DINING OUT: The New Angeethi is Dum Pukht Reborn Minus Pricing Pains

QUICK BITES

WHAT: Angeethi, an Awadh-Hyderabad restaurant

WHERE: The Village Restaurant Complex, Next to Siri Fort Auditorium,
Khel Gaon Marg

WHEN: Open for dinner only (from 7 p.m. onwards)

DIAL: (011) 26493945; +91-9999955889

AVG MEAL FOR TWO (WITHOUT ALCOHOL): Rs 2,000+++

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

SANDWICHED between the stranded skeletal remains of Siri Fort, the second of the seven cities of Delhi reputedly built by Alauddin Khilji on a foundation of 8,000 heads of slain Mongol soldiers, and the Asiad Village, Raj Rewal's ode to matchbox housing, bustles a restaurant complex that is famous for Chopsticks, the Chinese restaurant that's never gone out of fashion.

Angeethi, adjoining Siri Fort Auditorium, has
seen a rebirth with a new coat of paint and a new
menu with authentic Hyderabadi and Awadhi
specialities, such as Kakori Kebabs (inset).
Image: Courtesy of K. Asif, Mail Today

Since 1982, the management of the vintage Connaught Place restaurant, Kwality, which is preparing to celebrate its diamond jubilee in the coming year, has been operating this complex with yearly licences from the DDA. Chopsticks has been the evergreen star of the complex, so people haven't really cared much for Tonic, the lounge bar that comes alive whenever there's something happening at the adjacent Siri Fort Auditorium, and Colours 'N' Spice, the pan-Indian restaurant favoured by residents of the neighbourhood colonies.

Angeethi, the fourth name that'll strike your eye when you enter the complex, started out as an ambitious North Indian barbecue restaurant drawing on Kwality's formidable reputation as a purveyor of fine Indian cuisine, but it seemed to have lost the plot down the years. Not anymore, and here's why Angeethi should be next on your must-visit list.

I have always maintained that Dumpukht at the ITC Maurya is Delhi-NCR's finest restaurant in the Indian fine-dining category (the best, without doubt, is Indian Accent and its brand of 'Inventive Indian' cuisine), but like all good things in life, the place is way too (unfairly, I insist) expensive. Lesser mortals with evolved taste buds, and I am happy to report that their number has grown substantially over the years, have been praying for a restaurant that serves the cuisine of the nawabs at commoner prices.

Fortunately for us, the Angeethi menu has been turned around to answer this fervent prayer. The chef who has made this possible is none other than Ghulam Sultan Mohideen, formerly of the ITC Maurya, who must be knowing every square inch of Dum Pukht. He came out unscathed in the first test, making the perfect melt-in-the-mouth Kakori Kebabs with the best Sheermal I have had outside Dum Pukht. The combination would have set me back by Rs 1,600 (minus taxes!) at Dum Pukht, but at Angeethi, you'd pay Rs 515! And I couldn't perceive any difference of taste or experience. This is clearly not food with Kwality's seductive rusticity, but dining with the finesse you'd associate with sepia-tinted Lucknow and Hyderabad.

The Anari Lamb Chops, transformed with pomegranate juice, left a lasting impression on my taste buds, and the Jheenga Dum Nisha, another Dum Pukht classic, measured up to the high standards of the original, but at nearly a fourth of the price (Rs 650 compared with Rs 2,350). Life's pleasures don't always have to be mindlessly expensive! After getting these little beauties to tickle the palate, you'll find yourself in the mood for more.

Start with the Hyderabadi Mutton Dalcha (if you love the characteristic raw mango flavour of this preparation), otherwise stay with the more predictable Kwality Dal, which has been around much before Dal Bukhara was born. Next, you could choose between the Koh-e-Awadh (my favourite recipe with mutton shanks) and the Chicken Korma (I just loved the silky smoothness of the shahi gravy, which complemented the softness of the corn-fed chicken).

And then, departing slightly from the grand old tradition of both Awadh and Hyderabad, ask for a Murgh Yakhni Biryani, instead of Gosht Dum Biryani. I consider chicken and biryani to be irreconcilable foes, but in the hands of Chef Sultan and his team, each piece of chicken bursts with aromatic masala and flavours. Teamed with Mirch Ka Salan, it is the treat with which you'd like to leave Angeethi. But wait, you can't miss the Shahi Tukda, which doesn't come to you table as a soggy toast, but as a bouquet of textures, tastes and aromas. To my horror, I saw it missing on the menu. I hope it was a misprint.

