“There’s no such thing as Indian cuisine: it’s the cuisines of India. Across this country there are many cuisines, with different histories, different origins and different stories,” says chef Palash Mitra, the culinary director of South Asian cuisine at Black Sheep Restaurants (BSR), as we speak to him in a crowded airport while waiting for a flight that would take us from Jaipur to Udaipur, both cities in western India.
Tatler is following the BSR team—Mitra and fellow chef Kumaran Balaji; Jonathan Leung, a member of the group’s leadership team; and three of its front-of-house staff—as they traverse India on a culinary inspiration trip ahead of the opening of Prince and the Peacock, the group’s Indian restaurant in Tai Kwun, the second phase of BSR’s ambitious revival project for the heritage venue’s Central Magistracy building. It also operates Magistracy Dining Room and Botanical Garden in the complex.
Read now: The best Indian vegetarian restaurants in Hong Kong, according to Tatler’s Indian editors
Interiors of Prince and the Peacock (Photo: courtesy of Black Sheep Restaurants)
Syed Asim Hussain, the group’s founder, describes the trip as a “hospitality pilgrimage” of sorts. “This trip is essential to understanding the soul of what we are trying to present. This process involves immersive exploration, from bustling street markets to dining rooms that have become legendary places. We are not just bringing back recipes but something a bit more intangible. When guests enter Prince and the Peacock, I just want them to feel the deep sense of care that went into developing and curating this [diverse royal Indian experience],” he says.
It’s not an easy task to present the diversity of this cuisine on a plate. Prince and the Peacock highlights cuisines from India’s bygone royal periods, which means food spanning a wide range of kingdoms, hundreds of years and a vast geographical area. Each of these royal kitchens had their own closely guarded culinary traditions and heritage dishes, such as rogan josh, a curry made with goat meat and spices from the courts of Kashmir (which chef Mitra has brought to Prince and the Peacock); and mild, aromatic, potato-infused biryani from Awadh’s last king Wajid Ali Shah’s kitchens in Calcutta, now Kolkata.
The challenges to accessing this kind of historical food are manifold: not only are some recipes lost to the past but many have also been morphed to suit contemporary palates; others are caught up in debates around authenticity. Indian food historian and critic Pushpesh Pant, who joined us in Delhi, says, “The documented history of the food that people consume in India goes back only 150 to 200 years. Beyond that, there is no proper documentation; it’s all been recreated from memory.” This reliance on memory and oral traditions adds a layer of complexity, which is made even more challenging if we consider how Indian food has been transformed by centuries of colonisation and trade interactions. Add to this the country’s vast regional diversity—which means that one dish, such as the popular biryani, can vary widely in flavour and cooking technique in different parts of India—and one begins to understand just how impossible it is to recreate the true essence of royal historical Indian cuisine in modern times.
What we do goes far beyond simply what appears on the plate
By - Syed Asim Hussain
But BSR isn’t trying to recreate it. What they want to bring to Hong Kong from India is not a replica of this diverse cuisine, but the team’s own interpretation of it. “We are not trying to capture it. Food, cuisine, hospitality become a part of culture and tradition, and you can’t capture those things—they are living, breathing things,” says Hussain. “What we are trying to do is express things that are interesting to us, that pull on the strings of our hearts. What we do goes far beyond simply what appears on the plate—it requires a deep understanding, respect and an unquenchable curiosity for the traditions, histories and cultures that belong to over a billion people today.”
And it’s this quest to understand and respect India’s culture, cuisine and hospitality that led to the journey across fine-dining restaurants, hole-in-the-wall eateries, heritage sites, forts, palaces, spice markets and more in Delhi, Jaipur, Udaipur, Hyderabad, Lucknow and Chennai. And if it’s inspiration they were seeking, it was everywhere—from the boisterous tea stalls in the alleys to the jaw-dropping luxury of the ancient forts and palaces, and from the delectable street food that the BSR team enthusiastically tucked into the off-menu seasonal fruit the servers at breakfast buffets graciously presented to us unprompted.
Peacock carving at Golconda Fort (Photo: courtesy of Prince and the Peacock))
What stood out on this hospitality pilgrimage was the sheer diversity of the cuisine that we got to experience. In Delhi, where the Mughal influences are etched in the city’s food and architecture, one of the best places to try Mughal-infused cuisine is at Bukhara, a fine-dining restaurant at the five-star hotel ITC Maurya. The dishes that we tried there, from the naan—which the seven of us couldn’t finish—to murgh tandoori, or chicken cooked with yoghurt and spices, all hark back to the heyday of the Mughal dynasty (from the 16th to 19th century). The dynasty brought to the region culinary influences from then-Persia, which gave rise to a unique kind of Indo-Persian cuisine that’s associated with the northwest frontiers of the Indian subcontinent. But there are relatively more modern inventions to be found in Delhi, such as the world-famous butter chicken, which restaurant chain Moti Mahal’s co-founder claims to have invented in the mid-1900s. The restaurant’s owners are involved in an ongoing legal dispute regarding these claims, but what was indisputable was the creamy, tangy goodness of this dish, which was one of the star items on our visit to one of its branches in Daryaganj, Old Delhi. Mitra has expertly reinterpreted this classic at Prince and the Peacock in the form of murgh makhhanwala — braised, succulent pieces of chicken in a tangy, buttery sauce that takes you right back to Delhi.
