It’s been a so-so year for restaurants. Nothing really precedent-shattering opened. Very few restaurateurs took chances. And chefs were gradually replaced by bartenders as more and more bars pretended ...

If there was a Nobel Prize for boot licking then Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif would win it hands down. At a gathering in Sharm el Sheikh organised by US President Donald Trump to mark the ...

I’ve written before about the move away from standard holidays to more experience-specific vacations. What this shift means is this: in the old days, you went on a holiday. You saw the sights. You ...

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 ...

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 ...

It is a question that has often intrigued me. Each time there is a Kumbh Mela, tens of thousands of sadhus appear, seemingly out of nowhere. As the world media train their cameras, the sadhus march ...

Singapore’s Chilli Crab is one of the world’s most famous seafood dishes. Visitors to the city-state are urged to try it and – somewhat unsurprisingly – the recipe has even been the subject of spat ...

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 ...

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.

Sometimes a hotel can make or break your trip. I was invited to San Sebastian (in the Basque country in Spain) to attend Gastronomika, an international foodie seminar where India was the focus country ...

The controversy over the Delhi Gymkhana reminds me how different people define elites. And how our objections to clubs depend on our private resentments and prejudices. Let’s take my own example. I am ...