It is 2006. So here’s the situation. You have guests from abroad. (Perhaps they are business contacts.) You need to take them out for dinner.
Because they are in India, after all, they say they would prefer Indian food.
I have yet to meet a foreign guest who hasn’t loved Bukhara. And the food is consistently good; the dal and the kababs are sure-fire hits. If I lived in Mumbai, I would have taken them to Trishna. It’s very clearly not hotel-restaurant fancy. The crab is delicious and the flavours always appeal to foreigners. After those favourites I would have had to fall back on hotel restaurants. In both Chennai and Bangalore, I would have found it hard to find places in the same league as Bukhara and Trishna. In Chennai, there is now an obvious option: Avartana. Farmlore, in Bengaluru, is one of India’s best restaurants. In Kolkata, there is now the wonderful Sienna. And I take guests to the buzzy Grand Market Pavilion for chef Pramod Sinha’s takes on the food of India’s north-eastern states. Clearly things are changing more quickly than we realise. Some of the new places focus on international cuisine. The Table and Kaspers in Mumbai are outstanding, as are Alex Sanchez’s Americano and Otra. There’s a boom in Japanese food: Izumi in Mumbai and Goa; the dare-to-be-different Mizu in Mumbai; and Bengaluru’s amazing Naru, a world-class ramen bar. They are all full all the time. I used to know Regi Mathew when he was Thai chef at Bangalore’s West End hotel. Regi has turned his back on all that and rediscovered the food of the mothers of Kerala’s simpler families (which is very different from restaurant food) and created the hit Kappa Chakka Kandhari in Chennai and Bengaluru and now runs a successful restaurant, Chatti, in New York. The foodies did not know what to expect and when the food came, did not recognise it. But they liked it. They took pictures and posted them on Instagram to show people back home what Indian Chinese food was like. It was, they thought, a legitimate cuisine in its own right.
If I had been placed in this situation in 2006, I would have taken them to Bukhara. The no-cutlery rule, the aprons, and the fairly basic seating make it seem different from a hotel restaurant, even though it’s been located at ITC Maurya from the day it opened in 1978. There weren’t many other places you could have chosen to entertain curious foreigners or business colleagues 20 years ago.
Because chef Shubham Thakur has turned it into India’s best modern Japanese restaurant, even Delhi’s Megu, which muddled along for years, is now full.
