In celebration of offbeat Delhi food
It’s been written about ad nauseum. Throw a stone, and you’re liable to hit a foodie in whom it inspires a religious zeal the Imam at the Jama Masjid next door would envy. If you hear my friend Nishant talk about it, you’d think he’d been to the Rapture – and got an autograph.
Like a tutu-clad elephant in the room, Karim’s has hitherto been respectfully ignored by this blog. But what better time to make amends than just after having held a record-breaking EOiD gathering there?
It must be the age.
I can’t think of any other reason it took me a whole fortnight to figure out why I’d been looking at the world with such a jaundiced eye of late. Life had been toodling along quite nicely, until an EOiD plan in mid-September to visit Haji Noora’s had to be cancelled at the last moment — Ramzaan!
Most unfair, if you ask me, this whole business of fasting for a month, especially on us kafir carnivores. Rank deprivation from sun-up to sun-down for a whole month, without even the compensation of heavenly favours. Grrr.
The idea of a late evening walk originally came from food buff Monali, an Orkut friend who works for CSE (those obsessive warriors against pesti-colas). Last winter, we had taken a long walk through the bylanes of Old Delhi, sampling a variety of meaty and vegetarian fare dotted between Jama Masjid and Red Fort. Since another walk was long due and summers had arrived, Monali had suggested that we conjure one late evening stroll and turn it into a Hog Walk (her coinage). As luck would have it, Hemanshu popped up on my screen an evening later and floated an outing in Old Delhi. Things fell into place soon thereafter.
Continue reading “A Hog Walk”
Delhi’s answer to Lahore Food Street
[ed: we are thrilled to present our first guest column, by journalist and fellow foodie Pankaj Molekhi. Hopefully, this is the first of many to come!]
1900 hours: This is a time when shopkeepers in Delhi begin to pull down shutters; treetops get abuzz with homeward-bound birds; and Blueline buses are packed to capacity with sweaty human bodies. A time when nearly everybody is calling it a day. Nearly everybody!
Continue reading “A Night Stroll near Jama Masjid”
On our expedition for a breakfast of nihari yesterday, Abhik and I chanced upon one of the true hidden gems of Delhi’s street food — Daulat ki chaat.