Looking back at 2007

THE FOOD CLUB

The star of the culinary show in 2007 just has to be Chinese food. Restaurateurs and hoteliers disregarded any conventional wisdom about not reinventing the wheel and did precisely that.

However, they came up with a better, more functional, altogether better looking wheel. Hyatt Regency Delhi and Grand Hyatt Mumbai have both come up with fairly similar projects which were probably treated as one concept with differences in the bells and whistles.

The notorious Indian palate seems not to be pampered here. You won't get chilli chicken, chicken Manchurian and the other mainstays of Indian-Chinese culinary convergence.

In spite of that, both China Kitchen in Delhi and China House in Mumbai are packed every night. The other big Chinese project in a hotel is My Humble House, though it is more Chinese fused with contemporary Western. Purists would scoff, but my opinion is that Western-Chinese is on the same continuum as Indian-Chinese.

Steven Magor, general manager, Hotel InterContinental Eros, says that wheels have a funny way of turning full circle. On one of his last assignments in New Delhi (he is convinced he was an Indian in a previous birth), he saw the Chinese restaurant Pearls in Hyatt Regency Delhi turning into a Japan-inspired TK's and the Chinese rooftop restaurant at Maurya Sheraton, as it was then known, turning into the ill-fated Maroush. Now, Maroush has turned into My Humble House and TK's has a Chinese neighbour.

2007 saw the birth of many stand-alone Chinese restaurants in Mumbai and Delhi. What they had in common was Chinese nationals in the kitchen. There is the reluctance to pinch pennies by hiring Nepali cooks to do short-shrift to the world's most popular cuisine.

Bangalore seems way ahead of the other metros in the restaurant sweepstakes. At first, chef Manu Chandra and chef Steven Liu seem to have little in common. Yet, both have worked extensively overseas "" Chandra in the US and Liu in Europe "" and both typify the brave new breed of chefs who need not be from the country in whose cuisine they specialise.

Chandra looks after Olive and Liu after Graze, the Taj group's trendy new restaurant that is Zodiac Grill in a rebirth. Both chefs have managed to get their respective teams to taste the food they cook "" basic in a Western country, but nightmarishly difficult in Bharat Mata where line cooks eat dal and roti but cook foie gras with sauternes gelee.

Of course, the crossover formula is not mandatory. Chef Venkatesh Bhat of SouthIndies is from Udipi and though his contemporary, wi-fi enabled restaurant serves the food of the four south Indian states, the pride of place goes to bisi bele huli anna, an Udipi speciality that is prepared without any short-cuts.

Elsewhere in the city, Mako Ravindran, part-Japanese and part-Indian, looks after Harima, a Japanese restaurant that manages to be a home away from home for the Japanese community in Bangalore and a trendy eatery for Bangaloreans.

The theme for 2007 seems to be excellence, and thank god for that.