin. We are loud…

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.…

Anandini Tea

In this day and age of hype and bombast, you can count on the fingers of one hand the people in the food and beverage industry who know their onions. Anamika Singh, tiny pint-sized girl with the 360 degree smile is one of the foremost tea experts in Delhi. Not only is she the only…

Dishy Delhi

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Chefs and their ‘Out of the Box’ Creations

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Chef Angela Hartnett

I’ve noticed that lady chefs always bring another dimension to their food than their male counterparts. Perhaps it has been entirely incidental, but when you hear Chef Angela Hartnett talking about shopping for food, you could forget that she has won two Michelin stars at The Connaught in London, where she manages a restaurant for…

Secret Ingredients

Is it the recipe that is important or the writer ? A backlane in New Delhi’s tony Uday Park is where you’ll find the famous Ahad Waza of Kashmir. The cavernous commercial kitchen is the scene of unusual activity, for alongside a team of assistants who work with the precision of an army, chopping onions…

Spice Up Your Life

What is the spiciest dish you’ve ever eaten? I’ll bet you’re thinking only of fiery hot red chillies. Yet, other things than chillies can blast off the top of your head. Japanese wasabi paste comes to mind. Korean cuisine has a yellow mustard that’s ear-burning too. I was once invited to a Korean banquet where…

Kashmir in the New Millennium

As symbols of normalcy go, the all-glass front of Pick n Choose on Residency Road, Srinagar, is as telling as any. Five years ago, you couldn’t find glass doors in Srinagar – they’d be a sitting duck for a terrorist’s bullet. Five years ago, you wouldn’t even have wanted the transparency of glass. Thick wooden…

Swagath Janpath

When Swagath opened its doors almost a decade ago, there were plenty of concessions to the local palate. Several branches later, the restaurant has perfected its recipe to cater to our collective palate. Today, there’s no need to go to Mumbai for Gomantak food – it has come to our city. There’s Goan, Malabari, Chettinad…