DINING OUT: Go Dhan-Dhan-Dhansak with the Dikras at Soda Bottle Openerwala

WHERE: Ground Floor (it's closes to the main entrance), DLF Cyber Hub, Next to Building No. 8, Cyber City, Phase-II, Gurgaon

WHEN: 11:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.

DIAL: (0124) 6518801; (+91) 8527636633

AVE MEAL FOR TWO: Rs 1,200+++. The restaurant doesn't have an alcohol licence yet.

STAR RATING: ****/5

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

IT'S HARD to come up with one big idea in a lifetime, but AD Singh is like an ideas factory. The hugely successful restaurateur with an evolved sense of style has spawned three uniquely different restaurant concepts this year (and there's one more in the pipeline).

Soda Bottle Openerwala combines authentic good

food with the eccentricity of the decor of an Irani

cafe, a priceless yet dying institution of Mumbai

The year started with Le Bistro du Parc at Defence Colony, below the Moolchand Flyover, which introduced the city to the idea of bistronomy (a limited menu changing daily, depending on the best produce available in the market). Guppy by Ai followed at the Lodi Colony Market, where family-style Japanese dining has found an address and a loyal clientele who've ensured that it is impossible to find a seat at lunch or dinner if you go without reservation. And now comes Soda Bottle Openerwala, at the busy-as-a-beehive-on-steroids DLF Cyber Hub in Gurgaon, which I rate as the most daring and therefore doubly successful new restaurant to open in Delhi-NCR in many years.

Soda Bottle Openerwala is an Irani cafe, an institution that is gasping for breath in Mumbai, barring the two notable doughty exceptions -- Kyani Bakery and Britannia. The expression 'Irani cafe' at once brings back memories of bun-maska, dhansak, berry pulao, Duke's raspberry drink, nan-khatai and paani kam chai, and of course, Nissim Ezekiel's hilarious poem inspired by the notice at his favourite haunt, the late Bastani and Company at Dhobi Talao, Mumbai:

No talking to cashier / No smoking / No fighting / No credit / No outside food / No sitting long / No talking loud / No spitting / No bargaining / No water to outsiders / No change / No telephone / No match sticks / No discussing gambling / No newspaper / No combing / No beef / No leg on chair / No hard liquor allowed / No address inquiry — By Order." (I owe this gem to Jayshree Bajoria's story carried by the BBC News website, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4485523.stm.)

To bring this institution back to life in a city that has been hardly exposed to it, AD Singh worked hard with his trusted lieutenants Mohit Balachandran (whom many of you may know as Chowder Singh of blogosphere) and Chef Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai (who has since left to launch his own consultancy), and a brilliant new hand, Anahita Dhondy, who worked at the Taj and JW Marriott after graduating from the prestigious Institute of Hotel Management in Aurangabad, and then went to Le Cordon Bleu in London to complete her culinary studies.

Dhondy, who's as pretty as she's accomplished at a very young age (she reminded me of the equally talented Naina De Bois-Juzan of Le Bistro du Parc), says she owes her knowledge of Parsi/Irani food entirely to her mother, Niloufer, who's a much sought-after caterer, and her grandmother's dhansak and sambhaar masalas -- the latter being a combination of 15 ingredients, including Kashmiri red chillies, garlic and heeng. She finishes, for instance, her hard-to-stop-drooling-over Salina Marghi (a light but tangy chicken curry with fried potato shavings on top) with gur and traditional Parsi vinegar, which is now produced by just one man in Navsari, Gujarat. That's a family secret, she says.

Soda Bottle Openerwala marries authentic good food, funky interiors that bring alive the eccentricities of Irani cafe decor, and lively music from the 1980s. But the killer app, without doubt, is the food -- ask for the mutton berry pulao (sprinkled with cranberries in the absence of zereshk, or barberries, that the Iranians love), salina marghi, bheeda par eeda (fried eggs, sunny side up, baked with okra), and wash the soul-satisfying meal down with old-fashioned cold coffee made with Nescafe or the Irani chai (where the Brooke Bond Red Label decoction is added to reduced milk), and yes, don't forget the Toblerone mousse (it's a most desirable sin to have been created by a woman!).

It's not for nothing that there's a stream of people walking into the restaurant at all times, and some are groaning about the long waiting period during lunch. AD & Co have given the Irani cafe a new lease of life at a place where you'd least expect it to be successful. It is a tribute both to Delhi/NCR's evolved palate and to AD's entrepreneurial instinct.

Just 22 of the 42 restaurants scheduled to open at DLF Cyber Hub are up and running, yet it already gets more than 10,000 footfalls a day. With restaurants such as Soda Bottle Openerwala, and Made In Punjab (Zorawar Kalra's ever-popular venture) or The Wine Company started by the Yo China-Dimsumbros trio (you'll read about it soon), I can see the number heading in just one direction -- north.

FORTUNE COOKIE: Scotch Whisky Industry Fights Not Quite An Angelic Thirst

This is my fortnightly Fortune Cookie column, which appeared in the December 5, 2013, edition of Mail Today. I have modified it slightly for the blog. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers. Click on the link below and go to Page 21.

http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=5122013

THE Angels' Share is an expression whisky insiders have laughed and agonised about forever, but few outside this charmed circle knew about it till left-wing UK filmmaker Ken Loach's gritty comedy by the same name got the coveted Jury Award at Cannes 2012.

WHERE NO ANGEL FEARS TO TREAD:
Glenfiddich's vast barrel houses hold 125 million
litres of spirit at any given time, making them
contribute vast quantities to the angels' share

What is the angels' share if it is not just the title of an acclaimed film? In whisky brogue, it is the name given to the natural evaporation of the distilled spirit maturing in casks at 2 per cent a year. The subject made for a lively discussion over lunch with Ian Millar, Glenfiddich's Brand Ambassador and Distiller, whose idea of the good life is having a dram of his single malt with the kebabs and kormas of Dum Pukht. When seen in percentage terms, the angels' share may not look like much, but when you account for just Glenfiddich, a single malt that connoisseurs across the country know very well, having 125 million litres of whisky at various stages of maturation at any given time in its Leviathan barrel houses, the math will sink in.

Two per cent of 125 million litres is 2.5 million litres. Now, if you consider that each drop of Glenfiddich we drink spends a minimum of 12 years in barrels (though the 18-year-old is the one that sells more), we are talking about a loss of 30 million litres. In this day and age, when the supply of single malts has fallen far behind the spiralling demand, this is seriously bad news.

Millar reminded me that the duty on each 'litre of pure alcohol' back home in Scotland is 20 pounds, so the angels' share does hurt badly. And he belongs to the school of thought rooted in the belief that of the two ways of making profits -- "sell your product for more or make it for less" -- the second makes everyone happy. One of the many ways he can make Glenfiddich for less is by cutting down the angels' share.

The stage, it seems, is set for a historic clash between humans and the thirsty angels hovering over Scotland's distilleries. Interestingly, in the course of my research I learnt that in hotter parts, such as India, this loss could go up to 12 per cent a year -- angels, like politicians and babus, are greedier on our side of the world!

