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Recipes of the heart and home
From Veeraswamy in London established in 1926 to Quilon in St James Park, Indian cuisine has influenced dining in England by going beyond mulligatawny and chicken tikka. Many Indian chefs have stormed the citadel over the decades to London, establishing cutting-edge fine dine Indian restaurants. Many fell by the side but some survived and thrived. Chef Rohit Ghai is one of the latter. Having worked at established names in the restaurant scene like Benares, Hoppers, Gymkhana, and Trishna he joined the Leela Palace Hotels to launch Jamavar—a M…
Cocktail custodians
Bars in Goa are no longer content with just serving the usual cocktails. The drinks have to be innovative and memorable. Bonus points if they make for good Instagram pictures. At Goa’s newest bar, The Lab at Amaraanth, Pankaj Balachandran and his team at Countertop have created a classy space that does just that, marrying local ingredients with modern techniques to create innovative drinks. Food: It’s a bar so the food is limited to snacky bites, and elaborate cold, and mezze, platters. There’s vada pav, and cheese chilli toast, for those mid…
Many avatars of the diva of flavours
Ritu Dalmia is the grand dame of Italian haute cuisine in India. DIVA, opened at the tun of the 21st century. It was the first serious standalone Italian restaurant in Delhi and the place to be seen with a forkful of risotto and a sip of Negroni. It made Dalmia, its gregarious short-haired chef, a household name in the right circles of urban India. She is rarely seen not smiling, or laughing. This time, she laughs, admitting “I am the biggest liar.” A Delhi girl, she had claimed she would never open a Mumbai version. The truth is, since then …
Vino, vidi, vici in the mountains
Michael Juergens was pleasantly surprised when he went to Bhutan to run a marathon. “I was taken aback to see how fertile the valleys were. So I naturally assumed the country had wineries,” recalls the senior partner at Deloitte and a certified sommelier. Surprised to realise there weren’t any, he wrote a white paper on why and how Bhutan could grow world-class wine, and sent it to the government. The government was so interested in his proposal that it decided to donate the land and partnered with him on the project. Juergens teamed up with …
Packing for a train journey
In Delhi, Chanakyapuri is a high-profile area that is replete with foreign embassies, plush five-star hotels and broad avenues. While the diplomatic heart of India primarily invites dignitaries, now it could be a stop-over for the Indian musafir too who can satiate their taste buds dining on a train without boarding it! A new rail-themed restaurant, Kapasaa, has opened, converting an actual 3,000 kg rail coach into a 55-seater restaurant, offering dishes that are not just named after trains in India but also bring flavours of the places they …
Making peace with a truant river
Imagine an extended Walden Pond set in the Kerala idyll and you have Moozhikulam Sala, a pastoral housing colony for city people 28 km from Kochi in Kerala. As a mixed metaphor, one of the first things to catch your eye at the entrance is that there is no gate. A few metres inside, stands a large banyan tree with overhanging branches. The mud paths abound in dry leaves. There is a good deal of vegetation: peanut, banana, fig, bamboo, sandalwood and cannonball trees. Because the Sala is right next to the Chalakudy river, a gentle breeze blows …
Aurangabad: The gully gourmet’s heirloom recipes
Food is ubiquitous in Aurangabad. Famous for its exquisite, centuries-old, rock-cut temples, sculptures and paintings of the UNESCO-endorsed Ellora and Ajanta Caves, the city is also a gastronomic haven. Mughlai? Check. Arabic? Check. Nizami/Marathwada? Check, check. Much of this culinary diversity has to do with the city’s syncretic culture. Founded by the Abyssinian slave-turned-warrior Malik Ambar in 1610 as Khadki, and ruled subsequently by everyone from the Ahmadnagar Sultanate to Mughal Badshah Aurangazeb and the Nizams of Hyderabad, th…
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