DINING OUT: Startup Dreams Meet Fun Food At The Village

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

QUICK BYTES

WHERE: Hauz Khas Social, Hauz Khas Village (entrance next to Delhi Art Gallery)

WHEN: 9 a.m. to 1 a.m.

DIAL: (+91) 7838652814

HOW MUCH (MINUS ALCOHOL): Rs 800 for two, minus taxes and 10 per cent service charge
STAR RATING: 3-1/2*/5

HAUZ KHAS SOCIAL in not just another new dining space in a city teeming with options; it's a new experience altogether. It's the first hangout of the young -- in the capital of Delhi's Youngistan, Hauz Khas Village -- where bootstrapping start-up entrepreneurs can work through the day, satisfy their hunger pangs as they go about their day's business, and unwind at the end of it by stepping into the bar and ordering an unbelievably priced quarter to be shared with friends and co-workers.

The vibe at Hauz Khas Social is
such that you'd want to unwind
with an Aacharoska (above) or
a Screw Social Driver (below)
after a day spent with your
laptop and your colleagues,
your lunch being the humble
Social Staff Meal Du Jour

It's like working in your office cafeteria after some invisible magic wand has transmogrified it into 8,500 sq. ft. of social space, cheek by jowl with Firuz Shah Tughlaq's medieval madarsa, yet loaded with contemporary amenities such as WiFi and an app that lets you order food or select your music playlist, with the kind of edgy personality you'd associate with New York's Meat Packing District. Unfinished bare walls, naked bulbs, recycled furniture, skeletal clamp lights, plush leather sofas and signs in classical fonts hand-painted by street art guru Hanif Kureshi fall in place seamlessly to turn conventional restaurant design wisdom on its head. Anti-design is the Social's design statement.

The menu mirrors this sense of newness, yet it elevates conventional coffee shop and bar offerings into conversation pieces. Serious thought has been invested into it by Mumbai-based restaurant entrepreneur Riyaz Amlani, who's also famous for his Salt Water Cafe, Smoke House Deli and Mocha brands, his food and beverage honcho, Sid Mathur, and the Social's head chef, Gaurav Gidwani. Together, they have walked the fine line dividing fun food and kitchen gimmickry, without falling into the welcoming iron clasp of the latter.

For the Aacharoska, the classical cocktail with an Indian twist (and my personal favourite), for instance, they tried out 28 different lime pickles with mixologist Shishir Rane before settling for the Maharashtrian variant. The cocktail, served in a martaban (as you'd expect pickles to be), as a result, doesn't have the cloying sweetness that ruins such concoctions -- and that is especially true of the Deconstructed Moscow Mule, which comes (as it did at its birthplace, the Cock 'N' Bull restaurant on the Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles) in a copper mug with a pipette of ginger juice to balance the ginger ale's sugar punch. The Screw Social Driver, meanwhile, arrives in a beaker (specially ordered from Dava Bazaar, an area in South Mumbai famous for medical and scientific instruments as well as lab chemicals) with a real screwdriver in tow to remind you of the drink's origins -- it was apparently invented by American engineers in the Middle East in the 1940s, as they secretly mixed vodka into cans of orange juice with a screwdriver, the only equivalent of a cocktail shaker they had at an arm's length.

The food menu, similarly, is studded with surprises. You can order the Pakistani street food staple, anda shammi burger (with the buns being replaced by pao and the shammi being plumper than the usual), or make your heart work a little extra after you've had the fried bacon-wrapped peanut butter-jam sandwich squares served with vanilla ice-cream, or have a regular daal-chawal lunch for Rs 150 by ordering the Social Staff Meal Du Jour (notice the inverted snobbery!), or a Paneer Makhni/Butter Chicken/Andhra Mutton Biryani.

Each page of the food menu is studded with nibbles that will bring back cherished memories, like the cutting chai with khari biscuits, which are essentially puff pastries served in Mumbai's Irani cafes; or Bombay Bachelors, the typically Mumbai sandwich with sliced veggies and masala aloo bhaji topped with mint chutney and sev; or The Ramesh & Suresh -- deep-fried Five Star bars served with hot chocolate fudge and vanilla ice-cream -- named after the two characters who appears in the commercial for the well-known chocolate brand. But in all this unusualness, there's a unifying strand -- good taste. It never goes out of fashion.