It is precisely to cut these losses that the makers of Amrut, India's first single malt whisky, have limited the maturation period to a maximum of four years -- those are enough to cause a loss of about 50 per cent of the whisky in its barrels. The classic story from the Amrut stable is that of the single malt named Greedy Angels, which was released in April 2013. At the end of the eight years that the whisky spent in two Bourbon casks, the evaporative loss was so high that Amrut was left with less than a quarter of the 360 litres of spirit maturing in the barrels.

Seeing my mental calculator working overtime, Millar said that in the first two years, the spirit is volatile and eats into the wood of the barrels -- the process gives the final product its colour and tannins. What is lost in this period is crude spirit and Millar is "happy to lose what we lose". After four or five years, the annual loss becomes less than 2 per cent. The Scotch whisky industry is working hard to contain it. Diageo, the makers of Johnnie Walker, started packing casks in cling film, but it didn't help. The only solution, says Millar, is to get coopers to play their part in reducing the losses by tightening the casks and plugging physical holes. People like Millar have to keep wracking their heads to make the world a headier place both for their employers and for the growing tribe of single malt lovers.

AN OLD CHAMPAGNE HOUSE FINDS NEW MARKET

IN A champagne market dominated by the big boys (notably, Moet & Hennessy with Moet & Chandon and Veuve Clicquot and Pernod Ricard with the F1 favourite, G.H. Mumm), it is heartening to find an old-worldly French gentleman named Jean-Jacques Cattier speak excitedly about the Indian foray of his family's champagne house. The Cattier family has been producing grapes in its premier cru vineyards for champagne houses since 1763, but it was Jean-Jacques's great-grandfather who started making his own bubbly in 1918.

Since then, the champagne has been quietly going places, from being the house pour of the Ritz London to finding a place on the first-class menu of British Airways. To earn worldwide fame, though, it had to wait for Jay-Z, who had just dumped Cristal after the presticgious champagne's French CEO made racist comments on hip-hop artistes, to be seen with Cattier's Armand de Brignac (Ace of Spades), packaged in a distinctive gold bottle with pewter, in his video for the 2006 song, 'Show Me What You Got'.

From then on, Cattier has been the favourite of NBA hoopsters and was most recently the official bubbly of the UEFA Cup 2012, but the gentle and soft-spoken Jean-Jacques Cattier avoids showbiz talk and speaks instead of Clos du Valin, a 2.2-hectare parcel of land that produces a single-vineyard champagne, a rare occurrence in the world of bubbles, or about the Vintage 2005 champagne, now available in Delhi and Bangalore hotels, which has a third each of the classical champagne grapes -- Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier -- and is described as "generous and full-bodied".

I asked Jean-Jacques about the trend that defines champagne consumption in our time. He said it was pairing champagne and cheese. A French author has just written an entire tome on this exciting new subject. The thought struck a responsive chord because I have maintained against odds that wine and cheese are not the classic match (in fact, red wine and blue cheeses are mortal enemies!). Being more acidic, champagne definitely open our taste buds to the glories of cheese. The next time you plan a wine and cheese evening, have champagne instead.

SUCH A FINE BALANCE BY DOM 2004

AS CHEF de cave (cellar master) of Dom Perignon, the much-revered champagne named after the monk who's believed to have invented bubbly by accident, medical doctor-turned-oenologist Richard Geoffroy must have a good reason to give a vintage tag to a particular year. Especially if the rare honour is being awarded for the third year in a row. A vintage year for a champagne signifies a special year with perfect growing conditions -- in the case of Dom Perignon, it has happened just 40 times since 1921. It's different for a still wine, whose vintage merely indicates the year of harvest of the grapes that have gone into making it.

Launched late last month in the city with a series of exceptional champagne-paired dinners crafted by the chef with the stick-up hairdo, Mickey Boite, at Le Cirque, Vintage 2004 stands out for the way it peels off the champagne's austere personality, delicately balancing  fruit and acid to leave a sweetish aftertaste. It's a bubbly you'd expect from a moderate vintage marked by a gentle August, with no unseasonal rain or hail to spoil the party, and a couple of weeks of dry heat leading up to the September harvest. Geoffroy knows a vintage when he sees one -- after all, he has been the cellar master since 1990.

HOW RED SHOULD BE YOUR TUNA SASHIMI?

A CHERRY RED tuna sashimi may be pleasing to the eye, but it is most likely to have been treated with carbon monoxide to achieve the colour people associate with superior tuna. When Sri Lankan-Japanese chef-restaurateur Dharshan Munidasa, whose Nihonbashi restaurant is the first from his country to make it to Asia's Top 50, pointed this out to a lively gathering of restaurateurs and journalists at Indian Accent not long ago, he wasn't trying to repeat a well-known fact. He was pointing instead to the challenges that chefs like him face daily. People expect their tuna sashimi to look cherry red, so they question the freshness of the fish served by Munidasa -- after all, it looks just as it is supposed to, bright but not garish red. Cherry red sashimi is an absolute no-no also because the colour, wrongly associated with freshness, is used to mask stale fish.

MAURITIUS DIARY: Rhythms of Creole Music & Heavenly Rum in Indian Ocean Paradise

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

IN AN atmosphere surcharged with the electricity of youthful energy and the magic of music, on a breezy Mauritian night brimming over with possibilities, I had my first swig of a rum that had all the distinctive characteristics of the island nation -- smooth, gently heady, bursting with the seductive flavours of spice.

It was the all-night concert, the high point of the Festival International Kreol 2013, on the grounds of a convention centre named after Swami Vivekananda at Domaine les Pailles, a 3,000-acre gastronomic hub ten minutes away from the country's capital, Port Louis, on the foothills of the Moka Range. My fluorescent yellow wrist band gave me access to the grand stage where the singing stars of the Creole-speaking nations performed to a cheering, waving, singing crowd of about 10,000 young people.

It was like being at the Woodstock of the Indian Ocean. It was Saturday (November 30) night and I was savouring the experience of the backstage, my body swaying instinctively to the rhythm of the music. The gentleman next to me was the Mauritian Minister for Tourism and Leisure, Michael Sik Yuen, dressed casually in jeans and an airy shirt (imagine Chiranjeevi hanging out anonymously in the shadows of a major international event!). I did not have to know Creole, the lingua franca of the Indian Ocean nations, to soak up the spirit of the evening. It helped, of course, to be right behind the bongo player, whose knee-length dreadlocks and rugged aquiline features made him look like a character out of Pirates of the Caribbean. He was a powerhouse of assured energy.

(Top) My fellow traveller and acclaimed blogger, Nisha 
Jha (www.lemonicks.com), shot this picture of yours
truly at the rum display at the St Aubin reception hall.
(Above) The bar at Saint Aubin's restaurant is 
well-stocked with the many variants of its 1819
rum. My personal favourite was the smooth 
vanilla-flavoured rum.

In the middle of this celebration of the binding power of music, Devendra Babooa, Research and Development Manager of the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority (MTPA), guided me to a tent that served as makeshift bar. The smiling, mild-mannered man presiding over the operation was the MTPA's financial honcho. He said he had been drafted for the job because everyone else was busy chaperoning the 150-odd journalists who had come for the event. I tried to remember a more chilled-out bean counter back home, only to give up and surrender myself to the pleasures of Mauritian rum (or rhum, as the people of this Francophone nation like to call it).

