The Well-Fed Bong

What would you say to a shop located on the blind side as you turn from Siddhi Vinayak to the more mundane parts of Prabhadevi? Cycling is a good cure to blindness; that's probably the only reason why I managed to stare at the completely unpronounceable name without killing anyone. Two minutes of stammering later I'm ready to go back to modaks – someone should be warned that isn't really the land of spelling bee champions; its the land of their language-mangling parents. Lets just bite the tongue and spit it out; Debailleul . Its not quite clear how you say it, but apparently mashing the two middle 'l's into a 'y' is involved. Mumbai Boss was the first to warn me about a Belgian pastry chef who was bringing an entire patisserie flash frozen from the land of real chocolates. Chef Marc Debailleul is the man behind the magic, a much decorated pastry chef (I wish he had liked his first name more than his second, but no more name jokes). Its a beauti...

I landed in Bangalore starved from the early morning flight and a lack of breakfast, and was greeted straightaway with something I thought was uniquely Bangalore – a branded variant of filter coffee. Hatti Kaapi even did the whole meter coffee ritual, and handed me a perfectly acceptable filter kaapi; only the double steel containers were missing. Of course, Bangalore also invented Cafe Coffee Day; that stared reproachfully at my fickleness from the other side of the parking. Kaapi done, I discovered myself on the loose end after a friend ditched me for lunch. Given that it was going to be my sole lunch in Bangalore in a long while, I needed a touch of special. A bit of research dug up modern Indian at the Pink Poppadom, but it was dinner only. Caperberry and its molecular tapas beckoned, but I figured, do I really expect Ferran Adria to hang about Dickenson Road? I needed something Bangalore and  bit of thought later I narrowed the choice to the biriyani at Nagarjuna Residency...

No one can accuse Cafe Zoe of being easy to locate.  Embedded deep in the heart of Mathuradas Mills, the entrance tucked out of sight behind parked cars and the local omelette-pao place, Zoe tries very hard to be a 'find'. And succeeds.       Push past the large door, and you are suddenly transported into a cool, minimalist world of comfortable spaces and calm furniture. The ceiling soars, the sunlight pours in, colourful sofas invite you to laze about and widely space blondewood tables seem meant for gossip. Bunches of bare bulbs hang from unconcealed cables, the bar is made of old crates, a long bare brick wall adds to a carefully cultivated sense of industrial clutter. Cutlery comes in glass tumblers, water and gazpacho in glass milk bottles, salads in tall glass containers that look just like plastic till you touch them. This could be New York – a bistro in LES one of those cool Brooklyn places that have sprung out of gentrification, men in suits mingled ...

It was with some interest that I read the invitation Rushina had sent me. The text mentioned Dalmore, and I knew only two pieces of trivia about Dalmore. One was its owner - via Whyte and Mackay our very own Vijay Mallya – and second that someone had purchased in Singapore Duty Free a Dalmore worth about rupees one crore – apparently the most expensive regular whisky in the world . To those who want to do the math, its about one lakh rupees a small sip . My hopes of coming anywhere near that bottle were understandably slim, but Dalmore makes other stuff worth drinking too. The twelve, the gran reserva and the fifteen were promised but the invitation promised still more - a food and whisky pairing that combined the talents of Mallya's minions with Jamavar's Chef Surender Mohan. While wine-food pairings are a dime a dozen, this was the first time I was about to try a whisky-food pairing that did not involve a dive bar. Whisky is hardly a stranger to food; the enduring ...