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.

Riyaaz Amlani's Eyes $20m Funding As He Targets Entrepreneurial Youth With 'Social' Brand

Either scale up or be prepared to
get copied by cheap imitators,
says restaurant mogul
Riyaaz Amlani of Impresario
Entertainment & Hospitality

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

"Starbucks positions itself as the 'third place' between work and home, but for me, Social is the 'second place' -- a place to work and to unwind for entrepreneurial young people who are setting themselves up."

ONE OF India's biggest self-made entrepreneurial success stories in the restaurant business, Riyaaz Amlani, is all set to raise another $20 million (Rs 120 crore at present exchange rates) to finance the ambitious growth targets that he has set for his hospitality company, Impresario Entertainment & Hospitality Pvt. Ltd.

Impresario has already received two rounds of private equity funding from Beacon India, the local arm of Baer Partners that has invested in entities as diverse as the National Stock Exchange, Ratnakar Bank, Saffronart and Delhi's Bhayana Builders, and Gaurav Goenka's Mirah Hospitality, whose showpiece brands include Citrus Hotels and Khandani Rajdhani.

After selling shoes when he was a teenager, getting an MBA in Entertainment Management at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and working for media mogul and former Rajya Sabha MP Pritish Nandy, Amlani launched Mocha: Coffees and Conversations, a bold experiment to bring the culture of five-star coffee shops to young people like him, at a 500 sq. ft. location at Churchgate, Mumbai, in 2001.

Today, 13 years on, Amlani presides over a restaurant business that spans 39 outlets in 12 cities, and concepts as diverse as his star chef Gresham Fernandes's Gypsy Kitchen pop-up dinners at St Jude's Bakery in the quaint East Indian village of Ranwar in Bandra, Mumbai, to his newest (and most exciting) brand, Social, which has been conceptualised as a quirky work and party space for "young bootstrapping entrepreneurs".

The view from Hauz Khas Social, the latest
addition to Amlani's expanding restaurant
empire of 39 outlets in 12 cities

Having put his foot on the accelerator of expansion, Amlani plans to open 50-60 Smoke House Deli outlets in the seven major metros (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and Pune), and at least two or three each of the more fine dining-focused Salt Water Cafe in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, apart from taking Mocha to Tier-II towns because "Tier-I rental are driving us to them".

But at the core of this ambitious growth strategy is Amlani's belief that the 'cafe bars' catering to the young in metropolitan cities will drive his business. He spells out three reasons for his thrust on cafe bars. One, the audience is bigger, more loyal and much more appreciative of his concepts. Two, in this age of spiralling rentals, restaurateurs have got to sweat their assets by creating all-day dining spaces. "You no longer have the luxury to be a nights- or weekends-only, or fine dining-centric business," reasons Amlani. Three, and perhaps most important, "the battle now is for the customer's watch, not for his wallet." People's leisure time is "shrinking", so the restaurant of the future, such as Social, has to blur the dividing line between work and leisure spaces.

"Starbucks positions itself as the 'third place' between work and home, but for me, Social is the 'second place' -- a place to work and to unwind for entrepreneurial young people who are setting themselves up," says Amlani, as I dig the Pakistani street food delicacy, Anda Shammi, in a sea activity on the pre-opening afternoon of Hauz Khas Social.

Amlani got the idea of Social by watching people armed with laptops conducting business meetings at Barista or Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) outlets. He was quick to realise that coffee shops are becoming business hubs for young entrepreneurs, but there is an awkwardness in the equation, because people using these spaces for work have this feeling in the back of their mind that they are taking unfair advantage of the hospitality of a Barista or a CCD.

To end this awkwardness and give the people using the space a sense of ownership, Amlani has worked out a business model that allows a start-up the right to use Social for a nominal monthly payment of Rs 5,000 per person -- redeemable against food and drink vouchers. That's so much cheaper than owning an office space anywhere in Delhi-NCR and in this case, the 'office' comes with raw entrepreneurial energy all around it, decently priced food (as you'd expect from your workplace cafeteria), effective air-conditioning, working loos and, more importantly, a view to die for (and on a rainy day, a steady cool gust to keep you inspired).

With naked walls, recycled furniture, a work-in-process look and the hand-painted signs of street art pioneer Hanif Kureshi (better known by his brand name 'Daku', which is the abbreviated form of Design, Art and Culture), Hauz Khas Social, which sprawls across 8,500 sq. ft., also has fully equipped conference rooms that participating startups can use for free. And just in case you are tired of ordering the sumptuous all-day breakfast options (priced between Rs 250 and Rs 300), or the other offbeat menu items created by the brilliant trio of food and beverages head Sid Mathur, and chefs Gaurav Gidwani and Shamsul Wahid, you could ask for the Rs 150 daal-chaawal-sabzi combination of the Social Staff Meal Du Jour.

