By Sourish Bhattacharyya
PRIYA PAUL and panache are soul
sisters. Whatever she does, whether checking out the biryanis served around Charminar
or conceiving new concept hotels, the guardian angel of The Park keeps setting new
style benchmarks. On Saturday (August 31) evening, she invited the who’s who of
Delhi to a dining experience that’ll be talked about for a long time.
How many of you have dined under a
table? Well, that’s exactly what we did for two hours at The Park New Delhi's magically transformed banquet hall, eating canteen-style,
without name tags demarcating our places on the tables. It was a communal
eating experience of a designer kind — jasmine, marigold and orchid arrangements,
diaphanous white curtains, firm plastic chairs (I was scared mine would
collapse under my weight, but thankfully it didn’t) — and I found myself sitting
across Sunil Mittal and his wife, the porcelain-perfect Nyna, sympathising silently
with the telecoms mogul for having to field complaints about call drops even at
dinners!
On our long table, we had food writer
Reshmi Dasgupta, media stars Rajdeep Sardesai and Sagarika Ghose, ace corporate
lawyer Ajay Bahl with his radiant wife Radhika, Guddu and Christine Patnaik, Madhu
Trehan, the power behind www.newslaundry.com,
Chandra Kant Birla, Avanti Birla, and Highway
On My Plate hosts Rocky and Mayur. Other celebrities at the event included the nattily attired Minister
of State for Power Jyotiraditya Scindia and his wife Priyadarshini, Priti Paul, Kalli Purie
and Raj Singh, Shobhana and Shyam Bhartia, Hari and Kavita Bhartia, Pia Singh, Vikram and Seema Chandra, Amita Seth, artist Subodh Gupta, legal eagle Raian Karanjawala, fashion designers Suneet
Varma, Malini Ramani and Abhishek Gupta, and PR ace Nikhil Khanna. With so many
A-listers around, it was to be expected that the dinner would start
half-an-hour later than the appointed hour!
Many of them knew each other, but
others didn’t, yet we all kept talking as if we were old acquaintances. This is
exactly what Marije Vogelzang, the Dutch ‘eating designer’ from Rotterdam who put this
experience together, had said would happen. She said that when unknown people
are thrown together in a dining experience, they start sharing, they start
conversing, their inner child comes out. That’s an art we lost when we stopped
having our meals around communal fires.
The menu prepared by Rajesh
Radhakrishnan, Area Director (Food Production), The Park Chennai, matched the
unusual setting. The accompaniments, from pickled vegetables and nuts to breads
and luscious dips, were on the tables in tiered plates; each chair had a soft pillow
and a small table cloth, which we had to place on our laps; and we had to pour
water from bottles placed next to our chairs. These little elements heightened
the sense of drama.
The dinner started with lobster fried
in vermicelli batter, a mini duck puff pastry, a slice of pear and spun sugar
(candy floss) served in a cocktail glass. The vegetarians got sweet corn,
chickpeas, pear and spun sugar. Then came the quintet of grilled sea bass,
Canadian scallop, crab cake, a divine caramelised walnut and cheese-stuffed
Kashmiri morel, all served on a white tile. The vegetarians got samosa, beetroot dumpling and summer roll,
apart from the last-mentioned two items. Then came the mind-blowing
presentation of the evening: a bright red pepper serving as a bowl for corn-fed
chicken kebabs dressed with truffle cream (or ‘zucchini-enrobed’ — delicious
description — cottage cheese kebabs). And finally, the pots of lamb (or
vegetable) risotto arrived, redolent of Indian flavours. The pots, sealed with
spinach and red pepper rotis, were a
treat for the weary eye.
For dessert, we had to come out of
our under-table corners and just dig what was arranged on the tables. As accompaniments,
we had coconut ice-cream served on halves of green coconuts and ‘molecular’
B-52s — heady spoonfuls of tiny pellets of Kahlua, Bailey’s and Cointreau. Of course,
champagne flowed through the evening as if the world was running out of bubbly.
It added sparkle to an evening that resonated with laughter and good humour.
This is one dining experience we are not likely to forget in a hurry.
wow......stunning!
ReplyDeleteYes, Ranojoy, it was indeed an experience.
DeleteSounds like a great experience! My feature on Marije is coming out in the September issue of Vogue, India :)
ReplyDelete