The Punjabis love to experiment and try everything, there is a veritable splash of cuisines you can sample. Thai, Lebanese, Chinese, Israeli, Italian, Indonesian, Spanish, Mexican, French, Moroccan, Swiss and much, much more of the local Indian stuff. What the Delhites don’t like, they amend. Like the famous Indian-Chinese, which is a Delhi product.
‘Going out’ in Delhi is usually associated with food. However that was not always so. Not very long ago, in fact right into the fabulous forties till before the coming of the Punjabis, orthodox Hindus in Delhi would not eat food cooked outside the home, dismissing it as ‘unclean’. Reading between the lines this meant they were not sure about the caste of the cook – Brahminist squeamishness, which was followed by a surprising aggressiveness by non-Brahmins castes like the kshtriyas, kayasthas and so on.
All that stopped very abruptly when one enterprising family of fleeing Punjabis from the Partition holocaust set up shop as a Tandoori (Punjabi-Mughal cuisine) eatery in the old City, near the Red Fort.
and boy, did they clean up! Tandoori food, rich and succulent, cooked in hot clay ovens was an immediate box-office hit that set the cash registers ringing permanently. Today the standard menu at any Delhi restaurant takes in a fair share of Tandoori dishes, while also giving the nod to the more delicate (and difficult to make) Mughlai dishes like pilafs and kormas.