Mr Bottomline served me a generous pour of Bougainville Vieux Domaine, a rum produced by the Oxenham family at a facility on the Saint Jean-Phoenix motorway, and named after the intrepid French admiral and circumnavigator of the globe, Louise Antoine de Bougainville, who established the settlement of Port Louis in 1764. Poured out of an elongated 500ml bottle, the rum was as smooth as silk, full of the sweetness of sugarcane that the island is famous for.

My next was the Spiced Rum 1819 from Saint Aubin, a rum distillery in southern Mauritius. 1819 signifies the year of the founding of the sun-dappled sugarcane plantation, which produces the fangourin, the precious first-crush juice that goes into the making of the rum. Saint Aubin is home to the tropical island nation's first 'agricultural rum', produced entirely with sugarcane juice, and not molasses. Sexed up with oranges and cinnamon, the rum has been made to be drunk by itself, without the intervention of Coke or any other such needless props. I drank quite a lot of it, and before I knew it, the bottle was empty. My enthusiasm for 1819 must have been shared by many others, for the stock at Mr Bottomline's command soon ended in a heap of empty bottles. So did the Bougainville.

Saint Aubin was on my itinerary for Sunday (December 1) prepared by the MTPA, my hosts. As travel blogger Nisha Jha, the other journalist invited from India by the MTPA, and I neared the carefully manicured gardens of the distillery, I couldn't help noticing the chimney that appears on Saint Aubin's labels. It's the chimney of the old sugar mill that has made way for a museum that recreates the sugar milling process.

Our Saint Aubin experience started at the Vanilla House, where I learnt that vanilla is an orchid that grows best in the company of anthurium, which offers protection from the harsh sun and heavy rain. Of the 100 species of vanilla, only three are cultivated and Mauritius is one of the few countries where it is possible. It's this vanilla that had gone into the Spiced Rum 1819, which had won my heart.

Our next and final stop was the restaurant of the rhumerie, set in a colonial building with a long pillared verandah where the owners of the sugar mill and distillery once lived. The building, last renovated in the 1990s, was first built closer to the mill in 1819. The construction material used was wood from dismantled ships that had suffered endless explorations.

In the 1970s, the showpiece house moved to its present location overlooking a garden straight out of Beautiful Homes. It is here we had our meal of palm heart salad and smoked marlin (a Mauritian delicacy), followed by an underwhelming vanilla chicken served with rice, dhol (light masoor dal with celery and scallions), apalam (papad) and a delectable bilimbi, or tree sorrel, achard (pickle) spiked with whole mustard.

For dessert, we had the most memorable vanilla pod ice-cream with fruit salad -- fresh vanilla pods can transform ice-cream in a way that you can only appreciate when you have one at the Saint Aubin restaurant! The shots of intensely flavourful vanilla rum (it tasted as heavenly as XO cognac) and the slightly rough coffee rum (it had the seductiveness of a Kahlua but not its sugar attack) more than made up for the chicken, and the ice-cream, of course, walked away with the top prize.

We could have just hung around, but the rum gave our heads a sense of lightness that could only cured by a welcoming pillow. It was a Sunday, so the traffic was light, and it didn't take us long to settle down for an afternoon siesta. When you're in Mauritius, take it easy, my friend!

DINING OUT: Aerocity's First Hotel Woos Delhi with a Winner Buffet Spread

This review first appeared in Mail Today on November 22, 2013. To view the original, go to http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=22112013 and open Page 23. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers

DINING OUT

K3 @ JW MARRIOTT

WHERE: Asset Area 4, Hospitality District, Delhi Aerocity (on your way to IGIA's T3)

WHEN: Lunch and Dinner

DIAL: +91 11 4521 2121

MEAL PER PERSON (MINUS ALCOHOL): Rs 1,200+++ (lunch); Rs 1,750+++ (dinner)

RATING: ****

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

DELHI is in the throes of a spate of restaurant openings -- Yuautcha at Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj; Dhaba by Claridges at DLF Place, Saket; Soda Bottle Openerwala at Cyber Hub, Gurgaon; Paranda at Vivanta by Taj, Faridabad; Shanghai Club at WelcomHotel Dwarka -- but I chose to start my journey of new discoveries with K3, the all-day restaurant at the New Delhi Aerocity's JW Marriott, the first hotel to be off the block at what has been a ghost of a destination for the past one year.

K3's Daniele Trivero, one of the three anchor

chefs stationed at the sprawling open kitchens,

 rolls out pizzas that will give La Piazza a good 

run for its wads of money

What drew me to K3 was the chatter it had caused on Facebook for serving the city's lowest-priced buffet (Rs 1,250+++ per person for lunch; Rs 1,750+++ for dinner). People know it's an introductory offer -- how else does a newbie get us to talk about it in a competitive market? -- but what has blown them away is the sheer quality and range of the food dished up by the sprawling restaurant's three show kitchens.

Each kitchen is led by a chef who brings bundles of talent and newness to the food he serves. The Chinese kitchen is headed by the reassuring Thomas Wee, a Malaysian of Chinese origin from Malacca, whom many of us know from his days at the Empress of China, in the hotel that was once known as the Parkroyal. Daniele Trivero brings the best culinary gifts of his mixed parentage (his father is Piemontese; his mother is from Puglia) to the Italian kitchen. And Pavan Chennam, who in his last job at the ITC Grand Maratha spent five years documenting the recipes of the legendary Imtiaz Qureishi, brings his energy, repertoire and a young team to the Indian kitchen. You can only expect the best from this formidable trio.

I knew I was on to a good deal when I dug into the dim sum (the one with crab meat impressed me with its freshness and flavours). I followed it up with a platter of roast duck, pork with crispy skin and honey-glazed pork -- a meatvaganza that should warm any carnivore's heart with the subtle sensations it leaves behind on the palate. It's a pleasure to have meats served to you with just a hint of cooking and brushstrokes of accompanying sauces that don't smother the main ingredient. An example of this minimalist yet flavour-intense cooking style was the lightly steamed sea bass that came to life with the accompanying garlic-ginger-chilli sauce, which was splayed on the middle of the fillet like a victory belt.

I first had the tomato focaccia bread from the Italian kitchen and I kid you not, I could have had just that for dinner. But you can't have a complete K3 experience without Daniele's unbeatable pizzas. I had one with just a pelati tomato base (without oregano to dress it up, the umami of the tomatoes made me go chomp-chomp-chomp). The toppings were speck, radicchio and scamorza, the famous cheese from Puglia, the home province of the chef's mother. I have not had many pizzas that taste better. I had another slice from the pizza with the mildly hot Neapolitan salami as topping. It's just what our chilli-foraging palate would want more of.

