Going home

I know it’s a cliché, but it seems like only yesterday that I came to live in Delhi. I will miss my work colleagues who have been very kind to me. I will miss the historical sites of the capital, that I have come to know so well. I will miss the food. I won’t…

Blind Tasting

Yesterday, a colleague took me to a restaurant called “Ctaste”, run by blind and visually impaired people in Amsterdam. A recipe for disaster? Not at all. The strapline for Ctaste is “hear, feel, smell, talk, listen, imagine, experience, enjoy”. Diners eat a “surprise meal” completely in the dark. Before eating, we went on a virtual…

Paratha for breakfast

Street food is one of my guilty passions. I passed a young lad working on his food cart in Khanna Market. He worked the prepared wheat flour dough into a saucer shape, then pressed in some spicy cooked potato, sealed it up and rolled it out to the size of a side plate. He flapped…

Japani Samosa Wale

Tucked away in the labyrinth of stalls of Old Lajpat Rai Market in Chandni Chowk is Manohar Dhaba. Umesh Ji, the owner, has the best street food I have eaten in Old Delhi. And I have eaten a lot of street food; I have had the intestinal infections to prove it. The house speciality is…

Street Market Scenes in Ardash Nagar

The wholesale fruit and vegetable market across the road from our clinic is the biggest in Asia. Trucks crammed full of produce unload in the open warehouses. The distributors   divide up the produce into barrow loads for distribution across the city at formal and informal markets. There is an informal market along the side of…

Rabri Faluda I’m in love

In Chawri Bazar this afternoon I came across a food vendor with a queue of locals pestering him for attention. He was selling rabri faluda, a thick, creamy dessert with a basis of vermicelli made with corn starch (faluda seva). You need soaked sabja seeds (sweet basil), rose syrup, ice and cold milk. He added…

Milk-o

India is the world’s biggest producer of milk. The USA produces more cow’s milk, but when you consider cow and buffalo milk production, India leads the way. Buffalo milk contains more fat and milk solids, so it looks whiter and is slightly more viscous. My father was a milk deliveryman for most of his working…

Jashn-e-Rekhta

Recently, at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, there was a three-day extravaganza rejoicing in the “spirit and eloquence, the beauty and versatility of Urdu”. The festival celebrated everything Urdu – art, poetry, drama, music, cinema and literature. The ancient name for Urdu is Rekhta (which means scattered and mixed). Most people who…

Palate Fest 2017

Over the weekend, dozens of fancy restaurants in Delhi set out their stalls at this annual festival in Nehru Park. I was impressed with the variety and quality of the food. It was rather pricey compared to my local South Indian restaurant, where I can get a masala dosa with all the trimmings for 65…

Breakfast at Karim’s

Just off the Urdu Bazar Road, on the south side of Delhi’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid, the Matia Mahal Road runs south towards Daryaganj. On the left after 50 metres, there is a nondescript small lane which leads to Karim’s Restaurant. We had been cycling through the backstreets and galis of Old Delhi for three hours…