Over the Moon

The menu is a composite of Zambar favourites with the starters presented in a tapas format on Spanish crockery, meaning you can pretty much eat your way through the menu, if you have a couple of hours to spare. So expect classics such as Gunpowder Prawns, the poignant Mushroom Pepper, home-style Chicken Chettinad and Idlis in a Pouch, bite-sized perfectly spherical idlis tossed in gunpowder and served in a banana leaf, cloud-like appams and Malabar Paranthas flakier than Phoebe from Friends.

Keeping it fresh are new additions such as the topical Telangana Aloo — baby potatoes tossed in a spicy, sticky tamarind sauce and clearly inspired from Patatas Bravas (fiery potatoes) a typical Spanish tapas — and South Indian calamari, which are squid rings stuffed with sea food. The menu is on the higher end of the South Delhi pricing spectrum (an average non-vegetarian starter has an average cost of Rs 500) but the freshness and quality of food makes it more than worth it. The seafood, we’re told, is flown in every day off fishermen’s boats on Kerala’s coastline. So, the sole fish you consume for dinner was probably part of a greater school of fish in the morning. Talk about freshness.

To quote Dame Julie Andrews, “a few of our favourites” were the Suriani Egg Roast, a Syrian-Christian specialty comprising sliced boiled eggs cooked in a red and robust roasted curry paste, apart from the Kerala Fish fry and the Moplah-style Fish Biryani. The latter, a legacy of Kerala’s Muslim influence, while more delicate than its North Indian and Hyderabadi counterparts, is still rich with golden-fried onions, tender pieces of fish and fragrant rice, with a spice mix that would make you swear (until you eat the meat, anyway) that you’re tucking into a mutton curry. And we had the sole without the slightest worry about horcruxes.