It's a pity that the Indian kitchen doesn't serve kebabs (the hotel could have put the five years that Chennam spent under Imtiaz Qureishi's wings to better use), but its tadkewali bhindi (cooked in cold-pressed kasundi sourced from Kolkata), Purani Dilli ki Murghi, Mutton Nehari and dum biryani made with sella (parboiled) rice, which I thought was a nifty diversion from the standard basmati.

The restaurant actually has four kitchens, because its dessert counter has a distinctive presence, and the masala chai ice-cream convinced me that you can't let a sated tummy make you miss the offerings lined up to tempt you. You'll not regret spending this Sunday with your family at K3.

FORTUNE COOKIE: Din Tai Fung's Amazing Success Story is a Lesson in Mall Dining for India

Fortune Cookie first appeared in the November 21, 2013, edition of Mail Today. I have tweaked the headlines and the order in which the individual items have appeared in the newspaper.
http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=21112013
Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers

Din Tai Fung, Taiwan's gift to dim sum lovers,
has shown that even a mall setting can't stop a
restaurant from getting coveted Michelin stars
Image: Courtesy of Taiwan543.com 

MANY eyebrows were raised when the news first broke of Yuautcha opening at Ambience Mall in Vasant Kunj? How could a pedigreed international restaurant open at a middle-market mall not particularly known for outstanding food offerings? I found the answers during a visit to the Din Tai Fung, the dim sum restaurant famous for its soupy dumplings (xiaolongbao), at its fifth-floor outlet in Taipei 101, the world's third tallest building whose steel-and-glass pagoda structure towers over the Taiwanese capital.

Like Din Tai Fung's growing legion of Indian admirers who lovingly call it DTF, I had discovered the brand in Singapore, before also finding it to my utter joy at Bangkok's Central World mall. But having the xiaolongbao, after piercing each one of them with a chopstick and seeing the soup ooze out seductively (if you eat it any other way, you'll be left with a scalded tongue), in the city of its birth is a different experience altogether.

It's a sprawling restaurant at a food court with not one vacant seat, but you'll ignore its regular appearance (and commonplace seating) the moment you immerse yourself into the delectable xiaolongbao with finely minced pork and crab roe cooking in the stock inside, and the star anise-flavoured beef noodle soup, which the Taiwanese revere as much as their oyster omelette, and the gently flavoured egg fried rice. A great food concept, you'll realise, doesn't need a plush appearance and credit card-burning prices to become an international sensation whose two outlets in Hong Kong (Tsim Sha Tsui and Causeway Bay) have won a Michelin star each.

The global network of restaurants spread across 11 countries had humble origins at the arterial Xinyi Road in Taipei, which acquired international celebrity status only after DFT was rated by The New York Times as one of the world ten best gourmet restaurants in 1993. It is also the road where Taipei 101 is now located. DFT's founder, Yang Bingyi, and his wife Lai Penmai, opened Din Tai Fung as a shop retailing cooking oil in 1958, but the rise of packaged cooking oil put them nearly out of business. They started selling xiaolongbao and steamed noodles from their shop to stay out of the red, but so popular was their food menu that by 1974 Din Tai Fung grew into a restaurant famous for its soup dumplings. Fortunately for its fans, it has only gotten better in the past four decades.

Two global celeb chefs raise a toast to our city

FOR THE first time after Wasabi, which introduced Masaharu Morimoto to the Nobu-obsessed city, Delhi will be home to restaurants of two international celebrity chefs -- Akira Back at the Aerocity's sparkling new JW Marriott and Aldo Zilli, who makes his Asian debut with Zerruco at the airy spot that was formerly occupied by Mashrabiya at The Ashok.

Back, a Korean-American who started as a professional snowboarder and acted in extreme action movies before becoming a student of Morimoto and an executive chef of Nobu Matsuhisa's Aspen restaurant, and Zilli, a celebrity TV chef and best-selling cookbook author who recently sold his successful restaurants in London and Dubai for a tidy pile, are alike in many ways. They are both intensely creative (an admiring JW Marriott insider was telling me the other night that Back can turn even a potato croquette, which he serves with seared foie gras, into a sensory experience) and they are also brilliant showmen with a celebrity fan following.

Back has had Taylor Swift, Eva Longoria and a host of other entertainment industry celebrities eating out of his hands at his Yellowtail Japanese Restaurant and Lounge at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Zilli, whose last book, Fresh and Green, was on the Daily Telegraph's Top Ten Books of 2012, made headlines not so long ago by creating an a pair of edible stilettos from fresh pasta stuffed with spinach, ricotta and truffles for the multiple award-winning Manchester restaurant, Cicchetti, which is said to be the favourite of Coleen Rooney, wife of the England and Manchester United football superstar Wayne Rooney.

A regular on the pages of Daily Mail, a food columnist for Daily Express and a television food show host who has also appeared on Celebrity X-Factor, Zilli is the corporate executive chef (they call him the consigliere!) of the company that runs Cicchetti. Zerruco, though, is his independent venture, for which he has tied up with restaurateurs Kashif Farooqi and Prashant Ojha of Urban Pind fame, industry consultant Manish Baheyti, and three private investors. It was the Michelin one-starred London chef, Atul Kochhar, who introduced Baheyti to Zilli -- Baheyti and Kochhar know each other since their days as students at the Oberoi Centre for Learning and Development.

The entry of these successful international chefs seals Delhi's reputation as a foodie city that believes in spending good money on good food, but what do these chefs see in the city? I asked Baheyti this question and he said it is precisely this reputation that is drawing chefs of the calibre of Back and Zilli. Gone are the days when Delhi could be dismissed as the Republic of Butter Chicken. Yes, we (and I say this as a flag-waving Dilliwallah) do love our butter chicken (I'll have driven for more than an hour to Invitation, Ashok Vihar, to dig the best BC of Delhi), but we also have an adventurous, world-travelled palate.

More importantly, we put our money where are taste buds are. Another celebrity powerhouse of culinary talent, Mumbai's Rahul Akerkar, who's ready to open Indigo shortly on what was formerly a nallah on Africa Avenue, said as much when he described Delhi to me as a city of well-heeled, high-spending food lovers. For the new international imports, Delhi offers hope in a world where fine dining is yet to recover from the wallet-tightening aftermath of the economic downturn of 2008. Expect more to follow the road taken by Akira Back and Aldo Zilli.

Akira Back Lines Up His Best for Delhi Gourmet Club

AKIRA BACK'S restaurant at the JW Marriott opens with a Delhi Gourmet Club dinner on Saturday and the menu that the Korean-American celebrity chef has prepared for the evening will give you a foretaste of his inventive style. Back spikes his famous tuna pizza with ponzu mayo (ponzu is the citrus-flavoured soy sauce that the Japanese use extensively), kaenip (perilla leaves, which the Japanese call shiso and the Koreans use to make a kimchi) and black truffles. His other hallmark preparation, seared foie gras, comes with a corn croquette, tosaka (a seaweed that is either served cold or eaten with sashimi) and spiced litchi honey. And the supporting cast of his duck breast include a puree of kabocha (a white squash that the Japanese and Koreans believe to be an aphrodisiac), compressed Korean pear and the sweet soy-base Kabayaki sauce that an unagi or eel is dipped into. Ingredients Delhiites haven't experienced before.