This review first appeared in Mail Today on June 13, 2014.
Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers

DINING OUT: Bread & More Returns With Much More Pizzazz

QUICK BYTES

WHAT: Bread & More

WHERE: N-17, N-Block Market, Greater Kailash-I

WHEN: 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. (weekdays); 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. (weekends)

DIAL: +91 29246301

AVG. BILL STARTS AT: Rs 200 + VAT

STAR RATING: ****1/2

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

The Raspberry Melange is a star attraction at the
new and much-improved Bread & More, which
also has some genuinely artisan breads on its
menu and Delhi-NCR's best macarons. L'Opera
now has serious, decently priced competition.  

WHEN Pishori Lal Lamba and his brother-in-law, Iqbal Ghai, opened Kwality at the Regal Building in Connaught Place in 1940, the only items on their menu were ice-cream produced from a hand-cranked machine and milk shakes. The world was at war and India had been sucked into it. The contours of the conflict changed once the United States pitched in its lot with the Allies after Japanese kamikaze pilots bombed Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. It also turned around the fortunes of Kwality.

American GIs arrived in thousands to defend India against a feared Japanese invasion and a large contingent of them were stationed in New Delhi, at barracks in Connaught Place. They just loved Kwality's vanilla ice-cream and one of the soldiers, a big fan of Lamba and Ghai, taught the brothers-in-law how to make sundaes. Soon, Kwality started serving cold coffee and sandwiches, and the patrons of the Regal theatre next door stopped by before each show.

The story came back to me as I was being taken round Bread & More by Divij Lamba, Pishori Lal's Yale- and Cornell-educated grandson who worked at Hillary Clinton's Senate office before joining his family's restaurant empire. The ice-cream, milk shakes and sundaes have made way for breads and croissants, confections, sandwiches, and single-origin coffees, whose nutty fragrance welcomes guests as they enter the store. Bread & More has been around since 1998, but its look and menu has just undergone a delicious makeover steered by Sahil Mehta, the first Indian to be certified by the prestigious Lenotre baking school  on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, and Umesh Sharma, the Kwality Group's bakery chef. The aromas, flirting with our nostrils and doing a little tango with the senses, revved up my appetite with their promise of good food. L'Opera now has serious competition -- both in quality and in prices.

The Lambas and their bakery team operating out of the Bread & More central commissary in Okhla Phase-II have gone to lengths to ensure authenticity with quality. The starter culture for their peasant bread, for instance, is from Paris, and  it is 75-80 years old. Not a drop of water goes into their focaccia; it's olive oil all the way, just as it would have been in Italy. The hard-crust artisan breads are baked in a stone oven with a mechanism for steam injection. It is this investment that has ensured that these breads are delightfully soft inside.

Even the quantities of yeast used is less -- 16 gm to a kilo of flour, compared with 30 per cent in most commercial breads -- because even though the dough may take a longer time to rise, it has a more delicate flavour and aroma. The simple pleasures of life, as they say, requires little ornamentation. And of course, the butter used is French because it is more malleable and spreads more easily.

The menu has 13 varieties of bread, including whole wheat and oat breads for diabetics, and four kinds of croissants (each uniformly crusty outside and melt-in-the-mouth inside), and it has the old favourites (nachos, sausage rolls and Black Forest), and you can also pick up a spicy chicken galette (the pancake-like bread from Brittany is a new addition to the city's culinary repertoire). For breakfast, you can have ham and soft fried egg on brioche with piping hot single-origin coffee. You may find the seating a little awkward because of space constraints, but it is best to have the croissants and sandwiches at the store. Go there on a weekend morning, or when 6 p.m. hunger pangs get the better of you.

Among all these temptations, and the procession of truffles and pralines and gateaux, the macarons, based on the recipe of the redoubtable Pierre Herme, are Delhi-NCR's best. They start with an almost imperceptible crunch and then just dissolve in the mouth releasing a bouquet of sensations. After you've had the salty caramel macarons, you'll keep wanting more.

Chefs Share Seekh Kebab Secrets as Delhi Gourmet Club Honours Bukhara, Chor Bizarre & Kwality

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHAT’S the secret of the perfect seekh kebab? I asked this question of three chefs, all winners of the Delhi Gourmet Club’s Best Seekh Kebab of Delhi/NCR title, and none of them was as forthright as Pradeep Khullar of Chor Bizarre.

