Zorawar Kalra Set to Unveil Farzi Cafe in Gurgaon & Woo Market for $8m Cash Infusion

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

IT IS difficult to be Jiggs Kalra's son because of the gastronomical legacy you carry on your shoulders, but Massive Restaurants Managing Director Zorawar Kalra wears his heritage with elan. As he gets ready to open his newest concept restaurant, Farzi Cafe at the Cyber Hub, Gurgaon, reinventing the coffee shop culture with the tools and techniques of molecular gastronomy, Zorawar is carrying forward his father's tradition of innovating with imagination.

With Farzi Cafe, Zorawar Kalra is all
set to firmly establish himself as the
young and credible new face of
Modern Indian cuisine

Jiggs Kalra turned the salmon tikka and galauti kebab into national favourites; Zorawar Kalra is pushing the envelope with boti kebab tacos, dal-chawal arancini, karela calamari and anda bhurjee with chilli con queso (or molten cheese dip spiked with chillies) -- all invented dishes that may seem to a traditionalist to be straight out Mad Hatter's tea party, but which, without doubt, will bring the young back to the cuisine they had forsaken because it had become too predictable to tickle their taste buds.

And as he goes about giving Modern Indian cuisine a new direction with his talented team of Varun Duggal, the strategist, and Himanshu Saini, the star chef who (with Saurabh Udinia) has made Masala Library the go-to restaurant of Mumbai, Zorawar is working to a five-year business plan loaded with ambitious targets. He had set out with an infusion of funds from Gaurav Goenka's Mirah Hospitality, which has also made big-ticket investments in Riyaz Amlani's Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality and the Rajdhani restaurants, but with this  money exhausted by his first round of projects (including Made in Punjab), Zorawar is going back to the market to raise $8 million (Rs 48 crore at the present exchange rate) to finance his expansion plans.

Zorawar's plan is to take Made in Punjab to Tier-II cities, with 15 of them up and running in the next three or four years, open at least eight Farzi Cafe outlets in the same period, starting with the next one in Dubai, and go international with Masala Library with a network franchisees extending all the way to Dubai. "I am looking at Massive Restaurants notching up a turnover of Rs 225-250 crore at the end of five years," Zorawar said in an interview with the Indian Restaurant Spy.

Money does matter, but it's food that gets Zorawar most excited. He seems to be firm believer of the old restaurateur's adage, "Good food gets good money." Farzi Cafe, he says, has been an idea he has carried with him for eight years ("the first cafe in the world to showcase molecular gastronomy"), but it took shape only over the last six months, after extensive food trials.

Zorawar's vision was given a shape and form by the highly talented Himanshu, Manish Mehrotra's former protege who first came into the limelight when he won Chicago/New York restaurateur Rohini Dey's much-publicised 'chef hunt' last summer with his sarson da saag quesadilla served with butter milk foam. It was in that moment in the spotlight that Himanshu made a couple of telling comments that foretold his future. “There is a thin line between fusion and confusion," he said. "Once that is sorted, half the battle is won." He then went on to pay a tribute to his original guru: "You can’t think straight with food. Every dish must be prepared  like a story. That’s what I learnt from Manish Mehrotra.”

Farzi means 'fake', but it could also be an illusion, which is what Zorawar wants to serve on the plate -- a dish that doesn't taste the way you'd expect it to from it looks. The cafe's bar menu has a dozen molecular gastronomy-inspired cocktails and its tapas selection is crowded with surprises, from spare ribs spiked with the world's hottest bhut jolokia chillies and a double- deck galauti burger to tandoori lamb served with maple-soy sauce and whisky sour cream and a Philly cheese raan hot dog.

For the mains, some of the options are Thai green curry khichdi, roomali roti ravioli with eggplant mozzarella bharta and poha Pad Thai with wok-tossed red snapper. A couple of the desserts seem straight out of science fiction -- phirni oxide, for instance, or Bailey's lollipop prepared on Zorawar's favourite new toy, the anti-griddle, which can reduce the temperature of any liquid to minus-30 degrees Celsius in a flash -- but there's also the Parle-G cheesecake or the Cassata Indiana served with Magic Pops. It's as if Zorawar and Himanshu just let their imagination go on a free ride on the wild side.