Delhi-NCR's First Irani Restaurant is Chef Saby's Last Hurrah for AD Singh

I'VE BEEN constantly monitoring the progress of Gurgaon's Cyber Hub, which is evolving as the new must-go-to destination, but the new restaurant that's got the city chattering is Soda Bottle Openerwala. An AD Singh venture that is being justifiably billed as Delhi/NCR's first Parsi-Irani restaurant, the quirkily designed Soda Bottle Openerwala is also the last hurrah of the hugely creative Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai, who has spent more than a year researching a cuisine that most Delhiites equate with akoori scrambled eggs, and is now moving on to launch his own consultancy services.

The more discerning among us have been goading us to try out the amazing fare that Mrs Dhun Bagli serves at the Delhi Parsi Anjuman on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, but for those who can't think beyond Mumbai's iconic Irani restaurant, Britannia & Company, Soda Water Openerwala may be the best place to start for an understanding of the cuisine. I will review the restaurant at length, but I have not heard such a buzz accompanying any opening for a long time. With Zorawar Kalra's Made in Punjab drawing capacity crowds, Soda Water Openerwala doing better in its opening week, and Zambar with a new menu designed by the extremely creative Arun Kumar waiting in the wings, I can see all roads leading to the Cyber Hub.

Three New Pedigreed Chefs Land in Delhi: Angshuman Adhikari at Diya, Sujan Sarkar at Olive Mehrauli and Alex Marks at Orient Express

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

DIYA at The Leela Gurgaon is one of Delhi-NCR's few finer Inventive Indian restaurants that can be counted on your fingertips, but it has never got its due, maybe because the chef who was responsible for its outstanding menu, Kunal Kapur, is more famous as the genial host and judge of Masterchef India, and not for his tawa parantha stuffed with feta cheese, spring onions and onion seeds (kalonji).

Kapur has risen steadily up the hotel's corporate ladder -- he's now the executive sous chef -- so Diya will soon have a new chef and he's Angshuman Adhikari, who has been running Michelin-starred Atul Kochhar's Simply India restaurant at the year-old St Regis in the scenic Le Morne peninsula, an old hideout of runaway slaves on the south-western tip of Mauritius. Angshuman was sous chef at Kochhar's Dubai restaurant, Zafran, before he moved to the Indian Ocean island nation.

The St Regis at Le Morne stands in the shadow of a 556m-high basaltic monolith that looms over the palm-fringed resort thriving in glorious isolation on a beach in pristine condition. It is here that Kochhar, who opened London's Tamarind restaurant and now presides over Benaras, conceptualised Simply India, where the Samundri Do Pyaza, a treat for seafood lovers, competes for your attention with Karara Kekda Aur Salad (soft-shell crab paired with apple and peanut salad and apple chutney); Batak Chettinad served with cabbage and vermicelli foogath (which gets its name because of coconut and curry leaves); Tandoori Machhi teamed with crispy bok choy and Kochhar's signature smoked tomato chutney; and Citrus Rice Pudding with Blood Orange Ice Cream.

I can see Diya becoming the talk of the town, which Angshuman knows very well, having worked at Set'z with the formidable Master Chef Arif Ahmed, but it is not the only restaurant that'll see the infusion of pedigreed talent. The ever-popular Olive Bar & Kitchen at Mehrauli has got itself a prized import -- the young Sujan Sarkar, who's fresh off the boat from London (and all set to get married). I was reading up about Sujan when I stumbled upon a tweet by Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck fame informing his followers about how this talented dynamo was "preparing [a] dazzling display" for TreatFest 2012. It's not often that Blumenthal tweets as enthusiastically about a young chef.

Described as a "gastronomic genius", Sujan was crowned London Chef of the Year and was National Chef of the Year finalist in 2012. The rising star of 'molecular ingenuity' who uses liquid nitrogen like a magician, left Mumbai's JW Marriott, where he launched his career, in 2004 to join the Hilton hotels in the UK. Soon, he found himself working at Jamie Oliver's Fifteen, from where he moved under the wings of the Relais & Chateaux grand chef Peter Tempelhoff, and then on to the Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows on the 28th floor of the London Hilton at Park Lane, where he got to work with Andre Garrett and Chris Galvin.

Sujan Sarkar, seen at the TreatFest 2012 in the UK,
has joined Olive Bar & Kitchen, Mehrauli. His
appointment has been a casting coup for the
restaurant's charismatic owner, AD Singh.

Moving fast, Sujan changed gears and went on to be the opening chef of the Automat American Brasserie on Dover Street, Mayfair, whose popular menu is as famous for its macaroni and cheese with truffle as for its chicken liver and foie gras mousse served with plum chutney. From Automat, Sujan also ran the affairs of the private members' club, Almada, which opened beneath the brasserie and attracted the likes of George Clooney because of its classic decor, good food and discreet setting.

Alex Marks is the other debutant from London who is opening his innings at the Orient Express with a dinner on Tuesday, November 12. He's replacing D.N. Sarma, the Taj veteran who learnt his craft from the legendary Arvind Saraswat and became synonymous with OE. Well, OE needed more than just Sarma's reassuring presence to shore up its jaded reputation and Marks, who earned his spurs at Gordon Ramsay's Maze at the Marriott on Grosvenor Square, may just be the oxygen that the chic restaurant badly needs.

Marks got noticed because he did a pretty competent job of stepping into Ramsay's star protégé Jason Atherton's shoes at Maze -- a gushing review of the restaurant had lauded it for its "attention to infinitesimal details and a commitment to exactingly high standards". He was previously the head chef at the Michelin-starred Foliage, the Modern British restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge that has been replaced by Heston Blumenthal's Dinner.

With such talented chefs with impeccable track records arriving in the city (apart from of course the incredible Rahul Akerkar), we seem to have a great gastronomic season ahead. I can't wait to see how it unfolds.

DINING OUT AT UZURI: A Terrace to Die For and A Menu With Winners

This restaurant review first appeared in the 08/11/2013 edition of Mail Today. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

To set the original, follow this link:
http://epaper.mailtoday.in/mailanartical.aspx?parentid=87186&boxid=133052203&issuedate=8112013

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHERE: Uzuri Deck & Dining, M-40, M-Block Market, GK-II. It's on the Chungwa lane on top of Market Cafe.

WHEN: Lunch and Dinner. High Tea to start soon.

DIAL: 011-41623623 / 25

AVE MEAL FOR TWO: Rs 3,500+++

The restaurant doesn't have a liquor licence. But you can buy a day licence and have a party on the terrace.

STAR RATING: ***1/2 out of 5

Animal prints and African artifacts are all
over Uzuri's fine dining section to reinforce
the restaurant's positioning as the purveyor
of European fine dining suffused with
 uniquely African flavours.

I DROPPED in at Uzuri Deck & Dining almost on an impulse at an unsually sleepy Greater Kailash-II, M-Block Market (post-Diwali fatigue, I guess!), with my good friend and man-about-town, Shaun Lobo, whose father Ronnie is a much-revered name among hoteliers. Shaun's mother Fatima is one of the three owners of Tres, which has become a must-go-to fine dining destination, thanks to the combined talents of her chef-partners Julia Carmen De Sa and Jatin Mallick.

