A homecoming menu at New Delhi's Pandara Road featuring burrah kebabs, butter chicken, dal makhani, garam doodh & loads of memories : Gulati, Havemore

Having
had lunch at Kake Da Hotel the day I arrived in New Delhi during my
recent trip to the city, my next question was, ‘where should I go for dinner?’

I put this
question to my young food writer friend, Amit Patnaik. My brief to him was that I was looking
for traditional Delhi food joint, and ideally some place near the Connaught Place area given that my hotel was located there. That’s when Amit
suggested that we meet and go to Pandara Road at night. I readily agreed, as I have a bit of the
history with the place and have not really explored Pandara Road during my recent
visits to Delhi.

The thing
is, Pandara Road is possibly the first place that I ever stayed at in India. This is when I came to India
on holidays during the late 1970s. For those who didn’t know this about me, I was born in the UK, then lived in Iran, before I moved to India as a kid. On trips to India then, New Delhi where the maternal side of my family lived, would be our first stop before we headed to Kolkata where the paternal side of my family lived.

My maternal grandfather, the late Narendra Nath Roy, was an officer in the Indian Railways. He stayed at Pandara road with my aunts and my uncle and my
grandmom back then. My mother had grown up in that house too and lived there till she got married to my
father and went off to the UK. My first visit to India was possibly when I was
around 3 or 4 years old. I was the first grandson in my mother’s side of the
family. To add to that, I was born in bidesh (vilayat), which was a big thing
in those days. I was tiny, chubby and fussy and very very spoilt and pampered, or so they say.

A flood of memories came back to me when I headed to Pandara Road with Amit. That of being chased down the road by a little dog. The blue plastic potty that they had got for me as I couldn’t use squat at ‘Indian toilets’. I remember becoming friends with my chhotomashi, or youngest aunt, who was in school then. We would play and hug and then fight too. She’s around ten years older to me. I remember being taken from house to be house to be showed to neighbours and friends, and my grandpa later telling me about how I’d once gone to someone’s place, eaten and then said, ‘now we can go.’ Children do not beat around the bush you see. I also remembered asking folks about where my grandpa’s car was. In UK, everyone I knew had cars. In India in the 1970s, having a car was very rare and my grandfather didn’t have one. My grandpa used to cycle down to work at his office at Shastri Bhavan, well before cycling became trendy. So my aunt told me that, that the black and yellow ambassador taxis, which looked the same and were all driven by elderly Sikhs, were my grandpa’s car and I used to call them ‘dadu’s car’.  I also remember my mother cooking noodles and fried chicken for me as I wouldn’t eat Indian food. Then there was the time my granny made pantua, the Bengali cottage cheese based version of the gulab jamun, which I refused to eat as I had no idea what it was. Then at my aunt’s urging, I tried one and liked it so much that I finished the whole vessel, and my granny had to make another vessel full of pantuas for me as she became my favourite cook in the family. Didu, my maternal grandmother, spoke no English and I spoke no Bengali or Hindi, but we did get along well. My grandpa spoke English of course and told me stories that would take me across the world on a journey of discovery. I also remember a doll who sang a lullabye if one pulled a string attached to it. My father had got it for my aunt but we both played with it (I was not alpha male type) and my granny sewed a salwar kurta for it. I also remembered there being a roti shop where my grandmom would take kneaded dough and where they would make rotis for us. 

Remember, I
was just 3 years then, and yet I remembered all of the above from my first visit to Pandara Road which was forty years back. As I did remember the Mother Dairy
booth, with a milk dispenser which used to fascinate me then. Imagine my excitement
when we reached Pandara Road and when I saw the booth
still standing there. Thanks to my mother whatsapping the number of the house where
she once lived,   I was able to locate the house where I had stayed when I first came to India. We spotted it rather easily in fact and took pictures. This experience reminded me
of the time when I had gone back to Canterbury a few years back. I went to the
hospital where I was born then and to the house where we lived in. The experience
felt surreal and yet filled me with happiness and I had blogged about it.

