A special kind of a meat dish has been dogging me for a while –– and I am not complaining at all. We have friends in Gurgaon who always prepare this dish for us when we visit them. When a sis-in-law who loves fiery hot curries came home, I cooked a version of the meat for her. And then, just some days ago, it cropped up again at the restaurant in the State Government-run Rajasthan House.
The dish that I refer to is the Rajasthani laal maas. I first ate it eons ago at a friend’s wedding in Rajasthan. He had married into a lesser royal family, and we, the baraatis, were really feted. Laal maas was a part of the huge menu that we feasted on, I still remember.
Rajasthan House is on 7, Prithviraj Road, right next to the J&K House (Phone no: 011-24694244). The restaurant is meant for guests staying there, but opens on Monday to the public with an offering of dal baati churma, another Rajasthan speciality. But if you ask for permission to eat there, it is generally granted for Rajasthanis, who as we all know, are a most genial people.
The thali (for Rs.110) consists of rice, roti, dal, sabzi, papad, pickle, dessert and so on. The vegetable dish can be the typically Rajasthani gattey ki sabzi –– which is something that I really enjoy. Gattey is boiled channa dal cakes, simmered in thick gravy. My friend, Ashok Khandelwal, who runs the Fairy Dale cottages in Lansdowne, gives us the most delicious gattey ki sabzi (prepared by his indomitable mother) every time we are there.
Dal baati churma is a meal in itself. In fact, once you have eaten that, you don’t even need a dessert to round off the meal, for the dish is a confluence of tastes –– sweet, salty and spicy. The baati is prepared with wheat and semolina, and then deep fried into fat round balls. The dal is thick, hot and spicy. The churma is a mix of powdered wheat, semolina, sugar and ghee. You take a baati, crush it and cover it with dal, and then layer it with churma on top, adding some more ghee if you are ghee-friendly. It is rich and delicious.
For meat and chicken dishes, you have to speak with those running the restaurant a day or two in advance. Their laal maas is indeed worth waiting for. The meat is soft and the thick gravy is deliciously hot. The chicken that they cook is pretty awesome too –– spicy and rich in oil (but not floating in it, as you’d find in many kormas).
I like all the Bhawans in Delhi. They offer you their own cuisine (though I recall seeing some butter chicken in the Maharashtra Bhawan restaurant several years ago) and at very affordable rates. One of the nicest Bhawan meals I’ve had was at Odisha Niwas, where I ate all kinds of lightly cooked Odisha dishes. In Nagaland House, the lightly steamed pork served with boiled spinach is to die for. And the Chettinad chicken and mutton fry in Tamil Nadu Bhawan still make me drool. I suppose that’s what our text books meant when they talked about the richness of diversity!
