Delhi - without the belly

Monsoon Wedding is one of my absolute favourite films in the world, and one of the few times when I bought a soundtrack to a film (Slumdog's soundtrack pales in comparison, trust me), so when Carl invited me to be his date at an Indian wedding, I just had to go, naturally. We thought it would also be nice to incorporate it with a bit of travelling around India.

As a world first, I'm uploading a video on my blog (albeit pretty bad quality - my blackberry camera just doesn't really work in the dark)! One of the bride's cousins is a semi-professional dancer, and more weirdly works for one of my ex-clients back in London. Here she is in action!



In all, we spent about 4-5 days in Delhi, and I was very pleased to see the standard of the food is really very high here. Carl's friend Sonali invited us to The Indian Accent at the Manor Hotel in the Friends Colony district of Delhi, a newish restaurant, whose chef also cooks at the Tamarai in London. Its Asian fusion menu was by far the most interesting food we had on the whole trip, and for once I thought that the fusion worked. We started with an amuse bouche of paneer wrapped in rice paper, served very cold:


The highlight of the dish was the mekong basa fish, with a saffron infusion. Beautifully presented, I loved loved the green paste on the fish - for once I thought the spice complemented the fish rather than hid it. Superb.

I had some incredibly big prawns for my main (think size of fist!), good if not very exciting. More exciting was the dessert - a chocolate bombe with flames! Even my rubbish camera managed to capture the excitement!

The other big highlight of Delhi was actually on our last night, when our lovely host Gemma took us to Stonehouse, an uber-trendy bar/restaurant. Carl and I were so sick of Indian food by this point, so a decent Modern European place was just what we needed.

The food really was good, if you steered away from the weird combinations - my main of seabass with squid ink risotto and porcini sauce was just too much, the seabass also a little overcooked. But my starter of tuna and beef carpaccio with a sesame and kalonji sauce was just simply delicious. The perfect antidote to the thick Indian curries!

Unfortunately, I really can't recommend the restaurant simply due to the service. I'm not normally too fussed about these things, but it really reminded me that Asia doesn't really do good service.

But talking of service, by far the most fun meal was when Gemma had the genius idea of getting a sushi chef to come cook at her house. It is just such a nice idea, and the prices are really pretty reasonable (less than £20 a head). The sushi wasn't super exciting, but then we were in India - being able to have raw fish is good enough!

Given that the last time I was in Delhi, it was in a mad-rush case where we ate a lot of hotel food, I was mighty pleased with this time's food. However, things took a bit of a nose-dive when we started travelling - posts coming soon!