Diners in Mumbai have savoured the creative repertoire of Zorawar's team, but at Cyber Hub, sadly, he's invariably measured by the day's lunch buffet at Made in Punjab, which not only is a steadily popular restaurant, but also has an a la carte menu studded with gems. Farzi Cafe, I hope, will allow him to be judged for what he and his young, talented and turbo-charged team are really worth.

Zorawar Kalra Presents Farzi Cafe Sneak Preview at Delhi Gourmet Club's Gourmet Passport 2014-15 Launch

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Zorawar Kalra, Managing Director, Massive
Restaurants (Made in Punjab/Masala Library),
raises a toast to the Gourmet Passport 2014-15.
Others in the picture: (From left) Varun Duggal
of Massive Restaurants, Atul Sikand of the
Delhi Gourmet Club (DGC), yours truly, Aditya
Soni of Citibank, Sandeep Tandon of Old World
Hospitality and DGC's Rocky Mohan.

WHERE else can the humble karela be turned into a gourmet statement than at a Zorawar Kalra restaurant? And what can be a better forum to showcase the talented young chef Himanshu Saini's 'bitter gourd tempura' with sweet and sour raw mango chutney than the launch of the Gourmet Passport 2014-15? The smartly designed book of 402 'buy one main course, get one free' discount coupons from 134 restaurants in Delhi and Mumbai was presented by the Delhi Gourmet Club in partnership with Citibank at a free-flowing launch party on May 1 attended by all the supporters of the project.

SURPRISE PACKAGE OF THE EVENING:
Karela has never tasted better than in the
Bitter Gourd Tempura with sweet and sour
mango chutney served at the Gourmet
Passport 2014-15 launch party at Made
in Punjab on Thursday, May 1, 2014.
Of course, this was just one of the star
items on the 12-course menu.

The venue was Made in Punjab at Gurgaon's Cyber Hub; the finger-licking good food was from the menu of the upcoming Farzi Cafe next door ("it's not even 10 per cent of what we have in mind," Zorawar assured us, making us wonder, "what next?"); and the guests seen enjoying Himanshu's goodies included industry leaders Sandeep Tandon (Old World Hospitality), AD Singh (Olive Bar & Kitchen) and Pankaj Mathur (The Suryaa); restaurant powerhouses Janti Duggal (Mamagoto), Atul Kapur (QBA and The China House), Rajeev Aneja (Rara Avis) and Prashant Narula (Kwality Group); some of Delhi/NCR's most talented chefs -- Soumya Goswami, Ravitej Nath, Vikas Vibhuti and Sandeep Kalra (The Oberoi), Rajiv Malhotra and Pradeep Khullar (Old World Hospitality), Arun Kumar TR (Zambar/Lite Bite Foods), Vikram Khatri, Sujan Sarkar and Vaibhav Bhargava (Olive Bar & Kitchen and Guppy by Ai); F&B hotshots Ravindra Kumar (The Lalit's most durable pillar of excellence), Rajesh Namby (The Leela Palace New Delhi), Mohit Balachandran (Sodabottleopenerwala), Suveer Sodhi (The Lodhi), Sid Mathur (Impresario/Smoke House Deli), Yogendra Negi (DLF Restaurants/Set'z) and Sohan Bohra (Kylin Premier); and my partners in journalistic crimes -- Neeta Raheja (Very Truly Yours), Mukta Kapoor (Old World Hospitality), Deepica Sarma and Mallika Gowda (The Oberoi), Pallavi Singh (Crowne Plaza Okhla), Nidhi Verma (The Leela Ambience Gurgaon), Madhur Madaan (Kempinski Ambience), Nidhi Budhia (Crowne Plaza Rohini) and Manita Asija Tuteja (Kylin Premier/Sartoria).

