Bite Of  Mumbai

           ________SIDDHARTH KAK

Even though this is a dreary season, the restaurants are throbbing. Newer and more frantic means are being used to repackage the same elements with a difference. A few days ago, the new Royal Meridien Hotel near Sahar Airport, Mumbai, which flaunts a colonised style, advertised its new restaurant Captain Trumpet’s. The restaurant has not been launched yet but the manager obligingly showed me the elaborate menu and explained that Captain Trumpet was a fictional character who travelled to India and created his own brand of Asian Continental fusion cuisine. The story is fine, if a little hackneyed, and the pictures in the menu card are interesting, but I’d really like to report on the food when the restaurant is formally launched in the first week of October. I didn’t like the lobby which is long and narrow, but its colonial decor is pleasing. The 24-hour coffee shop was crowded and there is a half-hour waiting time, even at 1 a.m. Their Cigar Bar is very restful and tastefully done and my friend, cosmetic dentist Dr Suchetan Pradhan, who is a member of the Mumbai Single Malt club, says he absolutely loved the ambience at the last meet held here. That’s good going for a newly-opened hotel.

(Captain Trumpets - Telephone No. 8204392/8220519)

SO we trotted off to Leela Hotel and settled for a meal at their spacious Waterfall Cafe which has a fine buffet distinguished by its salads and desserts. I must recommend their prawn dosas. They are golden crisp and the prawns are in a tangy masala, making for a dosa heaven to which I was first introduced by model Madhu Sapre when we met here once over a tea-time conference. The gentle, white appams and mild vegetable ishtew are equally delicious, but I agree with my friend Suchetan that they should serve the dosas and appams one at a time instead of two together on a platter. There is nothing more uninteresting than a dosa which becomes cold and limp as it waits for it to be devoured. Imagine the delight of the customer when he is served a second piping hot dosa as he finishes the first at no extra cost! Psychologically, it makes a big difference — the difference that spells customer loyalty — something that will be in short supply when seven international hotels open in the next few months in the Mumbai-Sahar International Airport area, including the Marriot, Hyatt Regency, The Oberoi, Taj, ITC Sheraton, Intercontinental Bharat Hotels and the Meridien, which is already operational. What all these hotel openings will do to the already-nightmarish conditions on Sahar roads I shudder to contemplate.

Waterfall Cafe — Telephone No. 8363636.

I WAS late at the Meridien and Leela because I had attended Rajiv Anand’s first anniversary bash for his leisure complex Strike 10 at Andheri West. Mumbai’s premiere leisure complex — The Bowling Co. in Parel was closed because of a structural collapse disappointing many who thronged its bowling alleys and game machines, downed metric tonnes of pizza and hamburgers and washed down colas.

Anand told me that The Bowling Co. may now to Calcutta where the promoters have adequate space and young Calcuttans are learning to party. Strike 10 is all set to emulate the Bowling Co’s success by adding 10,000 sq. ft. in the new year and a snazzy front entrance in place of the present side approach. About 600 people laughed, jostled and crowded every facility from baccarat, pool, roulette and the salad and pizza counters. The theme was black and white and most of us were black and blue.

Rajiv is a personable young man who, with his attractive young wife Witty are going places in a hurry. In a few weeks time, he opens the exclusive Millennium Club in Juhu Vileparle with a swimming pool, bowling alley and mini theatre, opening yet another chapter in leisure activities for the Mumbai suburbs.

Strike 10 — Telephone No. 6324533/34

FAR across the city, at the end of the Queen’s Necklace, a musty old Cafe Royale where I once sampled a cheese fondue in the hoary ages, in the company of business tycoon Sanjay Dalmia and friends, has been broken down, renovated and transformed into a bright young international all-day marbled restaurant appropriately called Frangipani which is the Indian Champa flower reflecting whiteness, purity and freshness. Here too, there is a ‘theme’ and a ‘story’ — the ‘theatre of food’ where the preparation and presentation of food play a leading role and there are ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ stages in the development of the theatre of food. In plain language, it means there is a separate cold salad buffet display and a hot food display.

In between a smiling Italian chef Igor vigorously and expertly juggles majestic pizzas with a long trowel in an authentic wood-fired pizza oven. These fat pizzas with sizzling toppings and delicious, crunchy dough are the best I have tasted in Mumbai. There is a sophisticated and youthful elegance about this white marble restaurant which lights up like Mackennas Gold each evening, as the sun setting over the Arabian Sea pours its orange tones through the huge bay windows and turns the marble to gold. Order a fresh hot coffee from the extensive coffee selection, and sample Chef Ralph’s tiramisu and experience your own personal golden glow in this atmospheric restaurant.
Frangipani - Telephone: 2325757

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