Playing with our food

What would it take to have an Indian restaurant of the calibre of a Noma, or one that specialised in the “emotional cuisine” perfected by El Celler de Can Roca? And what would it take to have one of these in Delhi — and if we did, would we like it?

I haven’t eaten at either Noma or El Celler de Can Roca, named the top two restaurants in the world in Restaurant magazine’s highly influential list of the world’s 50 best restaurants. Eating out at the Michelin-starred restaurants has become something of a blood sport, the foodie equivalent of climbing the world’s highest peaks, with each prized menu from the Fat Duck or Alinea carried back reverentially as a trophy. But friends tell me that these two, like Thomas Keller’s French Laundry before them, are truly temples of gastronomy.

Noma takes classic Scandinavian cuisine and reinvents it — an amuse bouche might be a radish buried in a pot of “edible dirt”, sweetbreads, bleek roe, local onions and pickled vegetables, musk ox, reindeer tongue, fresh local herbs. For all the playfulness, Noma is serious about using and highlighting local ingredients, and traditional ones, too. El Celler de Can Roca plays with childhood memories; the plates look like art installations; and from fried anchovy bones set in rice crackers to humble pork trotters, the cuisine is said to be both inventive and evocative.

For years, Bukhara and Dum Pukht have dominated any list of Delhi’s best restaurants. They deserve their fans, and their unshakeable position as the grand dowagers of local cuisine; the fidelity to the old Frontier and Awadh recipes, the legendary and much-imitated Dal Bukhara, the casual excellence is all on display. But they are the equivalent of the grand old-school French restaurants that still use Escoffier as a Bible, or of the great kaiseki restaurants of Japan — these are among the best traditional restaurants we have. By definition, again, Chef Imtiaz Qureshi isn’t trying to do what Thomas Keller or Noma’s Rene Redzepi are doing — Qureshi’s aim is to preserve the glories of Awadhi cuisine, refining those recipes slightly, rather than to use them as a springboard for his own creativity.

Of the Delhi restaurants that do try to innovate, there’s an interesting North-South split. Kainoosh and Veda are ambitious, but both restaurants have trouble spots — Veda’s gorgeously campy décor is offset by the hit-and-miss menu; I’ve had good meals there, with Suvir Saran’s trademark karkaree bhindi starring over the meat dishes, but rarely spectacular ones. Marut Sikka’s menu for Kainoosh is pleasantly classic without, again, pushing the envelope too far, and the restaurant would be a good choice for business lunches and dinners. But the service can be worryingly absent-minded; on one visit, the waiter served us another table’s dishes, on another, the staff began mopping the floor around a bemused fellow diner’s table in mid-meal.

My picks would be Varq at the Taj, Indian Accent at the Manor and perhaps the more predictable Chutney at the Metropolitan. I’ve heard grumbles that Varq is overpriced and Indian Accent’s quietly elegant space is underpopulated, but both are manned by intelligent chefs (Hemant Oberoi at Varq, Manish Mehrotra at Indian Accent) and the tasting menus at either restaurant are well worth it. Neither chef goes as far as I suspect they could, in terms of imagination; perhaps that’s based on a belief that Indian audiences don’t want to play with their food the way the Europeans do, but it’s a pity. As with Baumra’s in Goa (better than either Varq or Indian Accent, for my taste), these two have potential.

The South is another story — but that will have to wait for the next column.

Nilanjana Roy is a Delhi-based writer