But the star of the evening was the spread planned by Zorawar and his multi-talented deputy Varun Duggal with Himanshu. Just back from America, where he had presented a talk on the trends defining contemporary Indian cuisine in the august company of Grand Master Chef Hemant Oberoi of The Taj Hotels, Zorawar said the Farzi Cafe, which is coming up right next door to Made in Punjab at the ground level of the Cyber Hub, would take 'Modernist' Indian cuisine to a level that is a notch higher than his other baby, Masala Library at the Bandra Kurla Complex. Now, that's a very serious challenge to set for oneself -- Masala Library, after all, has won nine prestigious awards in the seven months that it has been around! I am sure he must have picked up ideas from his recent visit to Alinea in Chicago, where the American guru of molecular gastronomy, Grant Achatz, gave him a guided tour of the kitchen (a rare honour).

AD Singh, who's unfailing in his praise for restaurants (even if they have the potential of becoming his competition), couldn't stop praising the papad-crusted dal chawal arancini with achari crème cheese and onion chutney. It was a brilliant reconstruction of the Sicilian classic with an Indian twist. My personal favourites were the tandoori portobello mushrooms with truffle walnut herb crust, bhoot jolokia lamb chops with tempered coriander seeds, and the chilli duck samosa served with roasted plum chutney. Each dish came with a twist and the presentations showed the Zorawar Kalra eye for detailing. As one of the guests said, "The food tasted as good as the discount coupons inside the book." Well, you have a year to check out each one of the 134 restaurants that have participated in the book that has stirred the pot of Delhi's imagination.

GURGAON'S FINEST: Zorawar Kalra, Sodabottleopenerwala, Bernardo, Amaranta, Zambar & Many More

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

I HAD never considered Gurgaon to be anything more than a culinary desert till the Cyber Hub came up and became Delhi's go-to destination.

My only Gurgaon favourite was Cilantro, especially because of the wines on offer with its Sunday brunch, and then, in chronological order, Spectra (Leela Ambience), MoMo Cafe at the Courtyard by Marriott, Eest at The Westin (not my favourite!), La Riviera (which has lost much of its old glory after the fire that broke out some months back) and Sen5es at the Pullman, and Amaranta at The Oberoi gave me occasional reasons to cross the border to satiate my curiosity about our neighbour's foodie islands. With the opening of Cyber Hub, my jaunts to Millennium City have become frequent and taken me to restaurants beyond India's answer to Clarke Quay, and I have discovered that Gurgaon has well and truly evolved gastronomically.

When my friend Pawan Soni announced the Indian Food Freak Awards to recognise Gurgaon's best restaurants (indeed, a creditable initiative!), I decided to do my own quiet recce, exchanging notes over FB Mail with certified foodies of the Delhi Gourmet Club, F&B professionals and chefs. I compared their recommendations with my notes and realised that my favourites more or less reflected the popular opinion.

Here, then, are my personal awards, and if you find five-star hotels being poorly represented on the list, it is because most of them haven't impressed me. The future clearly belongs to standalone restaurants powered by passionate entrepreneurs and powerhouses of young talent. I would have loved it if the Indian Food Freak Awards were given out at Cyber Hub amphitheatre as a tribute to the future of Delhi-NCR's culture of dining out.

Restaurateur of the Year: Zorawar Kalra, Massive Restaurants

He's a tribute to his father, India's first and foremost food impresario Jiggs Kalra, and the tradition of Indian fine-dining he upheld. After creating Masala Library in Mumbai, a Michelin star-quality restaurant, Zorawar rolled out Made in Punjab, demonstrating the ease with which he can operate across formats.

In his next project, Farzi Cafe, next door to Made in Punjab, I believe he's marrying Masala Library's finesse with Made in Punjab's mass appeal. It takes an imaginative and versatile entrepreneur to think across so many formats. He may be younger, but if he maintains his standards and his success rate, he'll  be in the league of AD Singh and Riyaz Amlani.

Restaurant Concept of the Year: Sodabottleopenerwala

Marrying quirky ambience with food you can never tire of, Sodabottleopenerwala, under Mohit Balachandran's able leadership, has made us fall in love with Irani Cafe cuisine.

