This isn’t a comment made purely in jest. In India’s metros, it often seems like a new place to wine or dine opens every day. The variety, from Arabian to Zanskari, will astonish anyone who might care to think back to the days of dingy bars and a time when eating choices were either stodgy Continental or greasy Punjabi. And anyone who could teach indigent Nepali immigrants of appropriately Oriental appearance how to boil noodles could start a ‘Chinese’ restaurant.
The daunting failure rate in the industry apart (despite the high profit margins, less than one in 10 bars and restaurants is successful, because they aren’t easy to run profitably on a sustained basis), many are doing very well indeed. On most nights you’ll find them packed, earning money somewhat faster than a mint can print it. Several aren’t just packed; they are crawling with their city’s Beautiful People.
Glitterati does have the talent, seen elsewhere only in quantum physics, of appearing to be in more than one place at a time. Which is presumably great for business, because it only increases the number of other people who want to spend their evenings at a hip place. Yet, fashionistas are nothing if not fickle, and can abandon their fave raves with all the speed of a frightened lepton. So today’s Terence Conran-styled happening place can all too soon turn into tomorrow’s last option for the terminally unfashionable.
But the cool brigade’s kiss of death hasn’t happened to the bars and restaurants featured in Outlook’s survey of the new wining and dining establishments in India’s 10 largest cities. Wherever possible we’ve concentrated on the very newest places; only in a couple of cities that haven’t seen launches in the last six months have we included still-popular places from the recent past. Bon Appetit and Cheers!
Pramila N. Phatarphekar with Saumya Roy in Mumbai, Sugata Srinivasaraju in Bangalore, Vatsala Kamath in Chennai, Savitri Choudhury in Hyderabad, Sutapa Mukerjee in Lucknow, Chander Suta Dogra in Chandigarh, Sanghamitra Chakraborty in Calcutta, Darshan Desai in Ahmedabad and Harsh Kabra in Pune