DINING OUT: Rosang Serves the Seven Sisters on One Platter

QUICK BITES

WHERE: S-20, Ground Floor, Near Uphaar Cinema, Green Park Extension Market

WHEN: Open from 12 noon to 12 midnight

DIAL: 8447963810 (M); 011-65544411

WEB: www.rosangsoulfood.com

AVG MEAL FOR TWO: Rs 800 plus VAT, Service Tax and 10% Service Charge. No alcohol.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

MARY LALBOI, a Kendriya Vidyalaya teacher, and Muan Tonsing, a village postmaster, left their home and careers at Churachandpur, Manipur's largest, ethnically diverse and economically better off district, and came to Delhi in 2003 so that their three children could get a "well- rounded" education and improve their English-language skills. Without jobs or contacts, Mary and Muan teamed up to open a restaurant in Munirka to cater to the growing Manipuri community in the neighbourhood.

A former Kendriya Vidyalaya
teacher from Churachandpur,
Manipur, Mary Lalboi, is the
face of Rosang Cafe. Image:
Arupjyoti Gogoi

It didn't take long for Rosang ('God's Gift') Cafe to become the hangout of the north-eastern diaspora -- mostly young people who come to Delhi to pursue higher education or careers in the hospitality and retail sectors, which would come to a grinding halt without them. Real estate issues saw Mary and Muan move out of Munirka and shift to Hauz Khas Village, where they had to shut shop again because the building from where they operated fell way short of the standards set by the bye-laws.

Rosang Cafe's present address, where it moved this year on January 15, is an unpretentious 850 sq. ft. space, enough to seat 20 people, at the Green Park Extension Market on Aurobindo Marg, in the shadow of the burnt-out shell of Uphaar cinema, opposite the ever-popular Drums of Heaven, and not even 100m from Delhi's other must-visit north-eastern restaurant, Nagaland's Kitchen. The restaurant's menu is a savoury showcase of the cuisines of the Seven Sisters and its whitewashed walls are tastefully decorated with north-eastern artifacts. It has a mezzanine floor as well and it can seat 32 people, but when I went there some time back, this section wasn't yet operational (nor did the restaurant have a liquor licence).

I started my meal with the most refreshing organic passion fruit drink I have had in a long time. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that passion fruit grows in plenty in Churachandpur between April and June. Tender passion fruit leaves are also a part of the unique repertoire of herbs and spices used for cooking across the North-East, the others being bamboo shoots (ideally, they should be wet), black and brown sesame seeds, sun-dried basil seeds, aromatic roots such as onion root, yam and mustard leaves, pith of the banana trunk, and of course, the fiery bhoot jholakia (or raja mircha) chillies.

The Manipuri thali is a no-brainer for those
who don't want to spent too much time
ordering. Image: Arupjyoti Gogoi

Every week, Mary and Muan have these ingredients flown in from Manipur, along with the addictively aromatic wild red rice of the state. Mary's only regret is that she can't serve her home-made beer brewed from this species of rice, but I was happy to have the wild rice 'tea' with a squeeze of lemon, which dramatically deepened the colour of the drink, with the standard accompaniment of jaggery.

Rosang Cafe's pork spare ribs served with the raja mircha chutney are without doubt the best, but I had a point to prove to those who labour under the misapprehension that north-eastern food is all about pork, more pork, and some unmentionable animals. To show the hollowness of this belief, I had the Maron Bora (vegetable pakodas from Manipur that tasted divinely different because of the mix of spices and herbs); chicken liver sauteed with herbs in the Arunachali style; the yummy masoor dal; the no-oil fish curry, Ngatok, which makes you wonder why you need oil in cooking; and yet another no-oil preparation, Aksa Dol, which is essentially chicken prepared with dried yam paste. And yes, how can one forget the accompaniment named Jatilau (lauki) Bengena (baigan) Khaar (filtered banana stem ash)!

Mary explained the preponderance of no-oil preparations in north-eastern cuisines. "Our forefathers would spend two to three days at a stretch hunting in jungles," she said, "so they perfected the art of cooking meats in bamboo hollows using aromatic herbs that grow in plenty in the wild." Talking about the wild, you mustn't leave Rosang without digging the wild red rice kheer cooked with milk, ghee and jaggery. It's a dish you'd serve the gods.