Discovery of the Year: Anahita Dhondy, Sodabottleopenerwala

She can land any international modelling contract with her porcelain looks, but this Taj product believes in sweating it out in the kitchen and producing Delhi-NCR's most addictive Parsi food. Bring on the Marghi Na Farcha.

INVENTIVE SPIRIT: Amaranta rewrote the
rules of serving rasam  at a Stag's Leap
Winery dinner for the Delhi Gourmet Club.

Gurgaon's Pride: Bernardo, Super Mart I, DLF Phase IV

Crescentia Scolt and Chris Fernandes have had to wage a long struggle to keep Bernardo afloat, moving from one location to another because of the real estate market's vagaries, but their to-die-for authentic Goan spread, which is better than what you get in Goa, has ensured their diehard loyalists keep following them wherever they go.

Corporate Chef of the Year: Ravi Saxena, Dhaba by Claridges, Cyber Hub, DLF Cyber City

I've seen him from the time he turned around The Imperial's Tuscan restaurant, San Gimignano, and it's heartening to see his transformation from an European fine-dining specialist to the creator of a growing chain of restaurants that exudes youthful energy even as it serves the classics that have been responsible for Dhaba's runaway success at The Claridges.

F&B Executive of the Year: Varun Duggal, Massive Restaurants

Zorawar Kalra's right-hand man, he combines sharp business instincts, a deep understanding of the restaurant trade and a warm personality that gets him friends and new clients with ease.

Best Modern Indian Restaurant of the Year: Amaranta, The Oberoi, Udyog Vihar, Phase V

Here's a restaurant that has achieved the impossible by consistently delivering the best fresh fish and seafood preparations from the coastal states with a contemporary twist, despite being in the heart of India's dusty plains. A tribute to the epicurean perfection that Executive Chef Ravitej Nath seeks to achieve in this laboratory of creativity, Amaranta can never let you down.

Sodabottleopenerwala combines a quirky design
with impeccable authenticity in its efforts to
popularise Irani Cafe cuisine and give it a
permanent new home in Delhi-NCR

Best North Indian Restaurant of the Year: Made In Punjab, Cyber Hub, DLF Cyber City

It's often unfairly judged because of its buffet, but you must order from its a la carte menu to understand why Palak Patta Chaat, Salmon Tikka, Beetroot Tikki and Railway Mutton Curry haven't tasted better anywhere else.

Best South Indian Restaurant of the Year: Zambar, Cyber Hub, DLF Cyber City

Arun Kumar TR's return with an all-new Zambar has been the best thing to have happened to Cyber Hub in recent months. The decor turns all notions of a South Indian restaurant on thjeir head and the menu is refreshingly different -- dig their Cauliflower Bezule, Andhra Chicken Vepedu, Squid Rings with Seafood Filling and Pork Sukka to understand why.

Best Small Restaurant of the Year: Pintxo, DLF Galleria Market, DLF Phase 4

Besides introducing a new word into our vocabulary, which means 'small snacks' in Basque country, Pintxo has proved that a restaurant can be a hole-in-the-wall and yet have an army of admirers, because what really matters is the food you're served. Can I have the bacon-wrapped prawns?

Best Multi-Cuisine Restaurant of the Year: Spectra, Leela Ambience Gurgaon

International variety and goodness, when combined, can be the recipe for a real winner, which is what this all-day restaurant with the best view in Gurgaon has to offer.

Best Sunday Brunch of the Year: Sen5es, Pullman Gurgaon Central Park

Its crab omelette isn't the only reason I am in love with Sen5es. The restaurant's Sunday Brunch, judging by the turnout for it, is clearly Gurgaon's favourite because it goes beyond the obvious offerings and makes an effort to do things, to borrow an expression from Pizza Hut, 'zaraa Hut ke'.

Best Italian Restaurant of the Year: 56 Ristorante Italiano, Vatika Atrium, DLF Golf Course Road

Located uniquely between two business towers, this restaurant combines a good menu and wine list overseen by an Italian chef with friendly and efficient service and a business-like atmosphere just right for corporate lunches. It's the best dining option on Golf Course Road.

