Every time I return to Delhi, everything is different. Bars turn into shops, shops turn into restaurants, restaurants turn into gyms, and my childhood home has turned into a gleaming jewellery store visible from the moon. So I like to reassure myself by checking up on all my favourites when I arrive.
Over the years, Indian Accent has cemented its place among these with its lovely food and charming, enthusiastic staff (never supercilious about explaining their very complicated menu).
Indian Accent serves contemporary Indian food, but there are no gratuitous outbreaks of molecular jellies or suspicious foams here. Instead, the kitchen plays with texture and colour, researching old, sometimes forgotten recipes, and refashioning them using flavours and ingredients from around the world. The dishes are pre-plated and not generally designed for sharing.
I have, in my more misguided moments, eaten a chicken tikka sushi roll with wasabi-pudina chutney, a noodle samosa and an uttapam lasagna, so I have experienced the absolute nadir of fusion food, as have many of us. (Say dhokla ravioli or kadhi risotto to the person next to you and watch them cringe). But when done right, contemporary Indian cooking can bring new life to old standbys. Done best, it brings an unexpected, tongue-in-cheek point of view to the table (to wit: the Phantom cigarette and black-sesame-and-sugar ‘ash’ that accompanied Indian Accent’s ginger ice cream, or their chyawanprash cheesecake). It doesn’t have to be frou-frou either. Like the tandoori momos beloved of Delhi University’s North and South Campuses — momos rubbed with the familiar lurid orange spice mix before being roasted in a tandoor — it just needs to take from different traditions and invent something that works, however surprisingly.
I was once in the Indian Accent kitchen at lunchtime: each dish had so many components that I lost count of how many went into each painstakingly-assembled plate: parmesan crisps, caper confit, toasted kalonji (nigella), crushed kurkure, translucent radish discs, chickpea cress, tiny kaffir-lime-flavoured paos. All these disparate bits can sometimes end up as an incoherent list of ingredients — churan ka karela, quinoa puffs, bitter melon crisps, or the much-feted duck cornetto with foie gras, which has never really grown on me. But some of Indian Accent’s inventions are sublime: the pulled pork phulka taco, for instance, or the ghee roast boti, the now-vanished kadhai duck in a green mango reduction and the fantastically excessive foie-gras-galauti kebab with strawberry-green-chilli chutney.
On this trip, however, I had a new favourite to inspect. Café Lota, the Crafts Museum’s new star attraction, is just as charming (except at midday, when the outdoor seating is a cooking medium, not a seating space), and much more affordable. It’s more restrained in its approach; sabudana popcorn and sriracha crop up here and there, but the menu is more a well-researched compendium of regional food that tries to highlight its ingredients: bhat (black soybeans), ragi (millet), Kerala red rice, griddled Ladakhi bread, amaranth seeds, bedgi red chillies. I always get the cool, gentle palak patta chaat, and the excellent salli boti, garnished with crisp potato straws (until recently, you had to find a Parsi friend or fly to Mumbai).
There is something reminiscent of Indian Accent in how Rahul Dua’s kitchen at Lota cooks and plates its food: they know what they’re doing, and they do it with a sense of humour. It’s evident in the bhapa doi cheesecake (which is so popular it is now also served at breakfast), or the fat beetroot ‘chops’ with bhaja moshla-spiked cream cheese, like a very successful Russian-Bengali cultural alliance.
At both places, everything on the plate has a purpose. What you get isn’t just good-looking gimmickry, but the real deal: diverse flavours from around the subcontinent and further afield, somehow all working together. And I’m happy to report that, with some judicious napping in between, it is perfectly possible to eat at both Café Lota and Indian Accent on the same day.
(Naintara is a food writer based in Paris. Follow her on twitter >@naintaramaya)