Delhi - Eating and Sleeping - IgoUgo Delhi Journal

Mirchi Kebabs and Curries

Restaurant | "Some Like it Hot"

Quote:

The auto-rickshaw we'd picked up at India Gate dropped us at Connaught Place and we started to hunt for somewhere to eat. Joyce was more desperate for a beer, claiming it was the heat and the dry atmosphere and reminding us that despite flying Kingfisher Airways, we'd been robbed of our Kingfisher beer the night before by what Reggie Perrin's colleague would have called a 'Cock up on the Catering Front' (ie. they forgot to load any beer on the plane).We skipped past my favourite restaurant 'Zen' because we had a plan to go back there later in our trip and were saving it for a special treat. Instead we took a turning down one of the side-arms of the double donut that is Connaught Place when...Read More

The auto-rickshaw we'd picked up at India Gate dropped us at Connaught Place and we started to hunt for somewhere to eat. Joyce was more desperate for a beer, claiming it was the heat and the dry atmosphere and reminding us that despite flying Kingfisher Airways, we'd been robbed of our Kingfisher beer the night before by what Reggie Perrin's colleague would have called a 'Cock up on the Catering Front' (ie. they forgot to load any beer on the plane).

We skipped past my favourite restaurant 'Zen' because we had a plan to go back there later in our trip and were saving it for a special treat. Instead we took a turning down one of the side-arms of the double donut that is Connaught Place when my husband spotted a restaurant he liked the look of offering beer and kebabs.

The restaurant was called Mirchi and shared an entrance with a cinema and was to the side of a place called Piccadelhi. The guy on the door clearly wanted to make sure we didn't escape so he guided us in, took us to the lift and accompanied us all the way to the door. I guess he's had too many prospective 'fish' wriggle off the hook in the past. He need not have worried with us – we'd not eaten in 12 hours and if the place had looked awful we'd probably still have gone in.

Once inside the room seemed to be quite small with less than a dozen tables. Everything was very red – red table cloths, red-dressed waiters, red décor. We were offered a table near to the bar and immediately Joyce was ordering beers and the waiter offered the choice of standard or extra-strong Kingfisher. My advice is to always stick to the lighter version – Indian strong beer is deadly stuff. My sister Aileen was thrilled to discover the standard bottle size for beer in India is 650 ml – oh, the delights of first time travel in India!

The menu was large and varied but since the place specialised in kebabs, we decided to all share a mixed vegetarian kebab starter which was easily big enough for four people. It being our first day, Joyce and Aileen were still in the phase of "We'll be good and avoid the meat" although that didn't last too long. My husband and I are 95% veggie in India, only making an exception for the odd bit of fish or prawns if we go somewhere a bit fancy. I've not had any other meat in 20 years but my husband becomes a situational-veggie when we go to India or anywhere that food hygiene might be considered a bit iffy.

Getting a decision out of my sister is like getting water out of a stone so I got bossy and suggested we chose three vegetarian curries, some rice and some garlic naans and since nobody else had a better suggestion, that's what we did. We ordered a palak paneer (spinach and cottage cheese lumps), Dal Tadka (a yellow lentil dish), and a dish with mushrooms and peas in a creamy sauce whose name I don't recall and which I can't read off the printed receipt.

Service was quite slow so we had plenty of time to finish our beers and order some more. We'd arrived at about 7.30 pm which was late enough to miss the early diner 'free beer' offer but still early by local standards. During our visit the restaurant soon filled up around us. We were the only foreign tourists in the place which reassured my sister who didn't want to just go to places where all the other tourists go. When our starters arrived we received a giant platter of mixed kebabs – lumps of tandoori paneer, tandoori mushrooms, pieces of potato hollowed out and stuffed with nuts and dried fruit, green spinach rissoles and odd lentil 'sausages'. These were all served with a bright green coriander-rich sauce. The mix of tastes and textures was excellent and we had no problem to polish off the whole platter. The spinach rissoles had been particularly popular.

