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.

Shiv Karan Singh Parts Ways with Riyaaz Amlani; To Relaunch Smoke House Grill as Smokey’s

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

EARLIER in the week, Smoke House Deli at Khan Market was in the news for the front-page picture carried by the Economic Times of its regular patron, Rahul Gandhi, chilling out at the restaurant. He was having his favourite chicken burger, which he, on another occasion, even made his mother order when they came together for lunch. The Page One picture, though, is not the reason why the restaurant trade is abuzz about Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality (IEHPL), the company that owns Smoke House Deli (and a host of other brands).

Riyaaz Amlani (left) and Shiv Karan
Singh at the launch of Smoke House
Deli in Hauz Khas Village earlier
in the year (Photo: Courtesy of
Food and Nightlife Magazine)

The big news that’s sent the trade into a state of high excitement is that Riyaaz Amlani, founder CEO and MD of IEHPL, and his go-to man in Delhi, Shiv Karan Singh, have parted ways. As part of the separation, Singh, who’s well-known in Delhi circles and was responsible in a big way for the group’s successful expansion in the national capital, will get the much-acclaimed Smoke House Grill, the fine-dining restaurant and lounge at Masjid Moth in South Delhi that was shut down “for renovations” some time back.

Smoke House Grill will return soon in its new avatar of Smokey’s BBQ under Singh’s independent stewardship. He’s also working on rolling out a chain of restaurants named Anday Ke Funday, which sources close to the development say is an exciting idea that will ride on the national popularity of egg preparations. Will the new venture be on the lines of the Montreal-headquartered international chain, Eggspectation, which has a partnership going for nearly a decade with Jaypee Hotels? That is the question everyone in the hospitality business is asking.

Amlani, who’ll now focus on his hugely popular Smoke House Deli and Mocha brands, besides floating a couple of new concepts (which we’ll be the first to report!), is in talks, meanwhile, to sell off the location of his aborted ventures, Shroom and Smoke House BBQ at The Crescent, Lado Sarai, virtually across the road from the Qutab Minar.

With Singh’s going, Amlani will lose a very visible face in Delhi. When the well-networked Singh ended his long bachelorhood and got married to film star Reemma Sen (a Tamil cinema heroine who was last seen in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur) in 2012, the who’s who of the national capital showed up at the Vasant Kunj farmhouse where the marriage reception took place, with a food and drinks spread to match Singh’s reputation as a restaurateur. Singh will certainly cash in on his personal equity to drive the success of his projects.

But Amlani, too, is not a stranger in Delhi. He has just been elected vice-president of the National Restaurant Association of India and his reputation as a hospitality mogul is as big in Delhi as in his home city, Mumbai. In 2011, Gaurav Goenka’s Mirah Hospitality and Beacon India PE Fund invested Rs 48 crore in IEHPL with a mandate to Amlani to expand the Smoke House Deli and Mocha brands across the country. Amlani therefore has his hands full and he seems to be revelling in it.

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.