I was therefore in good company -- and I was particularly keen on meeting Guy Clark, the Masterchef South Africa finalist who had guests at the wedding of Max India Chairman Analjit Singh's daughter (it was the wedding where Lionel Ritchie sang) eating out of his hands. Clark is one of the two chefs steering Uzuri, which bills itself as a European-African restaurant (the name itself comes from the Swahili word for 'goodness'), but he was vacationing in Rajasthan.

That gave me an opportunity to meet the restaurant's young executive head chef, Rishim Sachdeva, who has moved back from London, where he went when he was 16, after studying hospitality management at Oxford Brookes University and working at Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's celebrated Michelin three-star restaurant at Bray, Berkshire. I was particularly impressed by the last bit of the young chef's biography.
Rishim has actually worked for two years and half with the god of molecular gastronomy and was promoted to sous chef at Fat Duck, where most youngsters consider themselves lucky to be able to work as unpaid interns, just to be able to flash the name on their CVs. On the Uzuri menu, Blumenthal shows up with his invention, chocolate soil, on which rests the restaurant's must-have dessert with semi-frozen truffles, caramelised nuts, pickled grapes and butter caramel ice-cream. A silent tribute from a proud student.
I chose the two-storey restaurant's tastefully turned-out terrace, which was a delight on a nippy evening, and I could see it becoming the city's favourite party zone when the place gets its liquor licence only after the assembly elections. This hiatus may hurt the restaurant in the short run -- and it is showing in its uneven occupancy -- because its food is made for wine and long conversations. Frankly, I didn't say 'wow' after each dish, but the meal left me with a sense of satisfaction and a desire to return soon.

It was the mustard lamb shoulder, cooked for 48 hours and served on a bed of wild spinach with hazelnut salsa verde, that made me silently pray for this restaurant's long life. I had it with the herbed quinoa salad, bush-style smoked vegetables and truffle-scented pesto, whose charming simplicity won my heart, and the trio of beetroot and goat cheese mousse, toasted pumpkin seeds and warm bread. I just loved the bread, though I couldn't decide whether I loved the accompanying beetroot jam more (even the butter trio -- paprika, garlic and pesto -- accompanying the bread basket will make you consume a lot of carbs)!

The opening was heart-warming, but then came two jarring notes -- the Cape Malay fish cakes made me wonder why I was having aloo tikki in a restaurant that otherwise takes its food seriously and the pressed pork belly resting on an apple cider mash was left half-eaten. Before we could start complaining, though, we were blown away by the palate cleanser -- an unbeatable lemon souffle -- followed by the African-spiced leg of lamb with mint puree, onions carmelised for 48 hours, confit garlic and caper jus. I just loved the interplay of textures and tastes and how well they sat on my palate, and the twice-based cheese souffle served with braised edamame, sun-dried cherry tomatoes and balsamic fondue can give the grand-daddy in this department, Orient Express, a good run for its money. This is one restaurant that'll see more of me.

FORTUNE COOKIE: Max India Boss Analjit Singh Says Cheers to South African Wine

This column first appeared in the 7 November 2013 edition of Mail Today. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers.

Log on to http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=7112013 and go to Page 15

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

A COUPLE OF fortnights back, I had written about the discovery of Masterchef South Africa finalist Guy Clark by Max India chairman, Analjit Singh (current worth: $705 million, estimated by Forbes.com), which culminated in the opening of Uzuri Deck & Dining at M-Block Market, Greater Kailash-II. The multi-millionaire has now sent ripples across the wine world by buying into one of South Africa's youngest and much-acclaimed wineries, Mullineux Family Wines.

Singh's "complete love affair" with South Africa, as we are informed by the wine writer Tim James (http://grape.co.za), started with his maiden trip to that country during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, thanks to his soccer-obsessed son. It was then that he discovered Franschhoek, an exclusive enclave near Cape Town established by the French Huguenots in 1688, and now famous for its wineries as well as award-winning restaurants (including Le Quartier Francaise, which was ranked 36th in the San Pellegrino Top 50 Restaurants of the World in 2011). He bought a mansion house, the Dassenberg Farm, in that exclusive neighbourhood and James writes that it is being re-landscaped in a major way.

Max India Chairman Analjit
Singh has invested in the young
and acclaimed Mullineux Family
Wines in South Africa owned by
Chris and Andrea Mullineux

Mullineux Family Wines was established in 2007 by a young accountant-turned-winemaker Chris Mullineux and his American wife Andrea, a graduate of the famous viticulture and oenology programme of the University of California-Davis -- they had met, as you'd expect from a wine fairytale, in Champagne and instantly fell in love. They started the company with investments from the British serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Keith Prothero, who had made his money in the finance business in Hong Kong, and accountant Peter Dart.

Within a short time, Mullineux acquired a stellar reputation with its portfolio of wines (three with the coveted five-star rating) produced in the granite- and shale-based terroir of the Swartland, a young and tiny wine region 50km north of Cape Town that was previously famous for being the home of South Africa's oldest colonial hotel, The Royal at Riebeek Kasteel. The viticulturist Rosa Kruger, one of South Africa's great "wine innovators" (to quote FT's celebrated columnist Jancis Robinson) and fairy godmother to the Young Turks of her country's blossoming wine industry, introduced Singh to the Mullineux couple.

For Singh, who's seriously looking at bigger forays into food, wine and hospitality, to mastermind which he has appointed Hector de Galard to Max India, it seemed like just the kind of match he would love to seal. An opportunity presented itself when Prothero, who has also financed the London fine wine store, The Sampler, and is funding a charity working for the welfare of South African children afflicted by the foetal alcohol syndrome, announced that he would like to sell his stake in the business. Singh's Leeu International Investments Limited ('Leeu' is the Afrikaans word for 'lion', or Singh!) picked up this stake, making him the first major Indian investor in an important South African wine company.

Last fortnight, I had written about Hindustan Construction Company's Ajit Gulabchand and his massive investment in Nashik's Charosa winery. If Indian investors of the stature of Analjit Singh and Ajit Gulabchand pump money into the wine business, whether in India or around the world, then the profile of the country's wine market will transform dramatically. What the country's wine business desperately needs is an infusion of corporate culture into its daily operations to help it rise above its infantile presence. It will definitely help the country's wine producers to stop behaving like small farmers and make common cause to grow the market, and also get the government to start taking the business seriously. At the moment, the Indian Grape Processing Board is a joke dominated by small-time farmer-producers led by officials who essentially use the organisation to collect frequent flier miles by organising study trips around wine-making countries. People like Analjit Singh can change the face of this unorganised business.

NO GAMBLING AT DRY & VEGGIE BANGKOK DIWALI DOS

I WAS in Bangkok on Diwali eve, on an assignment for one of my many current employers, and I was struck by the sight of women brightly dressed in the Indo-Thai style accompanied by plainly clothed men with flat white turbans and flowing beards zipping into the porch of the busy Sheraton Grande on Sukhumvit Road in their sport cars, conversing with each other in the Thai language as spoken by the locals. They lent colour and buzz to the lobby of the busy hotel.

