Allez Cuisine

The highlight of my trip back to India was the week I spent with my friend Sunnymorn. And I’m not just saying that because she reads this blog and would kill me for saying otherwise. Other than amusing Facebook comments back and forth, I hadn’t spent time with her in ages and we were more than ready to make up for lost time.

Sunnymorn and I are good at many things, but two of the things we’re best at are shopping and dining. And much to our husbands’ chagrin, we don’t believe in budgets. After visits to numerous FabIndia outlets and the hunt for a new cell phone for yours truly, we could hardly be expected to celebrate our long awaited reunion at the local McDonalds or Sagar Ratna.

We lunched at some great spots both on our own and with her son, the Little Prince. The highlight of our dining adventures, however, was definitely lunch at Wasabi by Morimoto at the Taj Mahal Hotel. This was my second Masaharu Morimoto experience as Hubby and I had been to his Philadelphia restaurant several years ago.

The surprisingly well-priced sushi selection included a several fixed priced lunches, which included salad, soup, and lots of sushi. Much to Sunnymorn’s chagrin (and vague mortification), I requested to have their classic lunch set as a vegetarian selection instead of enjoying the tuna and salmon sushi she had been waxing poetic about all day. To be fair, Sunny was worried that I would be paying for the typical vegetarian sushi plate of cucumber and bell pepper rolls. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

When the wooden plank was placed before me, I couldn’t even identify most of the vegetables before me but I knew for certain that there were no boring cucumber rolls in the mix. Mouth watering, melt in your mouth, delicious, food-gasmic, amazing – I said this and more about the eight pieces of sushi I inhaled between snippets of gossip and shared memories. Even though the Iron Chef himself wasn’t there to oversee the restaurant, his vision certainly was – and it showed. Everything from the service to the tea was perfect and we weren’t even done eating.

I hadn’t come all the way to India to eat sushi and not have dessert you know! We ordered dessert and in the battle of who ordered better, I won hands down: my lemon tart came with instructions! First I had to bite into a special lemon. Then I chewed on a yucky tasting bean for one minute before spitting it back out. Then back to the lemon. Finally I was allowed to eat the bliss inspiring, orgasmic lemon tart. The idea was that this bean was able to change the flavour of the tart lemon into a sweet treat. I still tasted the divine flavor on the edges of my palate hours later. It was sincerely that good.

I love Sunny for many reasons not the least of which is that she’s super cool, let me do my laundry at her place, and knows many of my most embarrassing secrets yet doesn’t hold too many of them against me. (If she ever tells you about an extremely hung-over drive to Gurgaon where I probably permanently damaged a friend’s garden - I have no idea what she’s talking about. Really.) Most of all, Sunnymorn is always game – for sushi, for shopping, for hunting down dryer tubes or just chilling out and texting each other from across the room. I would have had a good time in Delhi anyways but thanks to Sunny, I had an awesome time.

(Note: Many of you asked me to blog about the food in India and this post was probably not what you had in mind. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten and I promise fulfill your request in the coming weeks.)