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 ...

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 ...

We now have a rough idea of what the food of ancient India was NOT like. We know that there were no potatoes. There were no tomatoes. There was no corn. And most intriguing of all, there were no ...

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.

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 ...

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 not unusual for a restaurant to be successful for 25 years. Many of the restaurants in Delhi’s Connaught Place, Kolkata’s Park Street and Mumbai’s Churchgate Street have lasted for longer. Some ...

Should Rahul Gandhi have been critical of the way things are in today’s India when he spoke in the UK? Does this amount to asking white people to colonise India as some BJP supporters have suggested?

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 once interviewed Jean-Claude Ellena, the legendary French perfumer (First by Van Cleef & Arpels, Declaration by Cartier, Terre d’Hermes, etc.) who created the first green tea fragrance for Bulgari ...

Almost everything you think you know about Morocco is either out of date or a complete lie.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 ...