Enough attention has never been paid to the heritage of royal cuisine. Now is a good time, before it gets shrouded in the mists of the past. Palaces and havelis still exist; the people who once inhabited them still live on, although in vastly different circumstances. Look hard enough and you’ll even find jewellery and…
Maharana Arvind Singh of Mewar celebrates his birthday in style. Visitors from all parts of the globe, villagers from the erstwhile princely state of Mewar, townspeople from Udaipur, a phalanx of press people, even filmstars beat a retreat to the doors of the living quarters of the City Palace. While lunch was a strictly family…
Travel around Delhi and you’ll chance across the occasional restaurant that advertises its unique selling point. “Our chef is from Bukhara” proclaims the signboard outside. Wherever the chef is really from, what the restaurant is trying to do is to hope that some of the greatness of the legendary restaurant will rub itself on their…
You can tell the sincerity of a restaurant by the quality of the freebies it serves. Zaffrani Zaika won’t give you store-bought papad. Instead, it makes a sort of baked matthi and serves that with three dips, all made in house. And here’s one place you needn’t be afraid of over-ordering: the waiters will tell…
Go to a Thai restaurant anywhere in the world, and order a Massaman curry, chicken red curry or a vegetable green curry. You will have quite a lot in common with an Indian meal. Or, visit a Syrian, Lebanese or Turkish restaurant and there will be other things in common with Indian food. The same…
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…
Fortunately for me, every restaurant in London puts up their menu in the window, the better for passers by to judge the advisability of dining there or not. One thing that puzzled me was an item on the menus of all the Indian restaurants: they all had chicken tikka flavoured with rose petals. Rose petals…
It has been a while since high profile hotels have opened in the capital. No fewer than two opened in the month of April. The Oberoi Gurgaon and the Leela Palace New Delhi have been keenly anticipated, but nobody could have imagined just how divergent the styles of both hotels would turn out to be,…
In Delhi, there are Andhra restaurants, Kashmiri restaurants, even Naga restaurants but no restaurants of the Mathur/Kayasth community, which is why many Delhiites are not even aware that the cuisine exists. That is something that has piqued Anoothi Vishal’s pride. This food journalist belongs to the Mathur community. As she describes it, “All Mathurs are…
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…