Is Amlani under pressure from his PE fund investors to expand at a breakneck pace? He answers the question in parts. "PE funds invest in you because of your ability to scale up," Amlani says at first, but then he admits: "Scale is the enemy of soul." But then he says that if he doesn't scale up a concept, others would roll out cheap copies and make a mockery of the original idea.

"I learnt this lesson from my Mocha experience," he reminisces. As soon as the original Mocha in Mumbai started gaining attention, others started copying the idea and before you could say Jack Robinson, as many as 2,200 Mocha copies came up around the country in less than a year. The challenge before Amlani, therefore, is to balance scale with soul -- not the McDonald's or Domino's way. And he does it successfully at Social, whose food and beverage offerings come with a refreshingly new twist (which will be the subject of my next Dining Out review). Restaurateurs like Amlani scaling up is good news for diners who are hungry for more.

McDonald's Taps Out-of-Home Breakfast Market As It Becomes Footfall Driver for Standalone Restaurants

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

FOR THE second year in succession, McDonald's celebrated National Breakfast Day, which is its own invention, on Monday, March 24, by handing out thousands of McMuffins gratis to early-bird customers at designated outlets. The five in Delhi-NCR even test-marketed the idea of an all-day breakfast served from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., taking a leaf out of similar packages now offered by five-star hotels to the cater to the requirements of the many body clocks of world-travelling international patrons.

Out-of-home breakfast may seem to be an idea that is alien to India (why would anyone want to have breakfast at a McDonald's when you can dig aloo parantha or dosai at home?), but as the demographics of our cities change, the trend seems to be catching on.

A McDonald's Breakfast Favourite:
Sausage Egg McMufffin. The QSR
chain can draw solace from the
success of the breakfast offerings
of standalone restaurants

Actually, it is not as foreign to our culture as it may seem at first glance. The breakfast offerings of Saravana Bhavan, Murugan's Idli and MTR are established favourites; the crispy stuffed paranthas of Murthal dhabas continue to attract Delhiites by the carload at breakfast time; the popularity of jalebi-and-hot creamy milk treats at places as varied as Jodhpur, Lucknow and Varanasi shows no signs of diminishing; and Purani Dilli's bedmi-aloo is worth a trip to Chandni Chowk, especially on a Sunday.

McDonald's is simply tapping into this market, and if the following at home of its Egg and Chicken Sausage McMuffin and pancakes bathed in molten butter and maple syrup is any indication (though my personal favourite is the McEgg Burger, which I recommend strongly to all!), then it must be succeeding. Restaurateurs offering breakfast share the fast-food chain's confidence in this segment of the organised restaurant market, or what its spokesman, Rajesh Maini, calls the "massification of breakfast".

The All American Diner at Habitat World took the lead about 15 years ago by introducing a breakfast offering. Today, according to Old World Hospitality's F&B Director Rakesh Anand, as many as 175-200 people daily have the Diner's breakfast between 7 and 11 a.m., and the number goes up to 250-300 a day for the weekend breakfast (in the summer months) or brunch (in the winter) buffet laid out on the lawns.

Most of the people opting for the weekday breakfast option are Lodi Garden walkers; Habitat World has 58 guest rooms, but not more than 15-20 of the guests come down for breakfast, for most of them prefer to have it served in the comfort of their room. The rest of the breakfast guests are residents of Golf Links next door, students unwinding after all-nighters and professionals working in offices in the neighbourhood. Anand, in fact, claims that it was the Diner that popularised the idea of breakfast meetings.

Families and specialised groups, such as those devoted to cycling or to burning Harley Davidson rubber, dominate the weekend turnout. The only flip side of the business, Anand points out, is that "breakfast is the most difficult service in terms of human behaviour". Apparently, if you are doing breakfast shift, you get to know all about people getting up from the wrong side of the bed. "That explains why for breakfast shift we only have cheerful, non-intrusive staff who are sensitive to guest feelings," adds Anand.

At Smoke House Deli, Khan Market, whose breakfast menu matches that of the All American Diner in both variety and quality, the morning turnout can be split into two time bands: 25-30, mostly expats on their way to work, between 8:15 and 9-9:30, and another 20-25, mostly desi, opt for a "lazy breakfast" between 9:30 and 11.

Sharing this information, Sid Mathur, F&B Director of Impresario Hospitality & Entertainment, the company that owns Smoke House Deli, said the out-of-home breakfast market has been growing for three reasons: "A lot of people, especially young professionals living away from their families, don't have full-time help at home; people's tastes have changed -- they're moving away from paranthas; and young double-income couples are increasingly finding it more convenient to eat out."