Best Chinese Restaurant of the Year: Nooba, DLF Cyber City, Tower C

Restaurateurs in Vasant Kunj may be complaining about how their businesses have been hit because of the Cyber Hub, but this place bang next to India's first food mall continues to be the favoured 'canteen' of Chinese executives working at DLF Cyber City. What does it tell you about the food of this silent star among Rahul 'Indigo' Bhatia's trio of restaurants?

Best Japanese Restaurant of the Year: Raifu Tei, Dia Park Premier, Sector 29

Ask any Japanese expat where he hangs out with friends and he would say 'Raifu Tei' without blinking his eyes (yes, if you go to a Japanese hangout, as opposed to a horribly expensive restaurant favoured by desi moneybags, you'd think all Japanese men are single!). If you wish to have Japanese food the way the Japanese do, this is the where you can savour the experience without burning your wallet.

Best Dim Sum of the Year: dimsumbros, Ambience Mall

A leap of faith by the Yo! China trio, dimsumbros dazzles you with its array and quality of 'little hearts'. Ask for their Almond Prawn with Wasabi Mayo, Laksa Crab Dumpling and BBQ Pork Pastry to find out what has got me eating out of their hand!

Best Korean Restaurant of the Year: Gung The Palace, City Centre, Near Crowne Plaza, Sec. 29

Here's a restaurant whose only competition is itself, but it is on this list because of the consistency of its offering and the authenticity of its preparations, which is why it is the social magnet of Delhi-NCR's Korean community. Its Beef Bulgogi will have you, like Oliver Twist, asking for more.

Best Pizzas of the Year: Fat Lulu's, Arjun Marg, DLF Shopping Centre, DLF Phase I

This is where your search for Delhi-NCR's best pizzas should end. The base, sauce, cheese and toppings of each of the 22 pizza varieties are textbook perfect. You can choose from an array of choices in each of the four categories, making every order a new experience.

Best Comfort Food of the Year: Eat@Joe's, Cross Point Mall, DLF Phase IV

Joe Baath romanced the spotlight on MasterChef India, but he's not the kind of guy who basks in past glory. He's an engaging fellow and his Chicken Wings, Jalapeno Cheese Shots and BBQ Chicken Hotdog keep bringing back his growing horde of loyalists. And his tie-up with Pradeep Gidwani's The Pint Room keeps us well supplied with brews of the best kind.

Best Cocktails of the Year: Cocktails & Dreams Speakeasy, Behind Galaxy Hotel, Sector 15

This is the creative laboratory of Yangdup Lama and if it doesn't serve Gurgaon's best cocktails, then Millennium City has no hope. Fortunately, the maestro of mixology has been able to live up to his reputation and keeps giving the world an unforgettable high.

Best Patisserie of the Year: The Oberoi Patisseri and Delicatessen, Udyog Vihar

From croissants, cakes and chocolates to sausages and sandwiches, to freshly baked breads and olive oil, you get them all here, the standards notches higher than the competition and the prices, surprisingly, about the same as, and in some cases lower than, L'Opera.

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.

Around the World with 250 Cakes + Virgin Coconut Oil at The Kirana Shop

This column appeared in the October 10 edition of Mail Today (Delhi/NCR).
Copyright: Mail Today
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/best-cakes-restaurants-food-cheesecakes/1/313943.html

FORTUNE COOKIE / By Sourish Bhattacharyya

AROUND THE WORLD WITH 250 CAKES

I MET Roger Pizey accidentally last week, much after the publishing house that had set up our interview, gave up trying to locate him. I ran into a chef in whites moving around with the air of an absent-minded professor in the Professor Calculus mould and I knew it had to be the man because I had seen his face on the back flap of his monumental book, World’s Best Cakes (Jacqui Small/Penguin Books India). When I said to him that we had been trying to locate him all over the hotel, he said, looking nonplussed, “But I was in the baking room!”

Where else would you expect Marco Pierre White’s favourite pastry chef to be? It is said that the legendary restaurateur had tasted Pizey’s tarte tatin at the iconic London restaurant, Le Gavroche, and at once made the chef a job offer he couldn’t refuse. And the two have stuck together for over 25 years; Marco has even written a laudatory foreword to one of the most delectable cookbooks that I have read in my lifetime.

