Under One Roof was set up around fifteen years ago. Was the market ready for a pair of restaurant consultants, where husband Manu organized the food, wrote the menu and trained the chefs, while wife Sonia trained the staff and organized the bar menu? As Manu Mohindra said in their salad days, “We’re doing this…
A mere year-and-a-half after it opened its doors to Delhi’s public, Hotel Ambassador’s Yellow Brick Road, the brightest, sunniest coffee shop hereabouts, has acquired a cult status among its patrons. This tiny 48-seater has a distinctive personality, the best cold coffee in town, and an eclectic menu. It has taken the city by storm for its novel rendering…
There is very little in the way of Mughlai food in Gurgaon. This is the venture of a Gurgaon-based entrepreneur with a taste for the culinary treasures of Old Delhi. Atmospherics: on the ground floor facing the road is this modest sized eatery with a bhatti and a tandoor outside. It looks contemporary enough but…
Lucknavi with fairly grand, all-mirror interiors. Atmospherics: Hyatt Regency Gurgaon is brand new. It is situated almost at the toll plaza that enters Gurgaon from Manesar, so that, while it is dauntingly far from Delhi, it is still a good proposition for residents of Gurgaon. The hotel is situated close to the industrial area of…
It was my first day in Tunisia and I had been whisked off by my hosts to visit a museum. Not any old museum, mind, but one that had mosaics as its theme. Bardo had mosaics on the walls, on plaques, on the floors, even on the ceiling. Most of them were old and faded.…
When Ismail Merchant brings back souvenirs from his many travels, he doesn’t put up them up on his drawing room shelves but in the refrigerator. For Merchant is at once a gastronome, a citizen of the world, a film-buff and a film-maker. His varied interests show up as much in the spread he lays out for…
The rise of North India’s first family of food can be traced to one man alone: master chef Imtiaz Qureshi of Dum Pukht, the signature restaurant at Maurya Sheraton Hotel and Towers in New Delhi. Chef Imtiaz started his career in the family’s butchery business. Like the other two well-known Muslim cuisines of India: Kashmir and…
Traditional Srinagar, isolated by militancy for the past decade, is reinventing itself in the cyber age. A halfway house between the old city of Srinagar and its plusher areas, Dalgate is a colourful tumult of brick buildings, shops crammed with tourist kitsch, and a road too narrow by far to handle its traffic. Here, poised…
Ever wondered about the planning that goes into a restaurant? “It’s not unlike having a baby” chorus husband and wife team of Janis Fraser and Sumer Arora. When Janis and Sumer decided to go into the food business, they called in food consultants Under One Roof to thrash out a concept, plan a menu, design…
If you don’t wish to see a steamed up Chef Olaf Niemeier, try and refrain from muttering the mantra of fusion cuisine before him. “It’s become almost a term of abuse,” he explains of the trend, and pleads: “Please don’t refer to my style as fusion.” Eclectic international then, you say to yourself, mentally agreeing…