The single portion of rice that we'd ordered was big enough for all four of us to get a good little pile on our plates and the two garlic naans were easily enough for four. Compared to others we had in later restaurants, they weren't very strongly flavoured and didn't really have enough garlic on them. The two curries were great – the palak paneer had juicy cubes of firm cottage cheese in a supremely smooth spinach sauce. The mushroom and pea dish was a little bit spicy but not enough to scare a first day traveller and could be zapped up a notch with lime pickle. The dal tadka was delicious, rich, spicy, and buttery and served in a little copper bucket. It's a perpetual mystery to me how Indian cooks get so much flavour into a lentil dish and how we in the west are so utterly rubbish at using pulses.

In the interests of research I sent my husband and my sister to check out the toilets and both pronounced them to be very clean. You might think we're on holiday but I'm convinced my husband is on a two week toilet survey. The service throughout was low-key and unobtrusive which is how I like it. Nobody threw anything or spilt anything but equally nobody kept hovering over us or pestering us to have more or to have something different.

Our meal with a large tandoori platter to start, three curries, a portion of rice, two garlic naans and a total of 7 beers came to 2500 rupees or about £10 each but over 1000 rupees of that was beer. All prices are subject to VAT at 20% on alcohol and something like 12.5% on food and to a further 10% service charge on top. The 'on tops' really add up in a city like Delhi but it was still a good meal and pretty good value for the location of the restaurant and the food we had. We knew we'd be spending a lot less once we got out of Delhi.

On our return to Delhi at the end of our trip we went back again for our last night meal and had an ever better dinner than before. On this second occasion we were suffering a bit from two weeks of non-stop curry which can really start to shrink your appetite. With only the flight home to get through, Joyce ordered a lamb dish that she couldn't stop talking about and hubby and I added an Punjabi fish curry which was the outstanding Indian dish of our two week trip. We spent a little more than the first time – partly due to rather a lot of beer – but at close to £50 for the four of us, we were all absolutely delighted with Mirchi as the venue for our 'Last Supper'. It's not a big restaurant, you probably won't find it on any listings, and it's nothing fancy to look at. If you can turn a bline eye to the television screens at either end of the restaurant – which were showing some very bloody American extreme wrestling on the evening that hubby and I popped in for a beer – the food is delicious and I thoroughly recommend it. Read Less

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on November 6, 2025

Mirchi Kebabs and Curries
H-block, Connaught Place
New Delhi, India

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Saket Bed and Breakfast, New Delhi

Hotel | "Saket and See"

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When I started planning our trip to India I thought Delhi would be easy but the Commonwealth Games (CWG) meant everything was more expensive than normal. My sister and her girlfriend were making their first visit to India and I wanted to at least start their visit with something a bit nicer than the places I usually go.I rejected the hotels I have used before because the prices were highly inflated and I wasn't willing to be exploited. I looked for alternatives in the Bed and Breakfast sector. I contacted three or four of the more popular B&Bs listed on one of the travel sites and chose the Saket B&B. Saket is quite a long way south of the city centre and I would not pr...Read More

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on November 6, 2025

Saket Bed and Breakfast, New Delhi
Swaran Villa, D21 Marg
Delhi, India
09582872580

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Zen Restaurant

Restaurant | "The Best Place for a Chinese Meal is India"

Quote:

Zen is one of my favourite restaurants even though I can generally only eat there once or twice every year or two. 'If it's so great, how come you don't go more often?', you may be thinking. That's simple, Zen is in New Delhi and I'm not. But if I were, I'd be there so often they'd have to give me a discount for my loyalty. And since it's now only three and a half weeks until we fly off to India, my thoughts are (sad I know) already turning to thinking about my favourite restaurant that I want to visit again. It really is an outstanding Chinese restaurant and - controversial as this might sound - for me, nobody does Chinese food better than Indians.Yes, I said that was controversial and I ...Read More

Zen is one of my favourite restaurants even though I can generally only eat there once or twice every year or two. 'If it's so great, how come you don't go more often?', you may be thinking. That's simple, Zen is in New Delhi and I'm not. But if I were, I'd be there so often they'd have to give me a discount for my loyalty. And since it's now only three and a half weeks until we fly off to India, my thoughts are (sad I know) already turning to thinking about my favourite restaurant that I want to visit again. It really is an outstanding Chinese restaurant and - controversial as this might sound - for me, nobody does Chinese food better than Indians.

