It doesn’t rain but pours. To have two high profile hotels opening in the same week is a windfall indeed. Who is going to win the food sweepstakes? Let’s wait and watch: the Leela Palace hasn’t yet opened its two restaurants that boast international tie ups. The Oberoi Gurgaon has two restaurants, both of which…
Who makes the best cheesecake in town? Foodaholics. And who makes the deadliest Mexican food in the city? Foodaholics again. Foodaholics (www.foodaholics.in) is run by young Kishi Arora, a 20-something bundle of energy and initiative who has passed out from the Culinary Institute of America after a two year programme. Rather than work for a…
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…
Eest in Westin Gurgaon embodies the eternal dilemma of international hotel chains in India. Whether to have expatriate chefs or Indian for their Chinese/oriental restaurant. And if the former, whether to take the cuisine to stratospheric levels or keep it suitably dumbed down for the local palate. Eest has not one but five expatriate chefs…
Zune Hilton Janakpuri has a brand new Indian restaurant, Zune. The colours in Zune (which means moon in Kashmiri) include turquoise and copper, and the combination is an extremely refreshing one: it is a pleasure just being in the restaurant. It is entirely a bonus that the food is as good as it is. The…
Every time a new hotel opens in the city, it raises the bar for excellence. With the Westin Gurgaon, the bar has been raised sky-high. So far, the brand new hotel only has a coffee shop open, and if you always thought that the 24 hour coffee shop of a hotel is where the most…
Radisson Blu sits in an island, together with a shopping mall, in much the same way that Leela Gurgaon does next to Ambience Mall on the other side of the NCR. Besides a bar and an all-day diner, there is an Indian restaurant that packs quite a punch. Now that it has been established that…
You’ve seen the rolling, flower-strewn meadows of Switzerland in innumerable Hindi films and snow-clad mountains in tourism brochures. You know that Zurich is lined end to end with banks and that every third shop in the country sells cuckoo clocks, cheese or chocolates. But did you know that hornussen is a popular sport, which has…
The best chocolate certainly comes from Western Europe. But, the question that needs to be asked is: does chocolate have to be made in Europe alone to be considered good? Not really, but making chocolate – as opposed to growing the cacao bean – does require a temperature of about 18 degrees Celsius. Warmer than that…
I heartily approve of restaurateurs who spend money where it is needed and save where it is warranted. Golconda Bowl in Hauz Khas Village is a no-frills place with minimal fuss decor. However, the airconditioning is effective on a humid afternoon and best of all, there’s a Hyderabadi chef in the kitchen, complete with the…