This was our last night in India and since we were at the ITC Maratha, Jeff and I wanted to have a nice meal. Both Amith and his father had recommended this restaurant, Dum Phukt, in our hotel when we had eaten at Peshawri at the start of our trip, so this was a nice way to bookend our dining in India. Of course, there was one fatal flaw to our best laid plan…we had already eaten a large breakfast in the hotel as well as a large late lunch with Amith and his parents. These would prove to be our undoing. When we walked down to dinner, neither of us felt very full, but we weren’t particularly hungry.
We had an 8pm reservation and we were only the second diners in the restaurant. Amith had told us we had to get the lamb with bone marrow and the biriyani. By the time we were at the restaurant, we had forgotten about the marrow, but we remembered the biriyani, but we had a difficult time determining which biriyani Amith had been recommending. The menu, which was available via QR code was terrible to navigate. In the end, we went with a 5-course fixed menu which would give us a variety of dishes including the Dum Pukht Biriyani, their specialty.
The core of Dum Phukt style cooking is slow cooking over low heat. This has it’s origins going back to the 18th century where large cauldrons of food were slow cooked to feed those in a food for work construction program. The story is that the Nawab caught a whiff of the aromas from the cauldrons and ordered the royal kitchen to prepare a similar dish.
Jeff and I started with some local Kingfisher beers – the Premium for me and the Ultra for Jeff. When I had asked them what the difference was between the two, they said the Ultra was smoother and the Premium more flavor. I liked the Premium more.
The papadum came out with the green chutney, but two different ones – a garlic one and a papaya one. I really liked the garlic one. The raw onions were seasoned just like at Peshawri with just a sprinkle of garam masala.
Our first dish was the Shorba Timater, a tomato soup seasoned with coriander and cumin with some toasted wheat crisps. This quite good and the addition of the crisps gave it both a nice texture and a bit of toasted almost nuttiness.
Next came the kabab course which inluded 3 kababs – a prawn, a chicken, and a minced lamb. The prawn was finished with a saffron chutney and was delicious. The chicken had a cumin marinade and was topped with silver leaf (have had gold leaf on food many times, but this is a first for silver). This was moist and delicious. The lamb though was that finely ground lamb and I still didn’t find the texture appealing at all. I ate the prawn, most of the chicken and just a bit of the lamb. But we were both getting full already.
Our third course consisted of 5 more dishes – here was the lamb and marrow dish that Amith had recommended, a vegetable dish with spinach puree, dal (looked very similar to the one at Peshawri), chicken and a fish both in rich sauces all with a side of raita. The food was more than tasty, but sad to say we were so full at this point that we could only have a bite of each. I think the standout dish in this course was the lamb. No joke, we were both experiencing some food sweats from being so full.
Our fourth course was the house special lamb biriyani. This was delicious…the rice was rich and flavorful and the lamb was tender and delicious. This dish was also one of the highlights of the meal. It was such a shame that we couldn’t eat more than a couple bites.
The final course was dessert. Jeff was so fulled he asked to pass on dessert. I’m a glutton for sure, so I wanted to try dessert. The dessert course came as a plate with Gulub Jamun, Kulfi, and I think the other one was the the Shahi Tukda. There was also some saffron rice vermicelli that I think was supposed to go along with the Kulfi. I had a bite of each which was all I could stomach (Jeff had none).
I don’t have any complaints at all about the food…it’s just such a shame that we were in no position to really enjoy it since we were so full.
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