My family doesn’t live at Pandara Road anymore and yet I felt as if I was back home when I reached there. I will ascribe this peaceful, easy feeling to the
company my friends, Amit Patnaik and Ankita Goel, who joined me there.  I had got to know Ankita from Twitter recently and I met her for the first time that evening and Amit for the second time but we all got along very well. Add to that, the warmth of the people
around us and you will know why I was smiling in all the pictures and in some of
the funny phone videos that we shot that evening.

We then went to the Pandara Market to eat. There were three restaurants there that people on
Facebook had told me that I should go to. These are Gulati (not Gulati veg), Havemore and
Pindi. Interestingly, they were all recommended for their butter chicken. There was also a Japanese restaurant named Ichiban there and
another Indian place called Chicken Inn.

Amit told
me that the area around Pandara Road still houses folks who work with the
government. Folks who usually prefer to eat at traditional Indian restaurants which are
not too expensive. These places are not too posh or trendy. They are oriented
towards making families at home said Amit, and are definitely more lux than Connaught
Place restaurants such as Kake Da Hotel which I had been to in the afternoon.

When I later asked my chhotomashi (aunt) about whether she remembered these restaurants from the time she grew up at Pandara Road, she
told me that she did remember there being dhaabas at the market. However, the
families of the government officials who lived there, like ours, didn’t go to these dhabas
in the 70s and early 80s, she said. The dhaabas were popular though, she told me, and
would be usually be filled with men. She didn’t know where they were from. What she does remember is a little corner shop where my grandfather
would take her and go to every evening after work. “He would buy a cigarette and
then he’d buy me a Chicklet (chewing gum). That was the high point of the day.”

The
restaurants that we saw at Pandara Market were all equally recommended to me on
Facebook. Amit and Ankita didn’t have a clear favourite either. So I suggested
that we go to a couple of them, Gulati and Havemore, and check out the food.

Our first
stop was Gulati. The ambiance reminded me of the Copper Chimney at
Worli in Mumbai.  It was ver Indian ‘ family restaurant and bar’ in look and feel. It was almost as if we were back in the 1990s again. The restaurant was clean, well lit, had
good toilets and a happy buzz to it. The place was quite full though it was 8
pm and on a weekday at that. Most groups seemed to be that of families. The service was
very warm and the waiter was visibly committed to his place of work and made
recommendations to us and answered our questions in English. He offered to take
photographs of us so I got him to shoot a video on my phone too. Which was fine, till I started speaking about the food, when he lost focus and started
describing the food himself with the camera pointed at the great beyond as you will see in the video at the end of this post. 

All the Pandara Park places had ‘we do not
levy service charge,’ written on the menu. The tipping is left to you unlike in modern restaurants in Mumbai at least, where service charge is added by the restaurant.

 

We tried
the Burrah Akabari Kebab at Gulati. The meat, served on the bone, is marinated for four hours and finished in the tandoor
as the waiter proudly told us. His pride was most justified as the kebabs were
indeed very good. The mutton (goat meat) was tantalisingly juicy. It was not ‘melt in the
mouth,’ (does everything have to be so?) but gave in beautifully to each bite and gave lots of pleasure. The spicing
was pleasantly intricate and yet not overwhelming in terms of either salt or chilli. The burrah kebab is a dish that we often order at the Bukhara and Peshawari restaurants of
the ITC Hotel chain. It would not be fair to compare the Gulati and Bukhara burrah though as I didn’t eat the
two at the same time. However, what I can say for sure, is that the burrah kebab
at Gulati is definitely a dish I would recommend strongly to you and go back
for myself too.

The other
dish that we tried there was the Murg Gulati Bemisal. Tender pieces of chicken, served
in a gravy of minced meat and egg. The latter we knew of, thanks to our waiter, as the presence of the egg was not obvious otherwise. This is the sort of the thickish,
masala heavy gravy dish that one associates with Punjabi restaurants. The quality of
the kukkad (chicken) was pretty good. The spices and seasoning again, as it was in the burrah, was fairly well
balanced. As a concept, it seemed similar to the ‘rara’ where meat is cooked in
a meat mince gravy. I am not sure if the dish could be called  ‘bemisal’ (matchless), but it
definitely went well with the rotis on a chilly Delhi night.

