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.

Another revelation was the extent to which fruit flavours dominated savoury dishes all over the South. Many of the recipes had been sourced from the Soopa Shastra, a book written by Mangarasa III ...

We are less concerned with authenticity or tradition in India. We just take things for granted and imagine that dishes have always been around. Let’s take the most famous examples. Tandoori chicken ...

I can still remember when I first met AD Singh. It was 1998 and I had been invited to moderate a session at a food summit in Bombay. On the panel were some well-known names from the food business of ...

More unusually, he concedes that the government failed to act decisively to stop fraud in many cases. In 2011, he writes, his colleagues brought to his attention that private investors in ...

Bangalore opted for beer over food so it had the best pubs of any Indian city; but I am not sure that it had a sparkling food scene. I rarely found very many high quality mid-market restaurants in ...

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?

You know all three, I imagine. I have written about them before. Gaggan, is of course, Asia’s greatest chef. The Suhrings are identical German twins who first featured in Rude Food when they cooked at ...

Over a decade ago I was at Dickins and Jones, a famous, historic department store on London’s Regent Street when they suddenly shut off the muzak.

But something seemed off to me. So I did a little digging and discovered that while the town of San Sebastian had one lovely historical hotel, we were to stay at a much less exciting establishment. I ...

There’s Camellia Panjabi who, apart from writing one of the most successful Indian cookbooks of all time (50 Great Curries of India), also set up the Bombay Brasserie in London, overturning British ...

But Khattar, who had studied hoteliering in America, was not content. Way back in the 1990s, when India’s restaurant scene was still fairly basic, Rohit wanted to open all kinds of new restaurants. He ...