Roger Pizey, legendary restaurateur
Marco Pierre White's pastry chef,
has written the most delicious
cookbook titled World's Best Cakes

World’s Best Cakes is a gastronomical world tour, spilling over with recipes (250 of them, from Apple Strudel to our own Malpua and Sugee, read sooji, Cake, to Tarta de Santiago) and guides to the best bakers and patissiers in the leading cities of the world. This is a cookbook that tells you not only how to make cupcakes, but also guides you to the home of the original temptress, Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street, New York City. It takes you to the “only place in Rome to buy tiramisu, according to the Romans” (Pompi on Via Albalonga 7); it points to the birthplace of the double-side macaron (“pure pleasure”), the Parisian tea room Laduree on Rue Royale, whose history goes back to 1862; it leads you to Vienna’s Café Central on the corner of Herrengasse/Strauchgasse, the historic meeting place of intellectuals and revolutionaries, which saw Josip Broz Tito, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky walk in and out of its portals in just one month — January 1913.

History and confectionery seem to walk with hands clasped together. The cheesecake, which I associate with the humongous portions of the Cheesecake Factory, a very American institution, is actually a creation of the ancient Greeks. It was served to Olympic athletes as a source of energy. The Pineapple Upside Down Cake wouldn’t have been possible had American bakers not discover the convenience of tinned pineapples, which started coming in from Hawaii in the early 20th century. The Scandinavian Cardamom Coffee Cake may seem like a mistake, but it owes its existence to the spice, which the Vikings took with them back home around the ninth century A.D. — the connection was established with the discovery of a Buddha statuette from the Swat Valley in a Viking grave excavated in 1954 in the island of Helgo in Sweden. Cardamom, not cinnamon, in fact, is the favoured spice for baking in Sweden and Norway.

Cakes also have been immortalised in literature and pop culture. Madeleines, the French sponge cakes shaped like scallop shells, owe their worldwide fame to Marcel Proust’s ecstatic description of them in his encyclopaedic seven-volume novel, A la Recherche du Temps (In Search of Lost Time). And of course, “cream coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels…” were some of Maria’s favourites in The Sound of Music. Apple strudels, which are layered filo pastries that can also have walnuts, pumpkin, cabbage and quark as fillings, have been traditionally eaten in Austria, the setting of the classic starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. World’s Best Cakes makes you a better baker and a better-informed person too.

At Ragini Mehra's organic produce
store, The Kirana Shop, you'll find
virgin coconut oil produced at the
Philippines spa resort, The Farm 

NOUVELLE CUISINE FOR NAVRATRA VEGANS

THE FARM at San Benito, an hour and a half by car from Manila in the Philippines, has become one of the world’s best-known spa getaways and is owned by resort developer Naresh Khattar. I’d first heard about it from the hotelier Rai Bahadur M.S. Oberoi’s grand-daughter, Ragini Mehra, whom I met in her latest avatar as promoter of organic food products at The Kirana Shop. At this quaint little place in one corner of Meharchand Market, on the other end from Ayesha Grewal’s The Altitude Store, the shop that brought organic food to Delhi, Mehra stocks The Farm’s ‘absolutely no heat’ virgin coconut oil, which dieticians recommend you have raw every morning to protect yourself against a host of diseases (believe me, it doesn’t taste bad!).

Mehra, better-known among the city’s ladies who lunch as the co-owner of the Silhouette salon at The Oberoi, also keeps a lavishly illustrated cookbook titled Raw! That too is from The Farm, which Mehra visited some time back and fell in love with its 175 acres of coconut plantations and “divine raw food”. Raw! has vegan recipes from Alive, the resort’s acclaimed restaurant, whose chefs showcased their style of cooking at a dinner at The Oberoi this past Sunday.