Yes, I said that was controversial and I know there will be a few raised eyebrows and sharp intakes of breath. I've been to China a lot and eaten in many top restaurants - even one where they proudly told me that President Clinton had loved their chicken feet - but the problem with Chinese food in China is their total lack of understanding of those weird foreigners like myself who choose not to eat meat. I do eat fish and seafood but I tend to keep quiet about that for fear of what they might do to it, so in China I go completely meat-free. I've been in places where the chef clearly thought that spicy tofu would be so much better if he bunged a load of minced pork in to liven things up. And picking out mince with chopsticks isn't my idea of fun. And so for me, eating Chinese food in a country with a higher appreciation for the vagaries of consumer food choices suits me much better - hence my love of Indian Chinese food.

Zen's been on my must-see-must-eat-at list since I first started going to India and it's always a joy to go back. It's not hard to find as it's located in Block B of New Delhi's Connaught Place. If you are arriving by Metro, just check the exit signs to make sure you get the right block. Or if you aren't hungry, leave at any exit and have a good wander around until you find it. If you are coming by car or taxi, the drivers won't have trouble finding it and if you have a driver booked for the evening, there's plenty of parking nearby.

Connaught Place is New Delhi's Knightsbridge - it's where many of the top shops and restaurants can be found rubbing shoulders with street traders, tucked under the colonnaded blocks of shops. Zen is recognisable by its distinctive etched glass windows with art nouveau patterns and the heavy front door with its liveried doorman.

Once inside the art nouveau design continues on the walls and the tables are squeezed quite closely together. This is a popular restaurant and they do cram the punters in fairly tightly by local standards. The ground floor is non-smoking and the mezzanine is the only place where smokers can sit. It took us a while to work this out after the table next to us had three different couples each spending a short time having a drink before moving on. We really did wonder if they just didn't want to sit with us until we realised they were all smokers.

On our last visit we'd just come into Delhi from Amritsar where the culinary choices were very limited and where two of us had eaten out for little more than £2-3 per meal between us. Prior to that we'd been staying in a small village in the Punjab where our friend's dad had a cook who must have ranked amongst the worst in the country. So we were ready to have a bit of a blow-out meal.

The waiters brought us menus and took our orders for drinks. Since Amritsar is not only 100% veggie but also 100% alcohol free, we both wanted long cold beers to mark our return to the normal world. The liveried waiters made a fine performance of pouring and presenting our Kingfishers and then left us to ponder the menus. Considering that the closest thing to fancy service for the previous week had been scruffy waiters rubbing the old curry off plastic coated menus with a swift swipe on their even dirtier trousers, we were suitably impressed by the waiting skills of the staff at Zen. The Zen staff wear black trousers and waistcoats over crisp white shirts with black bow ties at the neck. It's always nice when the staff aren't wearing the food.

To start I had Prawn Tom Yum soup (not a surprise to anyone whose ever read any of my other oriental restaurant reviews - I always have PTYS) and hubby had Lemon and Coriander Vegetable soup. Both were beautifully presented and excelled in their subtlety and balance of flavours. At a suitable interval after we finished our starters and had our beers topped up, the main courses also arrived. We shared two dishes - a steamed fish in soy sauce and Szechuan tofu - served with plain rice. The waiter dished up the food with an impressive silver service style which isn't that easy to deliver with a whole fish. As we ate, he popped back to top up our plates and take another order for some beer and even when we'd finished our food we were enjoying the atmosphere so much that we were left to linger over our beer for a long time without any attempt to hurry us on our way.

My notebook from the holiday reminds me that the meal came to 1300 rupees which was around £16 for the two of us. A large part of that was the beer which is marked up to a shocking degree in any up-market restaurant so that a standard bottle of beer (I think we had about 3 in total) can easily cost as much as a main course once the taxes on top of taxes on top of an already high list price have been multiplied up. However, whilst 1300 Rp was the most expensive meal we had on that particular holiday (with many costing less than 100 rp for two people), it still represented excellent value and we were more than happy to pay for the quality and atmosphere of one of our favourite restaurants. And to put it into further context, our meal the year before at the Spice Route (the Imperial Hotel's restaurant that is one of the top 10 oriental restaurants in the world) had set us back about five times that amount.

We were very lucky to get a table at 7.30pm on a Friday night so my advice would be to book or to go early. You won't regret it. Read Less

Member Rating 5 out of 5 on September 20, 2025

Zen Restaurant
B-25, Connaught Place
New Delhi, India 110001
91-11-23357444

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The Host

Restaurant | "Tom Yum or Tom Yuk?"

