Food Review: Playing With Food

The interiors of the restaurant. (Express Photo)

Mamagoto’s cousin came to town a few months ago. His name? We don’t know. But the seemingly well-respected-and-travelled Asian has found employment at CyberHub — no surprises there — and his station reads Mr Mamagoto. His temper, much like his predecessor’s,  is eccentric but he is more restrained in his demeanour. His culinary prowess is telling of his travels to Europe, Mexico and India. And, he too, is privy to the secrets to fusing ingredients and techniques to deliver revelatory flavours. Maybe it runs in the family.

His menu is charged with Asian treasures that bear impressions of his travels. Take for instance, the green salad of snappy beans, snow peas and leeks that stops basking under the Tuscan sun to reinvent itself as the Asian Panzanella in his kitchen. Complete with herbed baguette croutons and pine nuts adding to taste and texture.

The cousins couldn’t be distant. There is concurrence in their philosophy to food, its bending and bleeding, and both have made hawker food from Southeast Asia a tad posh. Normally, that would be an idea with its heart in the wrong place but as plates emerge from the restaurant’s kitchen, it is but with dishonesty.

Thai Puchka. (Express Photo)

Asian meals aren’t complete for Delhiites without a dash of Cantonese. The delicate prawn dim sums, mixed with enoki and seaweed, were juicy, soft and impressively prawny and can be paired with the troupe standing in a single file — schezwan sauce, black bean sauce, chilli oil and ginger in vinegar. Another snack from the streets is Onigiri. The Japanese dish normally has seaweed enveloping fat pucks of rice but Mr Mamagoto would rather serve it with fried seaweed with a dusting of red chilli powder, salted salmon and the fish’s roe. It is accompanied by the regular wasabi and gari and is delicate in both flavour and form.

He couldn’t have ignored the food that breeds on Indian streets. The Thai puchka, an ingenious invention, has wheat cups, arranged on a bed of powdered jaggery and desiccated coconut, carrying in them bird-eye chillies, plum and ginger chutney and a beetle leaf. The absolute must-try iterates that it takes, sometimes, only a few tweaks for familiar flavours to yield  unusual results. Then, arrived the rich and smooth liver pate, carrying with it a whiff of offal, with an aggressively tart raspberry and blueberry jam that shouldn’t be cared much for. To cut into its intensity, a sapid kiwi mint collins is a good choice — bits of kiwi make their way up through the straw.

Just as Mr Mamagoto was turning into one of those enviable places which serves a winner after another, the Katsu Chicken arrived. Overdone chicken with a panko crusting too thick to be enjoyed, even the traditional sauce was too little to beat the dryness. But the wasabi mashed potatoes pack a punch — stay braced as they approach.

We decided to wager on the white chocolate mousse with a raspberry sorbet and black current jam. A beautiful interplay of colours resulted in an even more stunning interplay of flavours and textures. He knows the tunes to which ingredients dance but most of all, he knows, that cooking is a test of the imagination.

Must Try: Thai Puchka, Kiwi Mint Collins
Address : 102, 1st Floor, CyberHub, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon
Meal for two: Rs 2,000