The cookbook, for instance, uses an assortment of mushrooms to give an interesting twist to the ceviche, a South American seafood salad that owes its worldwide popularity to super chef Nobu Matsuhisa. Its recipe for Som Tam, Thailand’s famous raw papaya salad, substitutes the flavour-enhancing fish sauce with a light soy sauce. And it reinvents the Chicken Marengo (chicken sautéed in oil with garlic and tomato and garnished with fried eggs and crayfish), the classical dish said to have been invented for Napoleon after his victory in the Battle of Marengo in June 1800. Alive’s version of it is the very nouvelle Crispy Potato Napoleon with eggplant, caramelised onions and pumpkin-ginger sauce. You’ll have to visit The Farm to figure out whether the food tastes as good as Luca Tettoni’s photographs look, but it’s one cookbook you may want to dig in this season of festive veganism.

ITALIAN NOTES IN BUTTER CHICKEN

I HAVE SEEN tomatillos, a staple of Mexican cuisine, grow in the farm of the promoter of Hyatt Regency New Delhi and Four Seasons Mumbai, Shiv Jatia. I have heard Bill Marchetti, the Aussie chef who’s developing the Spaghetti Kitchen restaurants for Blue Foods, talking ecstatically about cultivating the massive beefsteak tomatoes in Punjab. But it took a conversation last week to make me sit up and smell the ketchup.

I was talking to Zorawar Kalra, whose Masala Library by Jiggs Kalra at the Bandra Kurla Centre, Mumbai, has opened to rave reviews, and he said he was using San Marzano tomatoes for his butter chicken. These tomatoes, originally from Naples, are thinner and more pointed; they have a thicker flesh and fewer seeds, and their taste is stronger, sweeter and less acidic than what you buy in the bazaar. A favourite of pulp makers, San Marzano tomatoes may just lift the taste of butter chicken. This all-time favourite dish, about whose ideal recipe there seems to be no unanimity in this world, can be made or marred by the tartness of the tomatoes that go into it. With their acid-sugar balance and ability to smoke well because of their thick flesh, San Marzano tomatoes seem to have been created by nature for butter chicken. San Marzano, I bet, will be the new go-to ingredient.

GOURMET DELHI

DELHI’S credentials as the foodie capital got a boost this past weekend with the opening of The Gourmet Jar, India’s first store dedicated to jams, marmalades and preserves, at Shahpur Jat, the urban village in the shadow of the Siri ruins that’s been seeing a quiet revival. A creation of the Veggie Wiz blogger and ‘confiturer’, Apeksha Jain, the specialty store doesn’t have your standard-issue jams and marmalades. Instead, its spread includes such exotica 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; and mulled wine jam for the Christmas season. Jain also has a sugar-free jam with dates and prunes. These are made with fresh organically grown fruit and not sweet fruit pulp, and the good news is that Jain doesn’t use corn syrup, the bane of all things sweet and industrial.

Masala Library by Jiggs Kalra to Open in Mumbai on Oct. 5 with Progressive Indian Twist

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

THE much-anticipated opening of the Masala Library by Jiggs Kalra, the ‘Progressive Indian’ restaurant being launched by Zorawar Kalra, son of the Indian fine-dining maestro, is set for October 5 at its chic address — First International Financial Centre, the green building where Citibank has relocated its India headquarters, at the Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai.

Zorawar Kalra has been in the news since he sold his stake in Wrapster Foods, the joint venture company that ran the highly successful Punjab Grill restaurants, to his old business partners, Dabur scion Amit Burman and Rohit Aggarwal of Lite Bite Foods. After exiting Wrapster, Kalra formed a new joint venture, Massive Restaurants, with Gaurav Goenka of Mirah Hospitality to roll out the upper-end Masala Library, the middle-market Made in Punjab, which it making its debut at The Hub at the DLF Cyber Park in Gurgaon, and a chain of chic mithai shops.

Speaking from his about-to-open restaurant in Mumbai, Kalra said Masala Library will showcase ‘Progressive Indian’ cuisine, which combines authentic flavours with nouvelle presentation styles. It will also have a lot of molecular gastronomy happening — “not as a gimmick,” Kalra assured us, “but as a genuine flavour enhancer”. He added: “Each dish on the menu has a story. A lot of thought has gone into each one of the items. We started with 100, but have retained just 70 of them.”

