What do you do when you can’t dream of changing a single item on the menu of your 36-year-old North-West Frontier Province restaurant and risk displeasing the high -net-worth clients queuing up for hours outside? When you’ve refurbished your other award-winning, 26-year-old Indian restaurant, and refurnished and redone the menu at your European eatery? When the footfalls at your 24-hour coffee shop never falter and people get out of bed on Sundays just to have the brunch there?
You turn your attention to the only F&B space that’s open to tinkering. Once this was Bali Hai, an Oriental restaurant with great ambience, music and food, and the natural habitat of Delhi’s beautiful people. Inexplicably, it was killed to make way for the far-from-exciting Maroush and, more recently, My Humble House. Now, in that same place comes Tian, an ‘Asian Cuisine Studio’. It’s a delightful change. The new rooftop restaurant is airy and unpretentious, the dishes are varied and delicious, and the service is ITC at its attentive best.
The 31-year-old chef, Vikramjit Ray’s imaginative interpretation of Oriental fare and the avant-garde cooking techniques used by his team lend a distinct fillip to the most traditional of recipes. I guess you could call Tian’s offerings pan-global, with an east Asian flavour. The chef does party tricks with molecular gastronomy to good effect in the starters. A lot of the vegetables emerge in dehydrated form, and come to life on the table. There’s also a fair bit of dramatic, on-table assembly. For one of the soups, for instance, dehydrated vegetables and stock are put through an infuser and poured into bowls on the table, as the super-flavourful Purity of Earth. For dessert, Vikramjit puts spoons into your hands and creates an ‘Eat off your table’ concoction with 23 components.
The desiccated lotus stem is clearly a Tian favourite and pops up both as a very pretty starter and as a main dish, stuffed with sweet potato scoops and Sichuan sauce. My companions were moved to tears by the Scallop Carpaccio, served with wasabi-covered green tomatoes, but my vote goes to the Poached Scallops, with warm edamame puree and grilled fennel, and the Buta Kyakitori (aka grilled pork belly skewers). Though there is a fair amount of chicken on offer—this is Delhi, after all—I recommend you forget about it here, especially while ordering the mains. Order the Red Duck Curry instead or the Soft Shell Crab, and savour the flavours as they explode in your brain.
The three tasting menus (catering to three levels of appetite and budget) are the best way to work your way through all that Tian has to offer. They are very well-priced, at ` 2500, `3500 and `5000 a head, and can be topped up with two alcoholic drinks for an additional `500.
Presentation is big here; sometimes so big that it overwhelms the food. Given the quality of its cuisine and service, Tian doesn’t need theatre supper to flourish. Nor does it need a singer. Having someone sing for other people’s supper is unfair both to the young lady and the food.