Aishwarya Yadav, an Instagram follower wrote in to me saying that Gulati dinners was an integral part of her childhood. She goes there whenever she returns to Delhi, she told me. She said that the ambiance and presentation has become more posh now, but that the food tastes the same and just as wonderful as she remembers it to be from her childhood.

The other
restaurant that we went to at Pandara Market that night was called Havemore. The name
reminded me of Havmore, an ice cream chain in Mumbai. Like Gulati, Havemore too claimed
to have been established in 1959, as the sign outside the restaurant said.

We tried
the butter chicken at Havemore, as it had been recommended to me by folks on social
media. The good thing was that it came in different sizes, and we chose the
smallest one as we were fairly full. Thankfully I had company with me, and good
company at that, to help me finish the chicken. We were offered options of boneless chicken and chicken on
the bone, and we chose the latter. Chicken tastes nicer when cooked on the bone, though that’s a bit difficult to share. There were two pieces of chicken between the three
of us, but we managed with me doing a George (of Masterchef Australia) act and portioning out the food. Delhi’ites find the butter chicken of Mumbai  restaurants too sweet. The butter
chicken that I had at Havemore told me why this is so. The gravy here was thick and creamy, a
tad tangy, but not sweet for sure. Nor was it high on chilli heat despite the orange
colour. A heavy dish not doubt, but packed with flavour. If I was to compare it
with the ‘Goila Butter Chicken,’ in Mumbai that I like these days, I’d say that the latter
is lighter and something that I can eat with relish and with a lighter
conscience compared to the Havemore variety, but when in Delhi I would definitely loosen my belt and go straight for a butter chicken like Havemore’s.

We tried
other famous ‘Punjabi restaurant cliché dish,’ the dal makhani at Havemore. This was disappointingly
thin and salty  and the only blip in the evening. I’ve had better for sure and in Mumbai too.

At Havmore too, the service was competent, though not as ‘evolved’ as at Gulati next door. Havemore, like Gulati, was packed with diner, the place was neat and clean as was the toilet, and the
vibe inside was warm.

The thing
to have for dessert at Pandara Market, I am told, is the kulfi. Given that it
was cold, and that I had a panel to speak at the next morning, this didn’t seem to be a good
idea.

Ankita took
us to the corner sweet shop, where I first had some excessively sweet gulab jamuns in
memory of the pantua that my granny had made me when I visited her at Pandara
Road. 

Ankita insisted that we try something called, ‘garam doodh’ there. Hot
milk, boiling on a kadhai, served in a disposable earthen glass, flavoured with garam masala and saffron and with sugar added to it. I was
sceptical at first as I am not a milk drinker. Ankita insisted that I try it, and said that it’s a
Delhi winter thing. I gave in and tried some. It wasn’t bad after all, and I
actually finished the whole glass. 

I did give the malai, milk fat, to Amit
though.

The owner
of the shop was a chatty and friendly elderly gentleman. I told him about my family who used to
live close by. He told me that the shop dated back to 1959, ‘like every other shop
here,’ he  added with a smile. He’d come to work here in the late 1970s. He
showed me pictures of himself from then and said, “I look very different now.”
What hasn’t changed though, I am sure, is his huge smile.

I finally bid
farewell to my friends at Pandara Road and headed to my hotel. When back in my room, I checked
Facebook and saw that my mother had left a comment where she spoke of a milk
shop at Pandara Market where she was tempted to have hot milk from as a kid but
could not. 

‘Being Bengali, we were not allowed to have food cooked outside back
then,’ she said with an audible sigh.

That’s when
I realized that by having the garam doodh at Pandara Park, I had unknowingly
fulfilled a childhood dream of my mother. We grow up to be our mothers as they say!

Approximate costs; Gulati: Rs 2,000 for a burrah kebab, the chicken bemisal, 3 rotis and two lassis, Havemore Rs 1,000 for a small butter chicken, a dal and 2 tandoori rotis, milk place: Rs 400 odd for 3 milks and 2 gulab jamuns.


Videos that we shot on my iPhone that night:

Gulati:

Havemore:

Garam Doodh:

Please also read:

1. My post from when I went back to Canterbury where I was born

2. A post which my mother had written about returning to the house at Pandara Road

3. My post on my lunch at Kake Da Hotel earlier that day