I found out that they were members of Bangkok's Namdhari Sikh families, which are at the forefront of local businesses, and Diwali-eve parties are occasions for them to bond. For the hotel, which is owned by an old Punjabi business family settled in Thailand, these parties mean good business. And the seriousness with which it takes this business is apparent from the presence of an Indian chef, Janmejoy Sen (formerly of The Imperial New Delhi), catering especially to the social calendar of the Thai capital's vibrant Punjabi community.

Unlike Delhi's Diwali parties, where high stakes rule the gambling tables, single malts and Barolos get flashed, and an array of exotic dishes (from fondues to anda paranthas, which were hugely popular at a party hosted by a builder-hotelier this past weekend), the ones in Bangkok are strictly dry and vegetarian, and gambling is a big no-no. Namdharis (or Kukas), who constitute 60-70 per cent of the Thai population of Indian origin, are vegetarian and teetotallers. Their code of simple living forbids them to gamble and explains the everyday nature of the simple clothes worn by the men. I am told the non-Namdhari Punjabis aren't bound by such considerations, but thankfully, they haven't imported the culture of gambling.

The Diwali-eve party that I got a glimpse of was a tasteful affair. The hotel's event planner had got the venue decorated with Thai silks and flower arrangements, an old-fashioned band was in attendance with a pianist playing old Hindi film numbers and contemporary Thai tunes, and the food spread was a delight. From vegetarian sushi and quesadilla, to khao suey, pad thai and pastas cooked live, to Vietnamese kanom baung yuan (coconut rice pancakes), to matar paneer, naan and pedas, it looked as if the kitchens of the world had come home to roost at this Diwali-eve party. You can take Indians out of India, but you can't take India out of them!

COOKING UP A STORM IN THE DESERT

THE Bollywood stars who attended Nita Ambani's 50th birthday, and the 55 private jets that ferried them and the other celebrities and captains of industry who attended the celebrations in Jodhpur, may have cornered media mind space, but who were the chefs who kept the country's A-List eating out of their hands?

As you'd expect from an event of this class, super chef Hemant Oberoi of the Taj Group presided over the Umaid Bhawan Palace dinner where the best dishes of the hotel chain's top restaurants, from Blue Ginger to Wasabi, were showcased. At the Bal Samand Palace high tea followed by dinner, Manish Mehrotra of Indian Accent rolled out his signature phulka tacos, but the fillings were strictly vegetarian, and six designer chaats, including dahi batata poori with wasabi peas and caramelised onion kachoris served with blue cheese sauce.

The equally inventive Abhijit Saha, the chef-restaurateur behind Bangalore's Caperberry, served molecular gastronomy canapes and desserts carrying his creative imprint. The surprise of that evening, though, was a caterer from Surat named Tapan Choksi. He laid out a wow Gujarati spread that his mother, who's in her 70s and very close to Kokilaben Ambani, personally got made over two days. She made sure the dinner turned out to be a wow experience that the privileged guests wouldn't forget in a hurry.

RIP: CHARLIE TROTTER, 1959-2013

WHEN I woke up to Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai's Facebook post on what Charlie Trotter meant to him and other young chefs of his generation, I got a sense of the vast circle of influence of the Chicago chef-restaurateur who passed away on November 5. Trotter was 54 when he died, which only compounds the loss, for the man who read Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, talked management (Businessweek brilliantly describes him as a 'Master Chef with a McKinsey Mind'), took foie gras off the menu in 2002, and was one of the most revered chefs of his age, could have shaped at least a couple of more generations. Aspiring chefs have devoured his books, his restaurants have won a procession of honours, but we'll always remember him for his famous line from his cameo role in My Best Friend's Wedding: "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right!"

RIP: India Loses Her Sunny Granny of Comfort Food

This obituary first appeared in the 7 November 2013 edition of Mail Today, Delhi/NCR. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers

http://epaper.mailtoday.in/mailanartical.aspx?parentid=87147&boxid=42432875&issuedate=7112013

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

FROM Narendra Modi to India's first television chef Sanjeev Kapoor, all of India is mourning the passing away of Tarla Dalal after a heart attack at 77, for her cookbooks have been an essential ingredient of our national life, and a rite of passage for the pre-internet generation, for four decades since she was first published in 1974.

Tarla Dalal lifted home cooking from its
cycle of predictability and affected the
lives of millions in the pre-internet age

A chatty Mumbai homemaker with a sunny temperament and halting command over English, who'd gained a considerable following for the cooking classes she was running at her Napean Sea Road home since 1966, Tarla Dalal (with her husband taking dictations) spent 18 months writing The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking. It became a runaway best-seller after its debut in 1974 and a mandatory gift for brides in an age when cookbooks and Eve's Weekly were the only sources of recipes, and it was eventually translated into six languages (including Dutch and Russian).

With the cookbook, Dalal took home cooking with everyday ingredients to a new level of replicable creativity, lifting it out of its self-limiting cycle of predictability with her brand of accessible excitement. She was the grandmother of comfort food even before the term became fashionable. Betty Crocker was a figment of a publisher's imagination; Tarla Dalal was real. Her constituency was the country's mushrooming middle-class trying hard to bring some excitement to its table. And she achieved the impossible: to quote Atul Sikand, founder of Facebook's most vibrant Indian recipe-sharing community, Sikandalous Cuisine, "she made simple recipes, which are the toughest to get right, seem so easy to do".

Inspired to become a hobby chef by Dalal's cookbooks, Sikand remembers meeting his idol when he was 23-24, fresh out of his development economics master's programme at the University of Sussex, and asking her about how to get his kadhi right. She explained the intricacies of her recipe with the patience of an indulgent aunt and even said how he would become a great chef one day. Of course, he never became one!

Even chefs are proud to admit that they have liberally borrowed from Dalal's cookbooks. She authored 170 of them, which have sold more than four million copies, and her TV show,  Cook It Up with Tarla Dalal, ran on Sony Entertainment Television for three years. Yet, she was candid enough to announce in Harmony magazine some years back that she had stopped cooking, leaving the job of creating recipes to a team of chefs and nutritionists guided by her. The pre-internet diva's website, www.tarladalal.com, which is run by her son Sanjay, now has 17,500-plus recipes that people pay to access.

Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai, whom Dalal had ranked in 2003 as one of India's top 10 chefs in the in-flight magazine of Jet Airways, says he dipped into these cookbooks to sex up the vegetarian fare served to the 25,000 people who ate daily at the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge Centre cafeteria. "Where else but in Tarla Dalal's cookbooks could I have found recipes for vegetarian dishes with a Mexican twist?" asks Gorai, adding that when he was working in Australia, chefs at Indian restaurants liberally borrowed from Dalal.

Rushina Munshaw Ghildayal, corporate food consultant, blogger and modern-day Tarla Dalal, says her icon was special because she touched the everyday lives of ordinary people. Her Gujarati parents gifted her Tarla Dalal's cookbooks when she got married and, Rushina recalls, she got addicted to 'Spanish Rice' (a desi version of a vegetarian paella), a recipe she had picked up from one of the books, when she was pregnant.

