Modern Japanese traditional
Japanese food depends on delicate flavours and expensive ingredients. But modern Japanese can be cheap and spicy. Already, sushi-lovers are ignoring traditional nigiri sushi for rolls filled with such foods as tempura prawns. So as the realisation grows that modern Japanese is easy to do, more restaurants will take to the cuisine. Read more

I woke up in a strange hotel room last Sunday and reached for my morning paper. Bleary-eyed, I worked out that I wasn’t at home, wasn’t even in India and that therefore, I would not get to see that week’s Brunch. Well, yes and no. Read more

Even if you say that you do not like mushrooms – a common enough position with many Indians – and never order them at restaurants or cook them at home, there’s probably one mushroom you eat far more often than you realise. Read more

I’ve never been able to make up my mind about the food in Paris. For many years I stuck to the position I had evolved during my youth: it is impossible to eat badly in the French capital. This is the romantic view, shared by many people of my generation who have happy memories of cheap bistro meals that turned out to be terrific; of amazing local produce; of excellent local wine at everyday prices; and of our first Michelin-starred meals. Read more

One of the earliest Rude Foods I wrote was about the club sandwich. I confessed to being a club sandwich fiend and explained the lengths I had gone to in an effort to track down the origin of the club sandwich. The most likely explanation appeared to be that it was invented in railway dining cars on American trains some time in the last century. Read more

It says something about the revolution in our eating habits that most serious Italian restaurants in India (by ‘serious’ I mean those that do not restrict themselves to pizza and pasta) put carpaccio on the menu. In most cases, it is the original though it may not actually be made from beef because the restaurant uses buffalo meat – which also tells us something about religious taboos and restaurant menus.
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Anyone who has been to China will tell you that the principal difference between a real Chinese menu (i.e., at a restaurant meant for Chinese people) and an ‘international’ Chinese menu (at a place frequented by foreigners) is the nature of the ingredients. Read more

Four internationally renowned chefs – Nobu, Giorgio Locatelli, Santi Santamaria and Michel Rostang – opened restaurants at Dubai’s newest luxury resort. Will the food approach the levels it reaches at their principal restaurants? Read more

For much of the last week, I have been reading Cosmopolitan by Toby Cecchini. Subtitled A Bartender’s Life, it tries to do for the bar business what Anthony Bourdain did to the restaurant trade with Kitchen Confidential. Except of course that Cecchini does not write as well as Bourdain and his experiences have been less varied so the book can be heavy going.

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