A few weeks ago at HICSA, India’s most important hotel investment conference, Manav Thadani, who runs HVS, the organisation behind HICSA, presented Ajit Kerkar with a lifetime achievement award.

A lot of nonsense is spoken about food in India. But in no area are the myths and misconceptions as prevalent as they are in the case of vegetarian and non-vegetarian food habits. People still like to ...

If I asked you to name the most famous north Indian restaurant in the world, my guess is that you would pick the obvious contender: Bukhara. And, by and large, most people would agree with you. It’s ...

The first time I had an authentic Peking Duck in India was at the Great Wall restaurant at the Leela Palace in Mumbai twenty years ago. I was having lunch with Captain CP Krishnan Nair, the Leela ...

It’s a question I get asked again and again. And though I nearly always give the same answer, it never seems to satisfy people. It’s a hard question to answer. In most cities, food exists at different ...

If you have been following the furore over the price of tomatoes, you will note that reporters and political analysts often refer to tomatoes as a basic staple of Indian cooking and the food of the ...

Perhaps the best-remembered thing that the late Groucho Marx ever said was his comment on clubs. He would not join a club, he stated, because any club that was willing to admit people like him was ...

Towards the end of the last century (I think it was 1999), Kanwal Grover asked to see me. I knew Mr. Grover because I had been at school with his son Kapil from the age of eight (first in Bombay and ...

Many people on Twitter marked an article from the Hindustan Times to me. The piece was a summary of a report by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and had an irresistible headline: “Samosa ...

I usually end each year or begin the following one by listing all the food trends I have observed over the last 12 months. This year, for reasons too tedious to recount, I neglected to do such a piece ...

Almost everything you think you know about Morocco is either out of date or a complete lie. Take Casablanca. Those of us who have heard of the city know it from the classic Hollywood movie starring ...

I never need much persuasion to go back to Kolkata. So when Sumit Dasgupta, my former colleague at Sunday and now a big-shot Kolkata editor, invited me to conduct a conversation with Roni Mazumdar, I ...