The 34-year-old Chinoiserie in Taj Bengal, Kolkata, is a city favorite for Sichuan and Cantonese specialties like Peking duck, crispy spinach, lemon chili garlic asparagus, and butter chili garlic prawns. The restaurant offers warm comfort food, with an extensive dim sum menu, hearty hot and sour soups, zingy wok-tossed vegetables, meats and seafood, and crowd-pleasing desserts like date pancakes with ice cream and darsaan honey.
Nestled within a century-old French villa in Pondicherry called La Maison Rose, Coromandel Cafe uses its locale as inspiration. The walls are pastel pink and white with floral accents, the corners bursting with foliage and sunlight streams in through tall windows. The menu is all fresh salads, creamy pastas, and perfectly plated slices of cheesecake, caramel eclairs, and truffles. The weekly special menus feature dishes made with seasonal ingredients like wild gourd curry and gazpacho with mango or jamun.
Cafe Lota keeps things simple and straightforward, with a focus on well-loved Indian food. There’s everything from palak patta chaat, Mahabaleshwar corn pattice, and ragi vada pav to prawn fry, kathal biryani, and mutton dhansak. There are also Himachali and Kumaoni thalis, and desserts like kulfi and bhapa doi cheesecake, and special menus that explore Kumaoni, Odia, and other regional cuisines.
Indraneil
Overlooking the sprawling New Delhi Golf Course, Baoshuan is the rooftop Chinese restaurant at The Oberoi, New Delhi. For centuries, Chinese treasure ships—known as baoshuan—would carry goods from China to India and beyond for international trade. In keeping with the spirit of bringing Chinese culture to the world, Baoshuan takes you on a journey across geography and time, from the Buddhist temple cuisine of the Tang dynasty and the lantern-lit tea houses of bustling Suzhou under the Ming dynasty, to Shanghai’s jazz age and the cocktail hours of modern Hong Kong. The menu, crafted by chef Andrew Wong of the two-Michelin-starred A. Wong restaurant in London, offers cuisines from specific regions in China and its 14 international borders, like the Peking Duck, Thousand-layered chicken puff, steamed spinach and prawn tobiko.
A version of this article originally appeared in Condé Nast Traveller India.
