As much as I enjoyed eating there, I wondered how long the restaurant could survive. Of course, I did not say any of this to Varun at the time: nobody wants to discourage a young restaurateur who is ...

The first time I had an authentic Peking Duck in India was at the Great Wall restaurant at the Leela Palace in Mumbai twenty years ago. I was having lunch with Captain CP Krishnan Nair, the Leela ...

Because Indians like to eat Chinese food with rice (or noodles), every dish must have a gravy. This is regarded as strange by Chinese people. I asked Chef Liang of Mumbai’s Pan Asian, who is from the ...

A last point: perhaps somebody at Random House should have read the book closely before writing the inside jacket flap. Pratibha’s point is that the biryani’s origins are shrouded in dispute. (Was it ...

Raita is the silent guest at nearly every meal in North India. Silent because it never gets the credit it deserves. We enjoy it but we don’t talk too much about it. In fact, as I discovered while ...

And yet, I have been a huge admirer of his achievements from afar. Roni linked up with the Chef Chintan Pandya and the two of them started Adda in New York which soon became a rage in the city. They ...

By the mid-Seventies, a decline had set in. The Rajput boys I met at school re-unions seemed to have nothing to do. Most had retired to their havelis to live in sin with monks. (Well, Old Monk, anyway ...

More unusually, he concedes that the government failed to act decisively to stop fraud in many cases. In 2011, he writes, his colleagues brought to his attention that private investors in ...

Vir Sanghvi is the best-known Indian journalist of his generation. His career straddles print, television, books and now, new media. Vir Sanghvi was born in London in 1956 and educated at Mayo College ...

Jairam Ramesh’s massive and painstakingly researched biography covers all of Menon’s life, from his birth into a wealthy Malayali family, to his early association with the Theosophical Society (he ...

But these dishes were creatures of their time. Just as Escoffier was God’s gift to the dairy and milling industries because all his dishes required cream, butter and flour, the great Indian chefs of ...

The economic liberation led to a leap in growth rates and a new urban prosperity. Many millions of families were added to the middle class. Most of them were relatively young. They formed their world ...