Quote:

~A Far From Heavenly Host~I'm supposed to be spending this weekend working on plans for my next trip to India but it's so much more fun to distract myself with thoughts of the last time I was in Delhi. And for me FOOD is one of the things I most look forward to when I visit the city.The Host is a Chinese and Indian restaurant on prestigious Connaught Place in the heart of India's capital city, New Delhi. Unfortunately, it's one of many such restaurants on Connaught Place and it can be very difficult to tell them apart as we realised to our cost. The circular lay-out of Connaught's double donut-ring design is sure to confuse the unwary and lots of the restaurants look pretty sim...Read More

Member Rating 1 out of 5 on September 20, 2025

The Host
F-8, Connaught Place, Inner Circle.
New Delhi, India
011 23316381

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Megha Sheraton

Hotel | "A Megha Good Budget Choice"

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One of my favourite hotels in Delhi is the Madonna in Rajinder Nagar which I love because the owner is such a nice chap. However, on my trip to India two years ago, we decided to take notice of the credit crunch and trade down to the second of the hotels owned by the chap who has the Madonna - the sister hotel known as the Megha Sheraton. This place comes in at around the $50 mark which is at least $30 less per night than the Madonna and it's just a few doors away. Knowing that we love the area where both are located, and that we trust and like the owner, we booked the Madonna for one night when we arrived in Delhi, and the Mega Sheraton for two nights when we got back from our trip to Bhutan and Darj...Read More

One of my favourite hotels in Delhi is the Madonna in Rajinder Nagar which I love because the owner is such a nice chap. However, on my trip to India two years ago, we decided to take notice of the credit crunch and trade down to the second of the hotels owned by the chap who has the Madonna - the sister hotel known as the Megha Sheraton. This place comes in at around the $50 mark which is at least $30 less per night than the Madonna and it's just a few doors away. Knowing that we love the area where both are located, and that we trust and like the owner, we booked the Madonna for one night when we arrived in Delhi, and the Mega Sheraton for two nights when we got back from our trip to Bhutan and Darjeeling. The owner throws in a free hotel pick up or drop off if you book the Megha Sheraton for at least two nights and this is an excellent deal. Just make sure you send him your flight details so that they don't miss your arrival.

The Megha Sheraton is a bit older and more run down than the Madonna. The owner explained to me that for a long time he couldn't do any upgrading on the hotel because it was under threat of being knocked down over some strange planning infringement. Now that threat is passed, I fully expect to see the Megha Sheraton getting better soon.

The location in Old Rajinder Nagar is great. It's not a fancy area - I'd guess it's a solidly middle class district with lots of gated houses with name plates for doctors and dentists - but it's very convenient for the metro and the nearest station is Karol Bagh. The area is a lot quieter than the much better known district of Karol Bagh. During the daytime and evening there are lots of small shops along the streets but once the shops close, it's very quiet at night time and this is unusual in Delhi where so many hotels are disturbed by constant traffic noise.

Our room was large and decorated with the same sort of furniture we knew from the Madonna. We had two ceiling fans (one worked, the other didn't) as well as an AC unit. The floor was tiled and the walls were magnolia. I'd love to know who does their plastering because each time I lay in bed looking at the ceilings I was stunned by what a smooth job they had done. Our big bed was two full-sized singles pushed together and the were decorated with a fleecy blanket and clean but slightly worn sheets and pillow cases. I know some people freak about Indian hotel sheets, but it's important to remember that they don't have big industrial laundries like many European or American hotels would use. Often your sheets have been washed by hand and without all the artificial bleaches and brighteners that are needed for pristine white linens. We had a desk, a mirror, a fridge, TV with cable, a wardrobe and a suitcase stand. The bathroom was small and slightly battered but was clean and adequate for what we needed. Keep in mind that hotels in India don't provide a lot of towels or change them every day - we always bring our own.

Having stayed at the Megha Sheraton and liked it a lot, I certainly intend to return later this year with my sister and her partner. The staff are friendly (especially the owner who treats us like family) and the location is fantastic and it's a great value option in a city where it's hard to find dependable mid-price accommodation. Read Less

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on July 11, 2025

Megha Sheraton
53/1, Old Rajinder Nagar
New Delhi, India
+91 11 42432807

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