Well, paranthas are no longer hot in this market segment. At Smoke House Deli, Eggs Benedict is the reigning favourite. McDonald's, then, has a good reason to be confident about the future of the Egg and Sausage McMuffin.

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.

A Matter of Taste: Dissecting Asia's 50 Best List & How It Gets To Be Made

This is the original, and much longer, version of the article that first appeared in Mumbai Mirror on Sunday, March 2, 2014.
To check out what appeared in Mumbai Mirror, go to:
http://www.mumbaimirror.com/others/sunday-read/Race-of-taste/articleshow/31231445.cms
Copyright: Mumbai Mirror

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHEN THE Restaurant Magazine unveiled The World's 50 Best Restaurants list last year, a wave of anguish swept through foodie circles across the country, for not one Indian name from India figured even in the 100 Best -- Gaggan's of Bangkok made it to No. 66, but unfortunately for us, it has a Bangkok address!

The cause of the widespread despair was the clout that the list has acquired ever since it was first released by the London-based magazine in 2002. It was, after all, this list that made El Bulli, which was then just a local favourite, though it had earned its third Michelin star by 1997, an instant international star. Not only El Bulli, a number of other restaurants, notably Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck, owe their global celebrity status to the list.

Manish Mehrota, seen here with
one of his younger colleagues at
Indian Accent, without doubt is
the top choice for India's No. 1

With this change of status comes an avalanche of footfalls -- El Bulli made history by getting over two million requests for table reservations from all over the world in a year -- and a rush of new business. Well-known food writer Rashmi Uday Singh, who heads the Indian sub-continent committee of the Diner's Club Academy, the votes of whose invited members shape the list, points to how, thanks to The World's 50 Best list, Noma attained stardom and put Copenhagen on every gourmet traveller's world map.

DISAPPOINTED BY THE LIST

When the magazine released its Asia's 50 Best list, for the second year, in Singapore this past Wednesday, our flag-waving foodies should have been overjoyed, for six Indian restaurants figured on it. But the critics aren't amused.

They sneeringly point out that the Indian restaurant in India to secure the highest rank -- at No. 27, Bukhara at ITC Maurya, New Delhi -- is 24 notches below Gaggan's, which is at No. 3. They also question the wisdom of ranking a restaurant with an uninspiring and unchanging menu (Bukhara) above one that's been making waves, like Gaggan's, for its lively modernist take on Indian cuisine (Indian Accent, which is at No. 29). Sid Mathur, Director and Head of F&B, Impresario, the company that owns and operates Salt Water Cafe and Smoke House Deli, echoes the dominant sentiment when he says: "This is 2014. Indian Accent should have been on top. This list is a bit too touristy."

Indian Accent's Manish Mehrotra rose from obscurity to overnight fame when television audiences saw him transform everyday dishes on the popular reality show, Foodistan, which pitted Indian chefs against their Pakistani counterparts. Most recently, he wowed critics with his Baigan Bharta Cornetto because of both the unusual presentation of a common preparation (served in cornetto cups) and the use of goat's cheese to give it that unusual twist. The other favourite is the dish that bring together seared prawns, karela cooked with chooran, and quinoa puffs -- a seamless marriage of memorable textures and tastes.

Malhotra's all-time hit is the Meetha Achaar Chilean Spare Ribs, where the critical ingredient is the sweet mango pickle -- it was the first time the world had spare ribs this way and we continue to love it. Comments US-based food writer, educator and author of Modern Spice, Monica Bhide: "The way he pairs his spices with meats is nothing short of magical. The food works and then the chef plays with 'Indian-ness'. The jamun-churan sorbet that is served inside a mini pressure cooker, for instance. It is delicious, it is playful, it works!

Not all hope is lost. Indian Accent, which Mumbai-based food blogger Rushina Munshaw-Ghildayal describes as "fabulously different", has gone up by 12 places from No. 41 in 2013 (and it is the only Indian restaurant to have experienced upward mobility). Mehrotra, its star chef, though, isn't surprised. Indian Accent has been, without a break, TripAdvisor's No. 1 restaurant in Delhi for 19 months, and counting.

Gaggan Anand, the ex-Taj hand who's behind the phenomenal success of his namesake restaurant Gaggan's, says it all when he hopes that more chefs "follow Malhotra's lead and reinvent Indian cooking like no one has done before". He says: "We don't travel by bullock carts anymore, do we? So, why should we keep cooking what we have eaten for a hundred years?" Adds Bhide, about both Indian Accent and Gaggan's: "It is very difficult to achieve what they have because they are fighting against the battle of the stereotypical Indian restaurant that is 'supposed to', in the eyes of the international audience, serve only butter chicken and naan."

