By Sourish Bhattacharrya
23rd Dec 2011
Indian Accent and Varq started around the same time, one at the as-yet unknown boutique hotel named The Manor and the other at the famous Taj Mahal Hotel on Mansingh Road. One haf a chef whose bread and butter, jam and jelly, came from Oriental Cuisine and the other was the brainchild of the formidable Hemant Oberoi, a celebrity chef who has heads of state and government eating out of his hand. So you don’t need to have Michellin stars to guess who we said would outlast other.
But Indian Accent knocked us off our w-know-it-all-pedestial by constantly raising its bar for itself. It seemed as if Manish Mehrotra, executive chef who first got my attention with his khao suey, was proving the point that you don’t have to be a Gomes or a Qureishi to be able to make good Indian food, and his compatriot Shantanu Mehrotra was happy to follow in his footsteps (they aren’t related but they’re Indian Accent’s M&M- warm, welcoming and unfailingly leaving behind sweet memories.)
The result was predictable. Delhi has blipped out Varq from its radar screen, and the restaurant, despite it good genes, is stuck in the groove that Oberoi has created for it. The problem is, Oberoi opens more restaurants than he can possibly care for himself. And when his interest moves from one restaurant to another, the first suffers in silence. For Manish and Shantanu, Indian Accent is their life; they are constantly reinventing without smelling the soul of their creations to the devil of modernist cuisine.
These thoughts crowd my upper storey when I spent a fog-laden, listless Sunday afternoon in the welcoming embrace of Indian Accent. My big revelation came when, towards the end of the meal, the pan-seared John Dory(Rs 975), the fish every good chef loves to serve, arrived on a bed of haaq, the Kashmiri greens that only a Kashmiri mother-in-law can make to perfection. We could not decide what we loved more- the haaq (the best I have had outside my mother-in-law’s table) or the John Dory. That’s what integrity of cuisine is all about- you don;t sacrifice taste at the altar of gustatory inventiveness.
Indian Accent’s new winter menu is crowded with such surprises: potato sphere chaat with white pea ragda (Rs 395) is a brilliant reinvention of aloo tikki with the Delhi favorite called matar (or matra); tandoori bacon prawns with wasabi malai cream (Rs 1095) gives a creative spin to a dish that all of us must have many times over, the stuffed zucchini blosson with Punjab kadhi and ghee rice (Rs 695) was an example of how an unusual ingredient can lift an everyday dish and turn it into an experience; the kadhai tiger praws with XO balchao and masala prawn crackers (Rs 1295) were lip-smackingly comfortable; and the way the boys reduced the tamarind chutney-glazed tandoori spare ribs (Rs 925) into bare bones was the best endorsement the chef could have asked for.
If a dish gets two brothers to fight for more, and if haaq inspires them to ask for a second helping, then both must be worth an award! Follow their lead and ask for the wild mushroom kulcha drizzled with truffle oil (Rs 295) or the one stuffed with applewood-smoked bacon (Rs 295). And yes, do not leave without having the misht doi cannoli- it is a Bengali-Sicillian marirage that would inspire Godfather to make an offer M&M wouldn’t be able to refuse!