Amber Fort in Rajasthan (Photo: Instagram / Prince and the Peacock @princeandthepeacock)
The food profile changes dramatically as we travel some 270 kilometres away to the neighbouring state of Rajasthan, which had been ruled by the Hindu Rajput kings for centuries. The region’s cuisine is mainly vegetarian and heavily focused on grains, such as wheat and millet; as well as spices, thanks to the arid nature of the land, where limited vegetables grow. We got a taste of this Rajasthani cuisine in Jaipur and Udaipur through the breads like bajra roti, or millet bread, and missi roti, or wheat and chickpeas bread, as well as onion kachori, or onion bread, the latter found ubiquitously in street food stalls across Rajasthan. But that’s not to say that no meat is available here — one of this region’s most famous dish is laal maans, a mutton curry. It’s not for those who can’t handle spice, but in one of the most memorable parts of the trip, we headed to the heritage restaurant 1135AD in Jaipur’s historic Amber Fort, where the BSR team embraced it with gusto.
In Hyderabad in the south, where we headed next, the spice in the dishes we ate packed even more of a punch. The region is famous for its Hyderabadi biryani, which is considerably hotter than its mild counterpart in northern India. We tried two renditions of this biryani at the famous Paradise restaurant chain and at Hotel Shadab; the latter offered a bustling vibe, thanks to its location amid busy, crowded Old Hyderabad.
It’s the software we are here for, not the hardware.
By - Jonathan Leung
“We needed to come here to get the feel of these things. There is a lot to see, a lot to absorb here. From the grandeur of the palaces to the hospitality of even the rickshaw drivers, there’s a unique flavour to India which we had to immerse ourselves in. Each place I went to, I wanted to stay a little bit longer,” Leung tells Tatler as we journeyed around Old Delhi on a rickshaw. “Every place we visited had its own story and history; and each one is so different from the other. And because we are talking about history spanning thousands of years, we really wanted to do a lot of background studies and research to get it right. Ultimately, it’s the software we are here for, not the hardware.”
As Leung says, giving history its due respect is at the core of the team’s endeavours. The culinary team at Prince and the Peacock is not interested in modernising Indian cuisine, following contemporary culinary trends or making it into fusion food. Instead, Mitra, who’s helming the kitchen, hopes to stay true to the kitchens of the maharajas of Kashmir, the nawabs of Lucknow, the Rajputs of Rajasthan, the nizams of Hyderabad, the Mughals of Delhi and more, and he’s doing this through his own interpretation of dishes such as rogan josh, a delicate mutton dish inspired by Kashmiri maharajas’ kitchens and tandoori moorg ka soola, which is cooked on an open flame like in the kitchens of the kings of Jaipur.
Cannon at City Palace, Jaipur (Photo: Instagram / Prince and the Peacock @princeandthepeacock)
“I don’t want to overcomplicate the food. I want to honour the dishes from the bygone royal kitchens through the highest-quality ingredients and precise techniques,” he says. “If you think about it, the kings and queens in the old times used only the very best of ingredients and hired the most skilful of bawarchi [chefs]. That stringent quality is what we are aiming for. We want to celebrate the essence of royal Indian food in our own way.”
But how exactly is the team “celebrating this essence”? After our trip around India, Tatler went to experience it at Prince and the Peacock. From the moment we entered the restaurant, on the second floor of the Magistracy building at Tai Kwun, a certain feeling of déjà vu set in as if one had gone back to the forts and palaces that we had visited on the trip to India. From the Indian hand fans hanging from the ceiling that recalled the opulence of the City Palace in Jaipur to the soap dispensers in the washrooms that I had helped the team select from a small shop selling handicrafts in Udaipur, it was thrilling to see parts of India encapsulated in each nook and corner.
Hawa Mahal at Jaipur (Photo: Getty Images)
But what really stood out were the food and hospitality—and how the restaurant team reinterpreted this richly diverse food in a menu that’s only a few pages long. The patti samosa, or meat dumplings with thin pastry, reminded me of the famous chicken 65 of Hyderabad. The samosa’s chicken stuffing had recreated the chicken 65 dish to perfection, down to the mustard seeds and curry leaves. The naan, meanwhile, is cooked using a similar tandoor to those in Bukhara in Delhi, resulting in a similar texture: crisp on the outside, soft on the inside. Small touches seen in many restaurants in India, like the nalli gosht biryani being individually served on each guest’s plates, is another demonstration of the painstaking attention paid to the finest details. The group’s restaurants are renowned for their top-notch service, and here, beyond prompt, courteous assistance, we experienced genuine warmth from the staff, while the camaraderie between them was also palpable.
The hospitality, however, goes beyond what’s served on a plate or the glass, or how the staff interacts with diners. It permeates every aspect of the guest experience—from the folk music playing in the restaurant, which is reminiscent of the Rajasthani flute performance that we listened to on our hotel terrace in Jaipur, to the ornate incense-holders hidden behind the curtains that speak to a kind of nonchalant luxury that harks back to royal India. Through the music, the décor, the food, the aromas and the service, BSR has succeeded in deftly bringing the essence of the culinary inspiration trip to its guests. So, while tucking into a meal at Prince and the Peacock, if you find yourself immersed in a world of maharajas and Mughals, allow yourself that fantasy—it’s what the team behind it has been aiming for all along.
NOW READ
Bengal Brothers’ deluxe edition in Wan Chai puts an elevated twist on its Indian street food haven
In India, Black Sheep Restaurants searches for royal flavours to bring back to Hong Kong
The best Indian vegetarian restaurants in Hong Kong, according to Tatler’s Indian editors