Light Meals

Delivery is now restricted to Noida,but Siddhartha Khullar,a software professional who spends his afterhours simmering carrot juliennes and paneer in coconut milk and flavouring it with Thai curry powder,says he would like to expand soon. Now don’t quibble over the cuisine: coconut milk does not make it a Kerala stew nor does the galangal flavour make it a Thai curry. “We call it fusion food,” says Khullar,33. “We combine ingredients and styles from different cuisine. It is a feel-good menu that takes a bit of this and a bit of that to prepare something at affordable prices.” So there is chicken cooked in garlic and onion paste with Worcestershire sauce to pep it up.

“I was just tired of ordering the same Mughalai dishes all the time,” says Khullar. Necessity is the mother of cooking. So last month,Khullar along with friends Colonel (retd) Mohan Gopalan,48,and Ashish Bhattacharya,26,created a menu comprising nine salads,and 14 main dishes. The hardest part was training the chefs. “We taught them to use minimum oil and masala and fry as little as possible,” says Gopalan. Light on the pocket and on calories — that should work when they open a takeaway joint in Delhi.