Picking Through Food

Ritu’s very choice of restaurant is piquant to start with. Bina Modi, who owns Ego Thai, doesn’t need to earn a living. Ritu Dalmia, who owns Diva, doesn’t either. Both are from the same conservative community and both probably launched their unconventional professional lives with a tussle at home. Both ladies are closely associated with their restaurants, visiting them every day, but that’s about where the similarity ends. Whereas Ritu is a trained Italian chef, Modi confesses ignorance about the kitchen.

The conversation turns to food soon. After she’s placed the order—crispy fried vegetables in lemon juice, white fungus salad and a kael leaf platter—we dissect her clutch of restaurants and the competition. "Hey, guess who Nelson Wang is tying up with in Delhi?" and "There’s going to be an innovative Indian restaurant soon that will take the pants off Punjabi by Nature".

I ask her if cockroaches still run riot in her bloodstream (Sir Terence Conran’s famous explanation for his mania for opening new restaurants). "No," she replies with a straight face, "I’m getting old." By 30, she had opened Mezza Luna and Capuccino in Delhi, sold both, opened Vama in London, sold her share to her partner, opened Diva in Delhi, opened and closed Diva Art Café#, opened three outlets in a food court (only one of which centres around Italian food).

In between assembling kael leaf morsels with onions, dried shrimps, chillies, sweet soy and lime and handing them to me, she fields calls from her meat supplier: "No, get me cap off," she instructs him. There’s been a drought in Australia and New Zealand and the price of lamb chops there is going through the roof. The cap, incidentally, refers to the edging of fat.

We’re so busy gossiping that we switch-off our critical faculties, swap desserts—thab thim krob and coconut ice cream with sticky rice—and saunter out into Delhi’s hottest afternoon thus far.