What turns a restaurant into a phenomenon? It’s tempting to answer that everything depends on the food but I can think of scores of successful restaurants in India where I wouldn’t eat dinner even if you paid me to. I guess that it is a complex combination of factors and there is no single successful formula; if there was, then all restaurants would work and nobody would ever lose money. [Read more]

It is a measure of how much eating out habits in India have changed that whereas when I first wrote about truffles, readers were bemused, these days truffles crop up on menu after menu. It is, I guess, also a measure of how much more we are prepared to spend on restaurant meals compared to the past but that, as we shall see, can be debated. [Read more]

The Baked Alaska was one of the great show-off desserts of the 1970s (and perhaps the 1980s). Unfortunately, chefs don’t bother with it much these days.

At university, we were divided first, into colleges, and then, within the college, into staircases marking the blocks where we actually lived. Each staircase had about a dozen undergraduates and possibly, a don or two. [Read more]

In the old days, long before we had speciality restaurants, we had all-purpose restaurants that stayed open all day and served every kind of cuisine. In Bombay, such restaurants lined both sides of Churchgate Street. In Delhi, they were scattered all over Connaught Place. [Read more]

Kheer is the greatest rice pudding in the world, an international dessert combining three cooking traditions: India, the Middle East and the West. [Read more]