NOTE: This review first appeared in the June 6, 2014, edition of Mail Today. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

mmmM: Smoking Hot Chargrilled Burgers on Smoke House Deli's Hauz Khas Village Menu

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

YOU can't really fall in love with a burger until it's smoking hot! We have many restaurants that serve good burgers, classic burgers, experimental burgers, but it's hard to find a burger with a charcoal-grilled patty infused with a smokiness that alerts your palate to the possibility of something good coming its way. It's a smokiness that can't be replicated on a regular grill, but with Weber getting popular, it is possible now for chefs to grill and smoke up a patty at the same time, which is exactly what Sid Mathur and Shamsul Wahid have done at Smoke House Deli (SHD), Hauz Khas Village.

The Benedictor is the star of the mmmBurger
Festival. You must have it, but only after
skipping breakfast!

The SHD at Hauz Khas Village is located where Suresh Kalmadi's Bistro restaurants used to be, within shouting distance from the madrasa that the enlightened Firuz Shah Tughlaq established in 1352 and the lake (hauz) that Alauddin Khilji, who ruled from 1296 to 1316, built to supply water to the residents of the city that's been known since then as Siri. It's not enough to have history as your neighbour. Mathur, a burger fanatic who's also the food and beverage head of SHD's holding company, Impresario Entertainment & Hospitality, and Wahid, the group's executive chef, know this too well to let go of any opportunity to upgrade the restaurant's menu. And their latest brainwave is the mmmBurger Festival, which has been getting rave user reviews in foodie groups such as the Delhi Gourmet Club.

The menu's smoking hot burger is the Benedictor (Rs 410), which is a brilliant, albeit calorie-intense, take on Eggs Benedict -- charcoal-grilled tenderloin patty, strips of turkey pastrami, peppered fried egg and hollandaise. You can taste the difference the all-pervasive smokiness makes to the taste profile of the burger patty. My other favourite is the naughtily named Lucy's Juicy (Rs 340), which is essentially the Jucy Lucy (the missing 'i' in the name of the original burger is deliberate) with a char-grilled lamb patty. As you'd expect from a burger inspired by the Jucy Lucy, the patty has a layer of cheese inside, but it doesn't rush out in a scalding mass.

The only exception in the menu is the Country-Style Fried Chicken Burger (Rs 360) with peri-peri glaze and cheese melt. I just loved it, though it isn't a char-grilled burger. It may have left a lasting impression because our notion of fried chicken is being increasingly influenced by KFC's growing presence. Such was its novelty that the Smoked Chicken N Tequila Burger (Rs 360) with green chillies, tomato relish and beet jelly just sank into the Black Hole of my memory.

Bravehearts highly recommend the Baconator (Rs 450), a power-packed combo of char-grilled tenderloin patty, oak-smoked bacon and bacon-flavoured mayonnaise (baconnaise), but you can either have the Benedictor or the Baconator, or one-half of each! There are more burgers on the menu, but the one that left me unmoved was the Coal Smoked Chicken Leg Burger (Rs 380) with cream cheese, saffron curry and the short, broad and dark maroon reshampatti chilli. There's also a lonely vegetarian burger, which makes the intentions of the moving spirits of the festival quite clear: this is a celebration of char-grilled meats and is only for card-carrying carnivores.

It may be worth your while to visit Hauz Khas Village and partake of these char-grilled beauties. You may find it hard to go beyond the Benedictor or the Baconator, so drop in with your friends and share your burgers to get a taste of the many flavours, textures and tastes. When you're at the mmmBurger Festival, sharing is more than caring -- it's being able to get the best out of the most.

India’s First Gourmet Jams Store Opens in Delhi’s Prospering Shahpur Jat

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

A promo poster from The Gourmet Jar's Facebook page.

APEKSHA JAIN calls herself a ‘confiturer’, who in Queen’s English is a person producing jams, marmalades and conserves, but what makes her special is that she uses only fresh seasonal fruit (not sugary fruit pulp) and organic sugar, and she doesn’t pump up her products with corn syrup, a food industry favourite that enables moisture retention. And now, she’s also the owner of the first shop in the country, The Gourmet Jar, which sells only home-made jams, marmalades and conserves.

The Shahpur Jat store, which opens tomorrow (October 6) with a jam and cheese tasting, will be significant also because it marks the revival of a previously sleepy ‘village’, which has a sprinkling of designer stores and the city’s first Bihari restaurant, Potbelly, in the shadow of the ruins of the walls of Siri, the third city of Delhi that Alauddin Khilji founded in 1303.