Delhi Gourmet Club's seekh kebab jury members with chefs
Purshottam Singh (right) and Balkishen (left) at the Bukhara

Yours truly giving away the first runners-up certificate to
Pratik Sinha, General Manager, Chor Bizarre, and Master
Chef Pradeep Khullar. To my left is Rocky Mohan, the
captain of the jury, and behind us is the inveterate
travelling gourmand Rajeev Gulati

Kwality scion Divij Lamba and Master Chef Bernard Mandal,
flanked by the men who run the restaurant and seekh kebab
jury members, hold the certificate for the second runner-up.
 All images by Ajay Gautam

The bright young chef, who looks as if he never eats the food he cooks, said it was the right proportion of a goat’s kidney fat (250 gm for every 750 gm of mutton mince) to give the seekh kebabs their sheen and bound and Amul processed cheese to act as the binder. “Without these two key ingredients, it is impossible for us to conceive our seekh kebabs,” said the genial chef, whom I had some time back given the trophy for the best roghan josh at Food & Nightlife magazine’s Delhi’s Most Delicious Awards. The other Chor Bizarre secret is to use ginger and garlic paste, instead of using these whole, to produce those juicy temptations that inveigle you to keep eating till you lose track of time.

The Delhi Gourmet Club’s demanding jury led by Rocky ‘Mr Old Monk’ Mohan, though, ranked Chor Bizarre at No. 2, with Bukhara’s meaty seekh kebabs (70-80 gm apiece, I was told, which makes a plate of four a complete meal) besting the Old World Hospitality restaurant by just two points. The styles of the two kebabs are distinctly different — Bukhara’s were mutton-first, chunky Frontier-style beauties, whereas Chor Bizarre were smoother, softer, more gentrified. They’re like the village woman made famous by Nawaz Sharif acquiring an urban gloss. It’s because less fat (not more than 20 per cent) goes into the Bukhara seekh kebabs to maintain their rusticity.

At Bukhara, we missed the on-tour-to-Kolkata Executive Chef J.P. Singh, who, it is said, has fed more heads of state than we can count on our fingers many times over, but we had the good fortune of meeting his able deputies — Purshottam Singh, whose professorial looks and athletic frame (he used to run up to the top of the ITC Maurya’s Towers block every day when he was younger) doesn’t give away his profession, and Balkishen, who has travelled the world, from New York to Ajman to Hong Kong, with the Bukhara brand since the time of the legendary Madan Lal Jaiswal, the brilliant chef who passed away in a car crash. They are the architects of a brand that feeds over 400 people a day and makes more money than any other restaurant in the country.

At No. 3, and a good eight points behind Chor Bizarre, was Kwality. Being a lover of gloss and glam, I am a great admirer of Kwality’s to-die-for succulent seekh kebabs, so I was quite heart-broken by the No. 3 spot, but when the tussle involves 15 formidable restaurants (shortlisted from 30 by members of the Delhi Gourmet Club), final rankings can spring surprises.

I couldn’t resist asking Divij Lamba, the Kwality scion who’s a Cornell and Yale alumnus and has done stints at the Brookings Institute and the Senate Office of Hillary Clinton, how the restaurant always manages to get its seekh kebabs right. He gave the credit entirely to the success of his chefs in not deviating from the age-old recipe followed at the restaurant. Kwality’s Master Chef Bernard Mandal, a man of few words and a welcoming smile, nodded in approval. Beyond learning that the main ingredients were love and care, I couldn’t gather more from the Kwality team, which included the company’s CEO, Prashant Narula.

ITC Maurya’s General Manager, Anil Chadha, asked us who the members of the jury were and how they were chosen. Well, Rocky Mohan, who being the author of four acclaimed cookbooks knows his seekh kebabs better than most, put together the jury comprising a mix of food enthusiasts who had eaten around the world and professionals who took the trouble of visiting each of the 15 restaurants unannounced and assessing the seekh kebabs, at their own expense, on four criteria: quality of the meat; taste; add-ons; presentation.

The judges were Mohit Balachandran, AD Singh’s national business head who’s also famous as Chowder Singh on blogosphere; inveterate travelling gourmand Rajeev Gulati, who’s in the pharmaceuticals distribution business; corporate lawyer Sanhita Dasgupta-Sensarma; restaurateur (Angrezee Dhaba) Rajat Pahwa; young hospitality professional Nikhil Alung; self-employed businessman and hobby cook Vikram Bali; and Yogesh Magon, who’s in the liquor business.

They knew their seekh kebabs well and though they had generally good things to say about most of the places they went to (their big surprise was Kebabs and Curries at Greater Kailash-I, but sadly, it was at No. 8, below the Connaught Place restaurant, Embassy, which is better known for its Dal Meat and Chicken Pakodas), they were unanimous in their expressing their shock at the decline in the standards of two Defence Colony institutions, Colonel’s Kababz and Moets, which rubbed shoulders at the bottom of the heap.

Such exercises are important because they give followers of groups like the Delhi Gourmet Club a user’s guide to the delicacies they all crave for. As the dining world is moving towards giving greater credence to peer reviews, the Delhi Gourmet Club’s hunt for the best seekh kebabs in Delhi/NCR is the right step in the direction of giving these reviews a prejudice-free structure.