He then gave a foretaste of the explosion of creative gastronomy that awaits us at the Masala Library by describing the dish named ‘Steamed John Dory, Flavours of India’. The fish in this preparation will be served on a platter designed like an artist’s palette with eight differently flavoured relishes representing the kitchens of the different parts of the country. So you can have one central ingredient in eight different ways in one serving! Or, as Kalra puts it, “You can taste the whole of India in one dish.”

The menu has Lal Maas, Mutton Vindaloo and Meen Moily to cater to those who like to walk on the much-treaded road, but the sauciest San Marzano tomatoes from Italy go into its butter chicken (“these are not tart and can be smoked very well,” Kalra explained), or the essence of peas are turned into pea pods using the reverse spherification process, or the hearty rarha meat is given a vegetarian twist by substituting mutton with soy, or for those weary of the boring hara-bhara kebab, Kalra’s chefs have created the pesto kebab served with parmesan papad.

Care to sample innovations? Then, your must-have list must include the foie gras crème brulee, prawn balchao kulcha, trio of Bhindi Jaipuri, Papad ki Subzi and Hand-Pounded Choorma (“savour a multitude of flavours from just one dish,” Kalra explained), and ghewar cheesecake with almond chikki. Kalra and his team also have their share of fun with the menu. One of the dessert items, for instance, is Childhood Memories, which takes us to the time when as children we used love eating mud, chalk and other unmentionables. To recreate the experience, this dessert platter has flower pots with brownies mimicking the mud, water cans brimming over with chocolate sauce, edible chalk, and ice-cream biscuits shaped like another childhood favourite, Parle-G.

Will the pricing be over the top? Kalra assures us it won’t be. The nine-course tasting menu is being priced at Rs 1,900++ (vegetarian) and Rs 2,100++ (non-vegetarian) per person. And if you order a la carte, you can have a soul-satisfying meal for Rs 1,500++ per person. Not a bad deal for a restaurant in the financial hothouse of the country that promises to take Indian fine dining, so far dominated by establishments such as Indian Accent, Varq and Masala Art, to another level of excitement, evolution and excellence.

QUICK BITES: Zorawar Kalra Plans 45-Item Buffet for Made in Punjab

Zorawar Kalra’s Cool Quotient. Culinary legend Jiggs Kalra’s son Zorawar is determined to win his generation — the 20- and 30-somethings — over to Indian cuisine by lifting its cool quotient. This is the generation that sees Indian cuisine as being heavy and uncool, so Zorawar’s Made in Punjab chain of restaurant will be hip (you can ask for an organic lassi and get one) and VFM (his target average per cover is Rs 575), and it will have the most generous Indian buffet ever laid out by any restaurant. The Made in Punjab buffet will have 45 items, all served in cast-iron pots designed by the French company Le Creuset. By keeping curries and biryanis in these pots, Zorawar will ensure neither gets overcooked, which is a common complaint with chafing dishes.

Zorawar Kalra: Making Indian food hip for the young

False Alarm on Indian Accent: I am sorry I got the Indian Accent story wrong in my hurry to be 'first with the news'! A spokesperson for Old World Hospitality has clarified that Indian Accent is moving nowhere and that Alive, the restaurant of the Philippines-based spa resort, The Farm, is not opening at The Manor. The Farm, as we had reported earlier, will however manage the members-only spa opening soon at The Manor. My views on the popularity of Indian Accent and the celebrity status of the self-effacing Master Chef Manish Mehrotra remain unchanged.

Olive Beach R.I.P.? Are the bells tolling for Olive Beach at Hotel Diplomat in New Delhi’s exclusive neighbourhood, Sardar Patel Marg? The buzz in town is that the AD Singh restaurant, which seems to have lost its edge and is showing signs of premature aging, is on its way to being shut down. AD, anyway, has his hands full with Guppy by Ai and the upcoming first Olive Café and Delhi-NCR’s first Irani restaurant at The Hub in the DLF Cyber Park. Of course, this is unconfirmed news, so this may not be the last of what you hear about 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.