Few middle-class Indians who grew up in the pre-internet age can say they haven't had a Tarla Dalal moment in their lives. She taught us how to cook at home and make our next meal a little more exciting.

Olive Bar & Kitchen Tops Delhi Gourmet Club's Best Pizza of Delhi/NCR Ranking

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

The Olive Bar & Kitchen team posing for a photo-op with
the Best Pizza Trophy being handed over by Rocky Mohan
and other members of the Delhi Gourmet Club jury

AFTER enjoying a long Diwali weekend, I am back with a bucketful of news, starting with the announcement of the Delhi Gourmet Club's Pizza Hunt results. When I look back at the evolution of the pizza in our city, I remember the days when the Nirula's Keema Do Pyaza Pizza used to be my post-examination treat from my father. The pizza crust used to be like toast, with shredded Amul processed cheese filling in for mozzarella, the 'tomato puree' suspiciously seeming to be straight out of a ketchup bottle, and the keema do pyaza was unevenly spread on top, with the serving getting thinner as the pizza got popular. Of course, there was also the pepperoni pizza, which was hugely popular (with good reason!), but I discovered it much later.

I am speaking of the early 1980s, when a pizza was a treat that few middle-class families could afford. That was when Taxila, the city's only respectable Continental restaurant on the Maurya rooftop, was struggling to survive, and so was Valentino at the fledgling Hyatt Regency, which made way for the juggernaut named La Piazza. It was La Piazza, together (a little later) with Italian electrical engineer-turned-restaurateur Tarsillo Natalone's Flavors, which ended Delhi's pizza virginity. In fact, the opening chef of La Piazza, who was an Austrian, was so pernickety about the restaurant's Neapolitan pizzas that he banned the waiters from dousing them with Tabasco sauce or chilli flakes. The waiters, as a result, had to smuggle bottles of both in their jacket pockets to serve their contents on the sly.

Since those early days, we have seen Ritu Dalmia introduce Delhi to the wonders of the wood-fired oven at Diva. We have had Bill Marchetti inaugurate one with great fanfare at Pavilion, the all-day restaurant at the ITC Maurya, but the restaurant never became famous for pizzas. We have watched Olive Bar & Kitchen turn pizza slices, freshly out of the wood-fired oven, into popular party snacks in the days when the trio of Anirban Sarkar, Mohit Balachandran and Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai had made the restaurant a force to reckon with. And Mist at The Park, in the days of Bakshish Dean (the golden age of the Connaught Place hotel's culinary journey), rolled out such novelties of the time as the smoked salmon and quattro formaggi pizzas.

Of course, we had our share of PR gimmicks as well, such as the pizza priced at Rs 9,999 (its toppings included a generous helping of beluga and lobster), with which The Qube opened its doors at The Leela Palace Chanakyapuri. It was the creation of the hotel's then executive chef, the affable American, Glenn Eastman, who formerly presided over the kitchen at the personal yacht of the world's richest man, Mexican telecoms tsar Carlos Slim Helu. Talking about Americans and pizzas, India is well on its way to becoming one of the top five market for Domino's, which straddles across 55 per cent of the country's Rs 1,300-1,400-crore organised pizza market. Pizza Hut is hot in pursuit, followed at a respectable distance by players such as Papa John's and Sbarro, and now, JSM Hospitality, the company behind Shiro and Hard Rock Cafe, is ready to roll out California Pizza Kitchen in Delhi/NCR after a successful run in Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore.

With Delhi's pizza offerings getting more diverse than ever, it has become important for food connoisseurs to get a sense of where they can get the best pizzas in the city and its upscale suburbs. True to its record of becoming the final arbiter of taste in the city, the Delhi Gourmet Club, led by 'Mr Old Monk' and author of four well-received cookbooks, Rocky Mohan, went on a whirlwind hunt for the best pizza, covering 15 restaurants a record three weeks.

The jury consisted of a mixed group of well-travelled people united by a passion for food but representing the universe of Delhi restaurants--a couple of home-makers, a social media marketer, a management consultant, a well-known restaurateur, and even a professor of human rights at a reputed law school. Each of them spent Rs 5,000, tasting a basic margherita pizza followed by a gourmet pizza at each of the 15 restaurants, over five nights to arrive at a ranking that is refreshingly honest, though some of the big names in the business may not agree with their relegation to the lower end of the list.

My big complaint against the jury is that it left out Flavors and Cilantro at The Trident, Gurgaon, which, I maintain, has been consistent with the superior quality of its pizzas. I wholeheartedly endorse the No. 1 position going to Olive Bar & Kitchen, but I was left wondering how threesixtydegrees at The Oberoi managed to be No. 2 -- I have never known of anyone going there to ask for a pizza. Fat Lulu, in my opinion, should have been No. 2, not No. 3. But the shocker was Diva ending at the bottom of the heap, at No. 15. The news made me lapse into a state of violent disbelief followed by shock. Has Ritu Dalmia allowed her restaurant to slip to such an extent or was it a bad dough day? Anyway, without more quibbles, let me share the ranking with you:

Olive  Bar & Kitchen, Mehrauli, 79.33; threesixtydegrees, The Oberoi New Delhi, 74.50; Fat Lulu, Gurgaon, 70.50; San Gimignano, The Imperial, 68.50; La Piazza, Hyatt Regency, 68.44; Sen5es, Pullman Gurgaon, 66.25; Sartoria, Vasant Vihar, 62.93; Mistral, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, 62.20; Prego, The Westin, Gurgaon, 60.57; La Tagliatella, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, 58.47; The Qube, The Leela Palace Chanakyapuri, 53.35; Amici, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, 50.36; Tonino, Andheria More, Mehrauli, 48.57; Mist, The Park, Parliament Street, 43.22; Diva, M-Block, Greater Kailash-II, 42.88.

So, how do you rate a pizza? Did the jury follow certain guidelines? Rocky shared them with the Delhi Gourmet Club before posting the results. Though Rocky did not mention this fact, you'll find the pointers in the blog 'A Gravy Train with Biscuit Wheels'. Anyway, here they are:

Is the crust worth eating on its own? Or is it simply a load-bearing device to hold up massive quantities of toppings (not necessarily a bad thing, but not usually seen in the best pizzerias)?

Is the bread dense or airy?

Do the individual toppings taste good on their own? Would you eat them if they were served on an appetiser plate alone? Or do they need cheese, bread and tomato sauce to work.

What types of cheeses are being used? Would the cheese(s) also taste okay on its own?

Is there a lot of sauce, a sauce drought, or is it in-between? Is the sauce delicious on its own?

Does it rely on salt or sugar for a strong taste?

Does the pizza remain tasty and interesting from start to finish? Or does the pizza have a great first bite, but then become an uninteresting trudge to finish eating. Over-salted pizzas can definitely fall into this trap. If you wish to check out the original, go to http://cincinnatimalavita.blogspot.in/2012/12/how-to-judge-great-pizza.html. 

Interesting pointers! Keep these in mind the next time when you to have a gourmet pizza experience.