WHY MUMBAI FARES SO POORLY

The other point of contention has in fact triggered the old Mumbai versus Delhi debate. Just one of the six Indian restaurants is from Mumbai -- Wasabi by Morimoto at the Taj, which has dropped by 16 points to park itself at No. 36. And last year's No. 28 doesn't figure anywhere? Has Mumbai lost out to Delhi's vibrant new dining scene, as Munshaw-Ghildayal suggest, or it doesn't have adequately good Indian offerings to make it to an international list? "Delhi leads because its dining experience is mainly Indian cuisine-centred," says Zorawar Kalra, Founder-Managing Director, Massive Restaurants, whose Masala Library at BKC is Mumbai's new favourite.

Kalra has a point. International 'best' lists seek to showcase creative expressions of the home cuisine of the country whose restaurants are being judged. Mumbai's basic flaw, as Munshaw-Ghildayal also emphasises, is that it has very few Indian restaurants of any calibre and even among them, just one -- Ziya at The Oberoi, run by Vineet Bhatia of London's Michelin-starred Rasoi -- stands out because of its inventive cuisine. As Anand puts it: "If an Indian chef makes sushi or dishes out Chinese food, no matter how creative they may be, he can't expect global recognition. International juries are looking for what's new in our cuisine."

But with formidable front-runners such as Indigo, Ziya, Koh, Joss and The Table, Mumbai surely can stand up to Dum Pukht at ITC Maurya, New Delhi (No. 30), which has dropped precipitously from last year's No. 17; Varq at The Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi (No. 32, down by two); and Karavalli at the Gateway Hotel, Bangalore (No. 40, down by five). The list also leaves out hugely successful and critically acclaimed restaurants in other cities, such as Abhijit Saha's Caperberry in Bangalore, Pan Asian at the ITC Grand Chola, Chennai, where Vikramjit Roy has got his fan following eating out of his hands, and Patron Bowra Jap's Bomra's at Candolim, Goa, which counts novelist Amitav Ghosh among its regulars.

PEOPLE BEHIND THE LIST

Nevertheless, the contentious list has become the definitive benchmark of quality for the dining public and travelling foodies. To be fair, the making of the list is a democratic process, based on voting by the 936 invited members -- hoteliers, top chefs, well-known gastronomes and food journalists -- of the Diner's Club Academy. This hallowed group is expected to dine around the world at its expense and then, when Judgment Day comes, members hand in their ballots listing their best seven restaurant experiences (including four from their region) in the past 18 months. The Academy divides the world into 26 regions to ensure near-equal representation for every culture and taste profile, and each region has a committee of 36 members selected by a designated chairperson.

The Indian sub-continent committee, which includes representatives of the five metros as well as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, is headed by Rashmi Uday Singh, who has been a part of the process since its inception in 2002. Its members include people she describes as "serious travelling foodies", such as India Today Group's Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie, The Park Hotels Chairperson Priya Paul, RPG Enterprises Vice Chairman Sanjiv Goenka, Apeejay Surrendra Group's Chairman Karan Paul, writer Shobhaa De, adman and television personality Suhel Seth, Restaurant Week India founder Mangal Dalal, Madhu Neotia, wife of Ambuja Neotia Group Chairman Harshvardhan Neotia, and Mariam Ram, wife of N. Ram, Chairman of Kasturi & Sons, the company that publishes The Hindu.

In the past, Singh says, the committee included former Pakistani cricket captain and politician, Imran Khan, as well as media baron Aveek Sarkar (Star Ananda and Ananda Bazar Patrika), Indian Hotels Company Managing Director Raymond Bickson, celebrity chef Hemant Oberoi and the former boss of ITC Hotels, Syed Habibur Rehman. You can't question the credentials of these committee members, but as Singh points out, she has no control over the restaurants they choose to frequent.

"Any list (even if God made it) will attract criticism and controversy," says Singh, adding that this one is "a democratic snapshot of dining trends, not a definitive guide". She goes on to make the point that we should celebrate the inclusion of six Indian restaurants on the list. "We must not forget we're up against Japan, where Tokyo has more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris," she says. "We have at least put our foot in the door."

Kalra shares Singh's optimism. "I am happy to see so many Indian restaurants," Kalra says. "It shows the world takes India more seriously now." Malhotra of Indian Accent counsels patience. He says: "Look, there was a time when Bukhara used to be among The World's 50 Best. It then dropped to The World's 100 Best. And now it's not even on it. Lists keep evolving, so will this one." His fans, for sure, hope it does.