If your hotel has the mud walls and back-to-basics furniture of a traditional Indian home, and the electricity comes from a high-tech windmill, chances are that you’re staying in a Gujarat Tourism Holiday Resort. Chances are too, that you won’t find a better introduction to this multi-faceted State, where it’s quite in order to go…
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…
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,…
Cuisine: Mediterranean Blurb: bookshelves, multi-level café, bar and restaurant with style and flair Gurgaon Sector 29 is a smorgasbord of restaurants and bars. Zura is for those times when you’re catching up with friends and want to nibble rather than gorge. Atmospherics: It is a breezy café with bookshelves and a laden pastry counter. You…
“You can find a diamond in a coal mine,” beams the genial Rajeev Mittal of Mittal Tea House, Lodi Colony, New Delhi”just the way you can discover white tea on a regular bush.” White tea – it’s not really white, but very pale green and its leaves are long and pointed – is, quite simply, the…
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…
Exactly five years ago, I made my way to Hong Kong. It was my first trip to South East Asia and I was wide-eyed with wonder. The veritable forest of tall buildings, the neon brightness that threatened to outshine the sun, the sheer variety of Chinese food, from roadside dai pai dongs (street-side stalls) to…
The phrase “spoilt for choice” takes on an altogether different connotation for three weeks every April in Singapore. That is when the World Gourmet Summit is on, with 73 events packed into 21 days. I was there for a modest two days and could not make up my mind whether to attend a gala lunch…
Budget travellers to Singapore head happily to the thousands of hawkers centres in that city-state. Two people can have a filling meal of noodles, soup, Hainanese chicken rice or something called roti pratha, and still have change left over from Singapore $ 5. Hawkers’ centres provide variety. In the interests of fairplay, owners of a…
Salon International de l’Alimentation, better known as SIAL, just concluded in Villepinte, Paris. No matter where you looked, you couldn’t have missed the Indian contingent, and I’m not referring to exhibitors like Satnam Overseas. We were a motley bunch of executive chefs and F & B Managers, importers and food writers, looking at what France…