Local historians say the village was settled some 900 years ago by the Panwar Jats, who came from a village named Indri in Haryana. They were attracted by the fertile soil of the area. As Delhi’s chronicler, Mayank Austen Soofi, writes in www.thedelhiwalla.com, the government acquired the extensive farmlands of the villagers in 1978 to create the upscale Asiad Village, Panchsheel Park and Hauz Khas neighbourhoods of gentrified South Delhi. The compensation amounts were massive, so the old landed gentry of the village are sitting on piles of money and property.

With Hauz Khas Village ready to implode (watch out for my blog post on the subject), thanks to its humongous popularity and the boundless greed of both landlords and restaurant promoters, Shahpur Jat may just experience a dramatic change in its fortunes. With rentals still a third of those in Hauz Khas Village, it has seen a steady movement of stores, the next big launch (on October 12) being that of Anamika Singh’s Anandini Tea. Shoe Garage and installation artist Puneet Kaushik’s Alter Ego are the two well-known stores of the neighbourhood.

Apeksha Jain. Image: Courtesy of Veggie Wiz

Returning to Apeksha Jain, whom many of you may know as the blogger behind Veggie Wiz, her affair with jam-making began in France, where she spent a year and fell in love with a banana jam she tasted at an orchard in Burgundy. On her return to Delhi, the LSR alumna started making exotic jams, an art she mastered in France, first for her husband and then for her extended family, and before she knew it, The Gourmet Jar was born.

Jain’s spread includes exotica such as mango jalapeno or cape gooseberry cinnamon preserve; apple, green tea and rose jam; banana rum or fig Cointreau jam; marmalades with orange and apricot brandy or bitter orange and whisky; mulled wine jam for the Christmas season; and mint chocolate and strawberry spread. The confiturer even has a sugar-free jam with dates and prunes. The prices are between Rs 300 and Rs 350, and a gift pack of three small jars (125gm each) comes for Rs 600.

The sugar content of her products, Jain insists, is less than half of that of the commercial brands. And she only uses one spoonful of alcohol for 300gm of certain jams, which she believes require that infusion for flavour enhancement. So, relax, there’s no likelihood of your children getting inebriated after consuming Jain’s jams!

A delicious proposition, isn’t it? Being a lover of specialty jams and fruit conserves, my heart beats for The Gourmet Jar.

Riyaz Amlani and Zorawar Kalra team up for global tandoor restaurant

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

THE hospitality world is abuzz with talk about the new projects that are to be unveiled in the next couple of months and the whispers are loudest about the grand alliance of restaurant operator Riyaz Amlani, CEO and Managing Director of Impresario Entertainment & Hospitality (www.impresario.in), and Zorawar Kalra, who sold his Punjab Grill stake to Amit Burman to be able to roll out new cuisine concepts.

With the blessings of strategic investor and brand builder Gaurav Goenka of Mirah Hospitality (www.mirahhospitality.com), Amlani, creator of the successful Smoke House Deli and Mocha franchises, and Kalra are working together to turn the top floor and rooftop of what used to be Suresh Kalmadi’s Village Bistro Restaurant Complex at Hauz Khas Village into a global tandoor restaurant. The restaurant overlooks the 13th-century Hauz Khas reservoir, whose water has turned green because of evident lack of care, and the well-maintained madrasa built by the mid-14th century Delhi Sultanate ruler, Firuz Shah Tughlaq.

The view from the rooftop of the Village Bistro Restaurant Complex, where the global tandoor restaurant of Riyaz Amlani and Zorawar Kalra is set to come up within months. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The buzz is that the restaurant will be named Tinur, after the Akkadian word for tandoor (Akkadian, incidentally, is an extinct language) found in the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, and it will trace the journey of the clay oven from our sub-continent to Iran and Central Asia, and thereafter to the rest of the world. Of course, the restaurant is at present a scooped-out shell and before it takes off, Kalra will open the Masala Library, a new concept restaurant offering a cutting-edge pan-Indian menu with touches of molecular gastronomy, at Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC), the workplace of over 400,000 people.

After Mumbai, Kalra will open the second Masala Library in Bangalore, and the more value-for-money Made in Punjab at The Hub, India’s first restaurant mall in the DLF Cyber Park in Gurgaon. Amlani, who started life as a shoe salesman and studied entertainment management in America, is launching three more Smoke House Delis in the months ahead, which will lift the number of this accessible fine-dining brand to seven. These are busy days for successful restaurateurs.