Cuisines of Delhi

Delhi offers a variety of cuisines; the hotels and restaurants in Delhi offer everything as per your choice. Name anything and you get it. Food festivals organized by hotels in Delhi are popular among the tourists. The cuisine of Delhi includes both vegetarian and non-vegetarian varieties.

You can enjoy the best of continental cuisine at five - star hotels in Delhi .The popular amongst them are, The Oberoi, The Taj Palace, and Taj Man Singh. The numerous multi - cuisine restaurants in Delhi also offer continental food. Now the fast food outlets in Delhi also serve with all manner of cuisines.

In Delhi you would find places like Dilli Haat, offering a range of Indian cuisines. Here you can find cuisine of different states at very moderate rates. For people with different tastes cuisine of Delhi offers eateries such as those at Paranthe wali gali, or chaat at Bengali Market and Sunder Nagar, bhelpuri at Greater Kailash and sweetmeats from Annapoorna and Ghantewala can be part of the gastronomical tour of Delhi. Cuisine of Delhi also includes mouth-watering, tandoori chicken and tandoori roti, which, when freshly had from the tandoor, makes a delicious meal. This is often available at roadside dhabas at a moderate cost.

Over the centuries, Delhi has changed hands, and hence personalities, umpteen times. She has been variously Rajput, Arab, Afghan, Mongol (Mughal), and English. The vivacious eat-well-drink-well Punjabis came to the city with literally nothing, having left everything behind, in what used to be home, in Pakistan when the partition happened. However in an amazingly short span of time they bounced back with their lives and careers back on track.

The Punjabis love to experiment and try everything, there is a veritable splash of cuisines you can sample. Thai, Lebanese, Chinese, Israeli, Italian, Indonesian, Spanish, Mexican, French, Moroccan, Swiss and much, much more of the local Indian stuff. What the Delhites don’t like, they amend. Like the famous Indian-Chinese, which is a Delhi product.

‘Going out’ in Delhi is usually associated with food. However that was not always so. Not very long ago, in fact right into the fabulous forties till before the coming of the Punjabis, orthodox Hindus in Delhi would not eat food cooked outside the home, dismissing it as ‘unclean’. Reading between the lines this meant they were not sure about the caste of the cook – Brahminist squeamishness, which was followed by a surprising aggressiveness by non-Brahmins castes like the kshtriyas, kayasthas and so on.

Most of the shops in Chandini Chowk date from the previous century, and some, like the Ghantewala Halwai, are even older. Almost all the shops have been handed down from father to son and many of these businesses are now being managed by the fourth or fifth generation.
Chandini Chowk’s merchants take fierce pride in their trade and wares, hence quality is of the essence. Some of them would even go to the pains of grinding their own spices rather than trusting shop-bought Masalas (mixtures of various spices). Most of the shops have their own (very) secret recipes (guarded like family heirlooms, no less). This makes it very interesting for the gourmet as no two places providing the same fare will have preparations that taste just the same.

There are stories attached to most places and food in the city. Like the nahiri, a delicate beef stew which is painstakingly prepared overnight and served just-so now at Nali Nahiri and such places. Apparently during the reign of Shah Jahan, Delhi’s water supply came from a canal in the middle of Chandini Chowk. The water of this canal became suspect for some reason so the doctors (hakims, in those times) got together and came up with a recipe for a beef stew with lots of red chilies which were supposed to have germ-killing properties. Whether that worked or not is not known, but we can tell the nahiri sure did. It is still a very popular dish in Delhi and other cities of Northern India, like Lucknow and Kanpur.

The oldest sweet shop in Delhi is the Ghantewala in Chandini Chowk, which went into business in 1790. Down the centuries, it has remained in the same family and is now in the hands of the eleventh generation. There’s an interesting story behind how it got its name, Ghanta actually means a big clanging bell in Hindi. Legend goes that whenever the royal procession moved down this road, the emperor was in the habit of stopping here for a snack – a habit that his elephant acquired too. Well, we all know how passionately fond of sweets elephants are, so of course came the day when he found the way to the shop himself. Apparently he refused to budge and kept on shaking its head until people rallied around with assorted sweets. The bells hanging from the elephant’s neck would tinkle whenever the animal went into stubborn mode and shook his head. and from there came the shop’s name – beat that! The Ghantewala Halwai is celebrated for its sohanhalwa, a sweet made from dry fruits, sprouts and sugar.

There is another Ghantewalah Shahi Halwai, now near the famous fountain in Old Delhi. It is owned by a part of the same family, which branched out somewhere down the line. This shop also does roaring business with its dry fruit, sohanhalwa, barfis and namkeens.

Chandini Chowk is justly famous for its chaat: a quintessentially Indian spicy snack with various ingredients, laced with lots of sauces. In shops like Natraj’s Dahi Bhale (almost legendary for its chaat) and Chaatwallah you can still bange on some of the best chaat in Delhi.

For those who want it, international cuisine is marks its presence in places like the Orient Express at the Taj Palace. Italian and Tex-Mex food, perhaps because of its affinity to Indian food, is very popular in Delhi and there are some very good joints like Flavors (owned by an Italian) and Rodeo. of course as far as five-star hotels are concerned you can have any cuisine from Thai to Spanish to Indonesian to Greek.

While on Delhi tour one can also try the busy dhabas providing the cuisines from the most fastidious of Nawabs or gourmets living in times when the culinary arts had reached a peak and feasts had become a measure of class, style, and social status.